I've worked with contractors where you know what you want and why, but the developer insists on throwing up a lot of objections on how it won't solve the problem for x or y reason. Changing the orientation of a PDF seems like the kind of request that should be straight forward and not require a lot of heavy lifting to convince a contractor that it's worthwhile.
This is what I tried and failed to get heard yesterday.
Also now in Landscape the cover page header takes up like 50% of the page. But hey “just make it landscape”.
What the client needs me to do, I suspect without being able to confirm because my questions are “wasting their time”, is give the warehouse a place to pencil stuff in next to line items.
So I prepped both versions, portrait and landscape with a SKU Notes column at the side, adjusting the table width and header height, etc and emailed those options over unprompted.
The portrait version shows double the line items per page and probably (?) solves the problem at hand… assuming I guessed right on limited information.
So far no reply to any of the 3 solutions.
A week or so from now the warehouse will complain vaguely that they have “no place to write”.
The client will blame me for the poorly designed packing slip and suggest we “just go back” to the Excel version (which required multiple hours a day of manual data entry by an employee who is no longer at the company and cost untold $ in human error).
The trick is balancing that against wanting to be a consultant to them (i.e. somebody who knows what he’s doing and offers viable solutions that they themselves can’t think of) rather than a mindless pair of hands that gets directed by them to throw code at a wall.
I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe paying hundreds of dollars an hour is a sort of status symbol?
Anyway, they can recognize the failure of {y}. Now it's time to make my suggestion again, not in an asshole way, but rather: "I think we should do {x}" as if it's the first time I said it; or "Let's revisit what you're trying to accomplish here."
The happy story would be that people are abashed at my great wisdom and sorrowful that they did not heed it. More accurate story is that no acknowledgement of anything occurs, but they are more receptive in the moment, and even a bit more receptive in the future. Took a long time to arrive at this, sadly, my great wisdom notwithstanding.
Not necessarily. You'll just get back, "that's not what I meant by landscape".
Do you really want to be a consultant to people who don't value your input? Maybe you can find someone higher up in the organization to discuss your ideas with? They don't need to be your direct point of contact, but it sounds like you do need their buy-in.
have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all why they want this ? maybe they have a scanner somewhere that works better with the landscape format ? some regulation to comply with ?
I find it absolutely insufferable when you ask people to do something that you want, and they ask you why ; like, this is not at all why you're being paid unless you're in a R&D position ; if I was in your client's shoes I'd start looking for another contractor that would give me what I ask no question asked. They're paying you for your time, no? If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it.
Yes, that is the reason I ask questions about who is using this and what their objectives are.
> They're paying you for your time, no?
No. They're paying me for the value my skillset and experience brings. I don't bill hourly, I bill bi-weekly, 2 weeks in advance.
At any time they can fire me or I can fire them. Most likely we're setting the stage for either of those two outcomes right now, unless we can get our communication in sync.
I'll try to find a replacement client who's interested in communicating the problems they're facing, working with me to come up with solutions, then working with me to iterate on them.
> If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it.
I'm not currently at the point of desperation that accepting something like this would require.
This is more like something a prison or internment camp might do to mentally break prisoners.
This is a recipe for a really crappy career.
Source: my career.
Wow, I really want to avoid working with you on anything.
Sure, which is why asking "why?" is so crucial. Or are you suggesting they try to comply to some regulatory requirement without actually knowing that they're doing so or what regulation must be complied with, so they can actually confirm compliance? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Unfortunately the line between the two is very fuzzy, because every request is underspecified, and we fill in the gaps with context and guessing. And everybody has a different threshold for how sure they want to be that they understand the request, before they go off and implement their best guess about what it's asking for.
"I understand what you want me to do, but why do you think you want me to do this, because I suspect it won't achieve your goals."
On second thought, this might be the first type you mentioned.
It sounds like you can’t communicate with your users, which could be the meta-problem that you need to fix.
When you have a problematic person in the middle, sometimes you can set up covert channels of communication (risks, but rewards too). Problematic people are often causing problems within the organisation too, so you can find champions that will route around them.
Edit: Politics are important, but sometimes you are getting paid to solve a problem, perhaps using unofficial nefarious methods. It requires a lot of skill, and you need to avoid traps, but again that is part of what an external developer is paid for?