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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?"
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
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!