One of the best things about being independent: You can't tell everybody to fuck off, but you can tell anybody to fuck off. That's clearly great because then you don't end up doing dumb, pointless work because some executive said so.
But the subtly great part is that clients get better results. They know they don't own you, that you have other options. So they have to take your advice seriously. They may not follow it, but they'll at least listen. Which, counterintuitively, means you'll have a lot less desire to actually tell people to fuck off than you would in a regular job.
If you're a permanent employer, you usually can't flat out refuse, true. But I still think we have a responsibility as professionals to tell people why their ideas are shit - politely.
management: "I want an app that does A to solve business problem B"
programmer: "If you want to solve B, you're better off with an app that does C. If you do A you'll run into problems X, Y, and Z. I can do A but i strongly advise against it"
Far too many programmers just go ahead and do the first idea and then it inevitably falls apart, because they're too scared to act like professionals and give their own professional recommendations.
I think one of the more fundamental issues is the programmers access to that conversation itself. I’ve seen this scenario be far more common when developers try to get business context :
Management: “I want an app that does A.”
Programmer: “Alrighty. Can you give me more details on why you want that app and what you’re hoping to achieve?”
Management: “No. Now how long will it take to get App A out the door? Executive Foo said he wanted app A, so we need to give it to him ASAP.”
Programmer feels satisfies they’ve at least tried, and any screwups are managements fault. Scrambles to get App A out the door. Management comes back with feedback
Manager: “What is this? This isn’t what we asked for. It doesn’t even remotely address Business Problem B and now Executive Foo is on the warpath after championing this project and looking like a fool!”
Management finds a way to convince Executive Foo it was all the overpaid, useless developers that screwed up and reinforces the stereotype of IT being an untrustworthy and frustrating blackhole of a cost center. Management saves face and they pay a consultant to do it. The programmer is left dizzied by the sudden political flak they were just blindsided by.
Ha! I'll take your word for it. Makes me think I would not last long at all in that kind of workplace, as I'd go right over managers head to executive foo with evidence if he pulled that on me.
I've only worked in a place like that twice. Once (a large company), I didn't last long. In the other (a growing company), the blame-shifting and credit-stealing politics and the people who brought them in didn't last long.
In that situation, it's really a lose-lose for the developer. If they go over their manager's head, they've just made a very unfortunate enemy. And as the manager has more rapport and access to the executive, it's likely going to wind up fruitless as the manager finagles doubt into your evidence (by leaning on that existing relationship and handwaving misunderstandings and referencing non-existent verbal conversations into the points of contention that you raised).
And if they don't go over the manager's head, they now have an internal reputation for incompetence that'll negatively impact the rest of their time at that employer. So they're screwed either way.
At that point it's better to just leave rather than make waves. If you make waves they can come back to drown you later on during your career or job search. If you leave with little ado it stays more compartmentalized to that toxic environment.
Yes! I think the difference between minions and professionals is that professionals have standards. Doctors, for example, won't just do anything patients ask. Too many programmers seem to think they're minions. The job market for programmers is great; I wish more of us used that to stand our ground when asked to do something irresponsible or unethical.
Probably because far too many managers will blame the programmer for any failures that result from following the recommendations, no matter how tangential, while simultaneously taking the credit for any successes.
Except we're inherently idle creatures. So while you may be right in some silly marxian sense. 90% of us would do nothing until forced to due to biological needs.
There's a great bit in Johnstone's Impro where he has people paint simple pictures, and then shows them the work of others. The people exclaim at how bold, how creative the shown work is compared with theirs. The difference is that the old paintings are by kids, and the new ones are by adults. His point is that kids have a natural creativity that gets trained out of them over time. One can get that back. (In his case, he helps people get it back through improvisational theater classes. They work!)
90% of people have been forced to do things most of their lives. First through an industrial-age education system, then by employers running organizations designed to maximize compliance, not initiative, creativity, or agency. It's no wonder they have lost the joy of creation.
Tech for me was the ticket out of work like that. It took me years to work through my resentment. But now for me there's a joy in creation, a joy in service that doesn't match anything I can get with mere consumption-oriented entertainment. My nephew has been in a Montessori program since kindergarten, and he's far from inherently idle. He loves learning. He loves creation. We all do, deep down, if we're half encouraged in it.
People who've earned enough to never work again all seem to keep working, though. While the most idle people I've ever seen are those who seem to have no chance of financial independence.
I don't think people are idle or lazy naturally. I think they become idle or lazy because they learn that nothing they do matters.
Being able to choose the work you do matters, which is why people don't "do nothing."
If this were the case, I would expect to see a great many people who have enough money already such that they don't need to work anymore doing just that.
