[codeprada]

baavgai, on 17 June 2011 - 08:38 AM, said:

codeprada, on 17 June 2011 - 08:27 AM, said:

On the flip side a client will try to squeeze as much work out of you for as little as possible.

Charging by the hour stops this.

...I will work as many hours as you're willing to pay me for. Now, does the button really need to be changed from blue to cyan? No? I thought so.

How could I forget about that! After all time is money.

[macosxnerd101]

You are very lucky you are getting paid. One of my two client situations involved an infestation of feeping creatures.

My obligatory (and shameless) plug to my blog entry on the clients from Hell.

[BenignDesign]

I was part of an interview panel yesterday where the prospective employee, after learning that I was the resident developer, referred to me as "Goddess" through the rest of his interview.

I left feeling very unclean and don't want to hire him regardless of his qualifications.

[macosxnerd101]

BenignDesign, on 17 June 2011 - 09:19 AM, said:

Mac left me feeling very unclean, but oh so satisfied. He is the only person that can refer to me as "Goddess," too.

Fixed.

[Choscura]

If B9 is a Goddess, she's one of those dark Goddesses who has groves where white robed stone-faced men lead virgins, while clutching bronze knives, and if you want to compare programmers with non-programmers, the appropriate metaphor isn't to call us gods and them mortals, but to call them apes and us hominids. We aren't above some imaginary world standard: they are below it.

[codeprada]

macosxnerd101, on 17 June 2011 - 09:15 AM, said:

You are very lucky you are getting paid. One of my two client situations involved an infestation of feeping creatures.

My obligatory (and shameless) plug to my blog entry on the clients from Hell.

The saddest thing about it you wasn't going to get a dime out of it. That's a 6,000+USD site you guys pulled off. That's like 17,000ECD here. A lot more than the average cost of a website here.

By the way where's the link to it

[BenignDesign]

No one is to be killing virgins at my feet... consensually deflowering them, sure... but never killing...

[macosxnerd101]

@codeprada: I'd really rather not. Their nonprofit is for a good cause, and I really don't want my name associated with this organization (or the crazy woman).

[lordofduct]

You know who I find more difficult to communicate with, a client who DOES have a robust understanding of technology, but isn't quite all the way there. So they have some misunderstandings about certain technologies.

I had a client recently complain that there was a graphical delay in a graphically heavy application, that he was serving off a Xen remote desktop server. He logged in from 1500 miles away and showed me the 1 second delay as a new form opened on the horrible internet connection that the office we were in had. I personally saw no issue, 1 second delay for a Xen server to render this graphic heavy 1280x1024 window. He was displeased...

him: "look at that flicker"
me: "ummm, what flicker?"
him: "THAT FLICKER"
me: "the tiny delay?"
him: "Yes, the flicker."

I attempted to explain to him how Xen server works and that because the window being displayed is graphically heavy it isn't as responsive as everything else. But he thought Xen worked like VNC does and assumed the entire screen was just sent as an image every frame and that its compression ratio was just awesome or something... and he didn't quite believe me when I attempted to explain that no that isn't how it worked.

I accidently tripped over the word PDF in my explaining about it when he finally chimed in.

him: "OHHH, so that's why PDFs lag up a lot when viewing them through this."
me: "Umm... yeah, exactly, just like that."
him: "OK, I believe you."

[codeprada]

macosxnerd101, on 17 June 2011 - 09:47 AM, said:

@codeprada: I'd really rather not. Their nonprofit is for a good cause, and I really don't want my name associated with this organization (or the crazy woman).

No worries, we all that one `job` or `client` we'd rather not remember. But good leadership skills on your path.

[Jstall]

Quote

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

As baavgai suggested some of this may stem from the sexy media interpretation on how coding works. You will have a character say something like "we need access to classified documents at the pentagon" and the computer whiz character will pound on the keyboard for a few seconds and say "I'm in!".

[lordofduct]

I think the sexy media interpretation extends from the perception of it being magic.

Just like the magician just waves his wand, the coder waves his.

Media reflects more than it influences.

Either way its chicken and egg.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 17 June 2011 - 07:42 AM

[modi123_1]

Being a programmer is like being an auto mechanic. No one likes having to go to them in a usual business transaction (ti's usually expensive and embarrassing), but lord knows if you know someone with an aptitude for either you'll ask for crazy shit for free or on the "friends and family" discount.

To pull a Dane Cook joke:

Quote

"We had to replace the roof on your car, because it was peeling back. It resented the rest of the car, so we replaced that. Also, there was a tiny unicorn in your exhaust, and he was jumping and poking holes in your exhaust. And he was shitting in your filters as well. So we had to get that out of there."

Honestly we all know of a situation where we could have told someone that and they would have believed us; be it unf'king a laptop, cleansing a virus, or writing a code.

Quote

"We had to replace the bios on your computer, because it was peeling back. It resented the rest of the computer, so we replaced that. Also, there was a tiny unicorn in your memory bus, and he was jumping and poking holes in your data. And he was core dumping in your south bridge as well. So we had to get that out of there."

Of course people think not paying is a good idea because "they totally could have done that but just didn't have the time" or because they are never really sure we did anything. At least with a mechanic most issue resolutions can be see. That clunking is gone, my check oil light is off, or my tranny allows me to find the reverse gear! With computers people are always suspicious. Sure it "runs faster" but that could be anything! Sure the popups are gone for *that* virus, but what about these on my pr0nz site?

Pops and I commiserate quite a bit over our mutual issues. He's an architect, and if you want to see function creep and reality defying changes he'll give you a few lessons. People with some shitty $5 bargain bin Home Depot "Du-it-yurself Arketek" app trying to prove to the old man how some insane design should work.

What? Where's the walls and plumbing in my design? Pffst just make them, but I don't want to my room sizes to go down!
My lot's X by Y - so I want my house that big too!
Yes, bathrooms that have direct LOS to the front door!
I saw this awesome design in a magazine (which I don't have) and want to have you implement it though my description is incorrect sixteen times.

Pops also has a great strategy for dealing with work. Charge by the hour and give only two free "redesign" cards. After the customer signs off on a design any modification made by them post that will bump his rate to double an hour. He's had a few people balk at that, a few people try and screw him out money, but most of the cases people took note and made sure it is what they wanted before they signed. That made it all easy cheesy. There was one instance where this couple happily made changes past their two and were pleased as punch to pay double. We determined it was probably a social bragging thing to their friends, and the old man was happy raking in the cash.


Cliffs:
- programmers are more like mechanics
- unicorns dumping on your south bridge
- people don't trust us
- programmers are more like architects
- ways to stop function creep

[Curtis Rutland]

lordofduct, on 17 June 2011 - 09:00 AM, said:

You know who I find more difficult to communicate with, a client who DOES have a robust understanding of technology, but isn't quite all the way there. So they have some misunderstandings about certain technologies.

Oh, these guys are the worst. Also, it's even worse when you're in a "helpdesk" role. I had this guy at my last company that thought he knew a lot about computers, so instead of bringing his laptop in, he'd just start searching forums to fix it. Of course, he'd search for the wrong thing, then apply the wrong fix, and do this repeatedly. So by the time I'd get the laptop, it would be completely fucked instead of a little fucked.

[macosxnerd101]

When I worked the help desk, almost any student that knew how to use a computer was a script kiddie. So when we'd get their computers in, it would be a whole group of them at once all with crashed hard drives or cracked screens.