Quote:
Originally posted by Foggerty
If it makes you feel any better (probablly not), there are customers who are the same way, although I'm sure you know this already.
i.e. Trying to explain to a client why taking "a couple of days" to refactor the code is a good thing, if they want their future enhancements to be easy (read: cheap) to add.
Not kidding, I wrote a fucking awful Skip Tracing (i.e. tracking down debtors) web based program in .NET in two weeks. I'd never worked in .NET, and I'd never written a web app, and never used ASP.NET either.
It worked (because the Coding Guru who I was working with spent 3/4s of an hour finishing it off for me on Christmas Eve, which was basically a) correcting my usage of a library he had written and b) using the correct .NET objects for what I was trying to do, reducing 30-40 lines of code to 5) but it only just worked.
After this horrible experience I had to convince the client that despite apearances, I hadn't quite done a bang up job, and could REALLY use some time to get things sorted out (like removing hard coded SQL statements from the code base and introducing objects to represent debts/debtors/leads) before doing any furure work.
They didn't believe me:
"We've got serious time constraints from upstairs..."
"I don't think we can factor those changes into our costs..."
"If I ask you for this tiny little change along with the other ten tiny little changes, none of which were in the spec, it couldn't possibly cause problems downstream, could it?"
Jesus, trying to explain to clients that Little Change A + Little Change B = big fucking bug further down the track that we cannot see yet because it was never factored into the change requests and planning we did, so can we please leve those changes until I've finished the current changes you want... is not fun 
p.s. NEVER EVER EVER FUCKING WORK FOR A BASTARD WHO TELLS CLIENTS THAT YOU HAVE MUCHO EXPERIENCE IN A BRAND NEW TECHNOLOGY THAT YOU'VE NEVER EVEN SEEN BEFORE, LET ALONE FUCKING IMPLEMENTED ANYTHING USEFULL IN. Ah yeah, now that grinds my gears 
p.p.s. Web development sucks arse, until you get your mind around stateless programming (which doesn't take that long I guess, but its still a mind shift). Then you go out and start learning LISP, and then your brain melts.
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now isnt that where you need to have a BA that knows what the fuck they are on about, and has the balls to tell it straight (in laymans terms anyway) to the client - rather than agreeing to all sorts of crap to get the job?
very short sighted as sooner or later your company's name will be mud when all the limitations become apparent to the client (who will never stop to consider the fact that their demands might have contributed to this situation - though - really the client should expect to be educated when they are asking for stuff that isnt possible - again consultant/BA's job)