But that seems to be quite an unusual case. Certainly nothing like 90%. What I see around me appears to contradict the hypothesis. Not just "rich" people, either. In the UK, a few hundred thousand pounds in total would (going over the last couple of decades of returns on pretty dull investments, although over just the last decade significantly less would do the job too) pay rent and bills forever if all you didn't engage in expensive hobbies, and a lot of people have that kind of wealth but are still working jobs.
That might be true of the population in general, but I doubt it's true of the kind of person who hangs out on HN.
Even among the population in general, I don't think people enjoy being idle for long. We're curious creatures. We seek out novelty and challenges, and we don't like to feel useless.
Great article. I have similar experiences in my market and many times I ended up pointing to a Crunchbase page to defend the budget. It is not by chance that companies like Uber and Spotify raised more than one billion. Even if the customer will spend only a fraction in software they are not understanding how much capital they need for their product.
I am not saying that you cannot compete with Uber in a smarter way but if you only ask about an app then you are forgetting all the stuff that happens in the back office.
Learning to tell idea people to pound sand was the hardest, and most expensive lesson, in my career.
The crux of this article is that it's important to quickly identify and reject idea people. They just suck on your energy and waste your time going nowhere.
Or, you know, make sure you get paid for your part of the work, and if they don't take your advice and fail, that's on them. They are developers, not investors, this article goes against common business sense.
I've discovered that a lot of "idea" people (no technical background, no deep connection to their target audience, often B2C products) don't end up paying once they fail.
Yes, there's escrow and other options, but it can be incredibly time-consuming and/or reputation-harming to pursue those people, especially if they're skipping out on only the last payment or two.
What do you mean by "idea people"? Because I consider myself an idea person, but I also make things and get things done. I'm afraid you are throwing the good out with the bad... unless you have some other idea of what idea people are... and maybe a better name for them that is less inclusive.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea for an iPhone app. It reminds you to change batteries in devices. You can build it, we can split the profits.”
“I’ll require a $10K retainer up front, time and materials from there, you keep all of the profits.”
<crickets>
Source: an almost literal email exchange when I owned an iOS shop. One of many I received.
Now that’s just some individual that thought they were going to strike it rich on the App Store with just an idea. It scales up to enterprise level as well.
"Idea people" to me suggests the sort of folks who think that the secret to success is having a killer idea nobody thought of before, and execution is something that will sort itself out. This goes double if they think that execution is something that can be outsourced.
It's a common silicon valley term. These are people who just have lots and lots of ideas, but no concept of how to build them or how practical their ideas are.
They are, to put it mildly, a waste of time to work with.
The photos in the article provided no value to the content. I know the common wisdom to get lots of page hits is to include fairly random pictures, but I do tire of them. To the point that I find myself unconsciously discounting the content because my brain automatically assumes the article is more about becoming more popular than providing useful content (and may have suppressed content that would be unpopular).
"you want a clone for eBay/Facebook/Amazon? You realize they have teams of many thousands of people working on code bases over 15 years old right? And you think a single person, me, is going to be able to replicate that in 3 months?"
"you want a clone for eBay/Facebook/Amazon? You realize they have teams of many thousands of people working on code bases over 15 years old right? And you think a single person, me, is going to be able to replicate that in 3 months?"
I remember one chap who wanted us to build a complex risk management application for investment banks who got most irate when we asked the details of what it should do (NB purely the required functionality, we could work out to technically build it).
Eventually we did persuade him - we should have given up early on as eventually after many many months of work the whole thing ended up in a deeply stressful court case.
Edit: After the litigation settled with anyone walking away and paying their own legal costs he approached me and wanted to be friends again..... Didn't reply to that email.
Edit2: This was 20 years ago and the litigation still makes me stressed thinking about it now :-|
> complex risk management application for investment banks ... details of what it should do
As someone who works on risk and regulatory management software for investments banks: often they don't know exactly what they want it to do. Well, they know what they want it to do right now, vaguely, but what detail beyond the vague that they give will differ from what they'll want next time you meet with them.
Spent a year working on an ecommerce platform with two other people. The company wanted their own custom thing, but at the same time to launch a new company through us.
Lead kept wanting to imitate Shopify. I kept saying if we try to compete with Shopify we're already dead -- we're just a small team with maybe a couple years runway; it has to be different.
Eventually the company we were working for abandoned the project and switched to Shopify, since, you know, we were building a poor copy of that anyway...
I see people on this very website claim they can probably implement an Uber clone in a weekend or two - and they're probably right, the basics of such a service are quite simple, but perfecting it and marketing it are far harder.
