Attitudes in IT - Mediocrity Wins?

podo asks: "I've spent the past two months of my life working almost full time on a PHP/MySQL based web site for a client. Today I received an e-mail from the client point me to a similar web site set up by a competitor. 'Doing exactly what we are doing.' The site in question is not doing what we are doing, they have no dynamic content, no web forms, just e-mail addresses. They scarcely have any content (I counted only four HTML pages) at all. The client is chastising me for taking a long time and because the other site is 'much more impressive visually' than ours. Has anyone else found themselves in a situation where their painstaking work is compared to work which is a showcase for mediocrity? How have you dealt with such clients who fail to see the difference between a shoddy rush job and real quality?"

Comments

confused

[samjam]

Are you confused about the difference between "quality" and "features"?

"Quality" and "features" are not exclusive.

Negative extremes of these two are "over-engineered" and "bloated"

Would you code in triggers even if your project didn't need them, or merely insist your DB had them in case you might need them? (Smells like over-engineered)

Sam

Re:Not sure you want to hear this...

[elmegil]

I think the point is similar to yours, but different. It's not about LOOKS. It's about what the client wants to ACCOMPLISH. What is the TASK that the website is intended to do?

Your design may be prettier, more effective, etc. but if the end result achieved is only slightly different than the competition, and you took 4 times as long to get there, it should be clear which site the client is going to prefer.

You need to step back from your work long enough to evaluate honestly whether your interface is actually more compelling to the target audience, and whether the interface is even a key decision maker for the target audience. For example, I don't choose what hardware to buy for my PC based on the quality of the vendor's websites. Do I appreciate a vendor who has an intuitive and well organized website? Absolutely. But that's not going to make me spend more money for one product over another. I'm sure that's the perspective of your client, and it is completely valid.

This happends all the time.

[jellomizer]

What the company actually wants is a simple program that is fairly static and simple. But when they hire a someone to program it they will tout it as extreamly important and needs everything. Speed, Usability, Flexibilty, Runs on any platform, Easially upgradeable. Just to see if the developer will flintch. My favorate line was "Lives depend on this product! It is not like any program that you did before where falure will only cost money, Failure in this application could cause people to Die!" (This was from a towns fire department wanting a Crystal Report Report to manage the Departments Payrol and keep track of the previous incodence they went to.) The important thing is to readthrew the tought and get a good plan before hand on what they really want and use your skills to ask questions on anything that you might think they need. Don't assume you know what they need ask them before and get a good project layed out before them to approve. And if they did point to X application that is has less features you point to your project specs and go You told me you wanted XYZ feature in this. This application didn't have XYZ.

Re:Wow..

[dasunt]

Yeah. It's not like I'm paying your money or anything, so why in the hell would you want to do what I say?

If you are willing to hire someone to do work you don't know how to do, you should be willing to listen to them.

Example: Lets say a client comes up to me and asks about upgrading his CPU in an AMD 1.13GHz/64MB machine because his machine is too slow.

I'd ask him what he was doing and probably suggest upgrading the memory instead.

The problem is when he ignores my suggestion and goes with the CPU -- in the end, his machine will be slow, he won't be happy, and it will look like I did a crappy job.

Not only a plumber would care...

[Ayanami Rei]

Not only a plumber would care a lot about plumbing when buying a house, but anyone whose home has been flooded and their property damaged.

The "blame" lies somewhere in the middle here.

Home buyers who don't care about the quality of the plumbing are just asking to learn the hard way.
People who want a website but want it quick (and without any maintenance system behind the scenes) are asking for trouble later when they can't keep it updated.

My AC 2 Cents

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to be perfectly blunt, this sounds like it was entirely your fault.

As with any contract labor, you need to be specific and entirely up-front about every little detail and put it in writing. This goes double for dealing with non-techies.

If you had done this, you would have already established that your CLIENT WANTS/EXPECTS lots of bling-bling and if you wanted to get the job, you would have given it to them.

Also, you would have laid out your timeline for accomplishing the site that THEY WANT.

When you focus on what YOU WANT, you will never be able to please your customers more than just a hit and miss frequency.

So, my advice is read, understand, and apply Dale Carnegie's advice in the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" on your next project and you will be a success.

Re:Yes, But Make Sure Client Knows What He Asked F

[reallocate]

Sure, if you've got the person. Whoever it is, they need to be conversant with both the client's business and the design business.

I've sat in more than enough unhappy meetings between client and software firms for this lifetime. Far too often, the customer is ticked off because they didn't get what they thought they asked for. When the techies respond, "That's the requirements said.", I know that they sent someone over to the client's office for half-a-day to ask questions and write requirements. The specs were massaged and passed to the developers, but the client didn't have a clue what they said or meant. Why? Because the software firm forgot how to run a business.

"I am a professional... "

[dpbsmith]

I wish I had clipped and saved the column I saw some years ago in a controlled-circulation publication, I believe it may have been Industrial Photography. It's a very old problem. The columnist described it as how to deal with the client who insists that you could save very large amounts of time and money if you would only provide just very slightly shoddy work.

His answer went something like this: "I am a professional. I am exactly as good as the last job I have delivered. All my work is of professional quality, always, and I do not compromise or scamp my work for anybody, ever, because that is not what professionals do."

He went on to say that a professional must never do shoddy work and must always be willing to risk his job when asked to. He argued that it was committing career suicide to ever have shoddy work in public view with your name on it.

One of the characteristics of a professional is a sense of responsibility to "the profession" and to fellow professionals, as well as to the person who is writing the check.

I expect to get flamed by replies from people who write checks or who have been indoctrinated by people who write checks, and I don't say he was 100% right, but there is an ethical dimension to professional work.

Re:It's sad but...

[Wolfrider]

--I don't know why you got modded Troll, because I happen to agree with you. Sometimes a calculated "bluff" is helpful in these situations:

"Well sir, if you think my efforts so far are unsatisfactory, I can take what I've coded so far out of the system entirely and you can look into hiring someone else."

--Some of the time, they'll back down - because they've already invested (time, money, reputation, $intangible) in what's been done so far. If they don't, you wouldn't want to work there anyway.