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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

I changed the orientation of the PDF as requested. This did not add any white space next to line items, since the line items table uses 98 % width either way, unlike when printing from Excel I guess.

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.

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The next trick to learn is that the customer will still blame you for not telling them that landscape won’t fix it. Then you’ll waste less time the next time your customer asks for something stupid. Fail fast can work well for client management.

Solid advice. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to get heard. Should have just made it landscape (which took minutes) and let it fail.

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.

Argh, that resonates. My general strategy: speak up briefly on how we should do {x}, and then, when I am not heard, do their thing {y}, which usually fails, since if I speak up in the first place it means I probably know what I'm talking about.

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.

You need clients that will allow you to be that for them. Sometimes they just want a really expensive code monkey.

I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe paying hundreds of dollars an hour is a sort of status symbol?

Raising rates seems to help. The more they're paying you, the more they're willing to listen, it seems. Though of course you can never completely escape bad clients.

wanting to be a consultant to them

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.

> Solid advice. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to get heard. Should have just made it landscape (which took minutes) and let it fail.

Not necessarily. You'll just get back, "that's not what I meant by landscape".

Tangent, but the phrase "client management" makes me imagine asking a client's point-of-contact employee, if I can speak to their manager. I wonder how that would go?

You seem to be making things difficult for yourself. Do you have an example of what it used to do from Excel? Just do something similar as your first cut. You implied you knew how Excel printed since you wrote “because even though ‘just making it landscape’ solves this same problem in Excel”.

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?

Not sure why, but now I really want to know how this turns out!

If history with this client is any indication, they will not realize I have offered these viable solutions at all.

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).

I'm assuming you're being serious here. I'd suggest sending an email: Tomorrow I'm going with option #[your favorite]. I think it best solves the problem. Let me know if you'd like something different.

At least the conversation hasn't progressed to printing it upside down or on the back...

> 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.

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.

If you ask me to implement something and I don't understand why you need it, then I may not do it right, and you may get regressions in this functionality in the future. Developers need to build a mental model of the problem they're solving. If the answer is "we've always done it this way" that's not very compelling especially when we're building a new system! But if you say "this is required because of XYZ", then this is something that I can understand, and more importantly, document as a requirement.

> have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all why they want this ?

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.

"If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it."

This is a recipe for a really crappy career.

Source: my career.

> I find it absolutely insufferable when you ask people to do something that you want, and they ask you why

Wow, I really want to avoid working with you on anything.

I keep meaning to write something about this, but: There are two kinds of "why". One is "I understand what you want but I think it's stupid so I'm going to argue with you." That one is insufferable. The other one is "I don't understand what you want, and I need more information to know what to do." That one is inevitable.

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.

This one might be a third type:

"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.

> 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 ?

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.

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