Is that my problem though as a freelance developer? Should I invest effort in something knowing it will fail because it can't possibly be marketed successfully against competitors?
The linked blog post is really about bad customers, and either firing them, or not accepting them in the first place. As a freelance developer it seems easy enough to say if someone's going to pay you your going rate to build something, accept their money and build what they're asking.
The problem is that in reality, clients like that often turn out to be bad customers. They don't know what they want, make all the excuses to avoid paying on time (or worse, offer "equity"/revenue share), and you end up spending all your time and energy supporting them - just one more little change and I'll pay you - and not by working on actual client projects.
Sussing out which clients are like that is up to you as a freelance developer, and it's a skill that isn't programming but is well worth your time to develop.
When the API becomes common practice the xkcd is no longer relevant, yet it was correct (at time of writing). Unless educating on the difficulties of the past of course, then it would be relevant.
I mean, it's a well written article, I enjoyed reading it. Great for a target audience of developers.
But what will potential clients read when they see this? A company disclosing details of (possibly confidential?) meetings, talking about how stupid their ideas were. They don't name companies but they do give some very specific details - and HK isn't a huge market.
> I’ll eventually ask, “Which platform do you like to build on to start with?”
> One client answer was: “All — Android, iOS and web. And I want the mobile apps in native to make sure the responsiveness of the app is good.”
Maybe I'm misreading, but the client wanted a Yelpish kind of app. The right play, in my book, would be convincing the client that a React Native app would do. This is a really easy sell since that is actually what the client need. Maybe the author's team aren't yet familiar with RN.
React Native is super snappy and is a great choice for MVPs. It's easy to develop, the reusability is really high between platforms and the price tag is usually quite low in comparison.
My opinion is that any client that is serious, is putting together a team, has a budget, and has real prospective customers is something I can get on board with. I personally don't have to like the idea or think that it's going to find a wider audience. Pretty much any billion dollar unicorn I would have looked at their elevator pitch and said "I don't like the idea and I don't think you are going to succeed".
Why is an app agency judging the client's business model. If what the client is asking for is legal, and if the agency can deliver, I'd think it a win-win to make it happen.
Specifically, they should have cloned Uber for their client, and let the markets decide.
> It’s not cost-effective to build the app on all the platforms at once because it takes 3 times more effort to make a small change. We should start with just one and invest into others when the concept is proven to be successful.”
There are multiple development toolsets that will let you do this, without tripling your effort. There are tradeoffs involved, but I think this request was more reasonable than this article presents it as.
The article specifies that the customer didn't want a cross-platform framework: "I want the mobile apps in native to make sure the responsiveness of the app is good."
Agreed, I very much doubt any of these clients would have put up any serious money upfront. My experience has always been they look for alternative deals or financing such as “equity” or “revenue share”.
I'm curious to know why this comment dropped from near the top of the page (2nd comment) to near the bottom (2nd-to-last). The points have consistently increased, so why would it drop?
I purposely didn't write a "this title is misleading clickbait" comment, opting instead to describe what the blog post is actually about. I know a lot of people check the comments before reading an article (esp. from unknown blogs) so they can avoid wasting time if the article is not what they're looking for. Allowing this comment to stay at the top of the page would help people who are interested to know this.
A moderator marked it off topic. It's not that you made a bad point, but it's not one that should be accumulating mass at the top of a thread, because it chokes out interesting discussion.
Thanks for the timely explanation. I would maintain that substantive comments that help people quickly understand what the article is about—and what it's not about—should be allowed to rise/fall organically. If people are +1'ing it, that means they found it helpful. Doesn't that tend to indicate that others might find it helpful also?
I should say that if this down-weighting had happened simultaneous to a title change, I would feel differently. A better title would be: "Clients I Chose Not To Work With". To my ear, it's equally click-baity, but it has the benefit of accurately describing the post itself.
I hear you, and of course we change titles like that all the time. I'm not quite over the line on this one though; the objection feels a bit pedantic to me and that's not how we moderate the front page.
Also, the upvoting system isn't great for cases like this. There are certain qualities in comments that attract upvotes almost mechanically (indignation is another) and if we didn't moderate the threads, the result would be such comments at the top of every thread, and less interesting discussions. HN functions best not when it's entirely community-and-software driven, but when community, software, and moderators interact in feedback loops. Our goal is to help the community process coalesce into something more interesting than it would in a less complex system.
But the subtly great part is that clients get better results. They know they don't own you, that you have other options. So they have to take your advice seriously. They may not follow it, but they'll at least listen. Which, counterintuitively, means you'll have a lot less desire to actually tell people to fuck off than you would in a regular job.