“When I use your product, I’m trusting you. “
That’s where you are messing up. You trust the product to work to YOUR standards rather than just accepting the product as is.
When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.
“When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.”
This. Oh so this.
It’s not “the customer is always right”, it’s “the customer has precious little idea what he wants and we have to build something that will make him think it’s right”.
When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.
Customers don’t always know what they want, but there are ways to find out what they are willing to pay for, before going through the effort of creating products.
“When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.”
Yup. I’m a woman in the IT field. Originally RPG programmer turned system admin/enterprise-wide scheduler. The users really don’t understand much, that’s for sure. Often I’d spend weeks (or months) on a project to learn they “forgot” they needed this or that. Meaning? Starting from scratch and doing over again.
Or they purchased something from out of house and it didn’t come close to what the salesperson claimed....and did they include IT in the research for this new application? Course not! Even worse there were times this glorious new product wasn’t even compatible with our own system apps. Drove me crazy. In one case had to purchase middle-ware to get the thing to work and product the reports in the “pretty way” the users wanted to see them. Argh!
Ah - there’s the rub. Guessing about requirements. You shouldn’t have to, but life is messy sometimes. First, let me tell you that I’m a Mechanical Engineer. I tell my Electrical Engineer wife that if I can’t see it happening, I consider it “magic”. In other words, I have considerable respect for people who do understand/design “tech”.
Having said that, I wish more developers would realize that I don’t want to bend my will or my actions to fit how a machine wants ME to behave. The best machines/programs work for me, not me for them.
All right, now I’m going to sound like a Xenophobe (to use a term the liberals like to pin on me), but part of the problem with programming nowadays, I sincerely believe, is cultural. As smart as some folks are, if they grew up overseas, they probably don’t understand how I think. Therefore, they will not program the way I’d like to see it on the screen, and will not understand why I don’t want to bow to their thinking and feed the program “just so”...
Again - I totally understand that developers need full requirements, but to the extent that they have to guess, it would be helpful if they thought like the users did.
Pappy - keep doing your magic. I salute you.
at my company, www.northeastanalysis.com It’s my job to design the app.
Without me, the programmers would communicate directly with people who have no clue what they want - They just want something and they have nothing to pay for it with.
So I have to spend a full-time effort to make up for it. Without a designer, you’re in a world of hurt. My clients aren’t allowed to talk to my programmers at all - ever. God that would be disastrous. It’s happened before and it cost tens of thousands of dollars.
I’ve stopped programming, a few years ago because I couldn’t handle the heartbreak of my ideas being rejected. Now I run a team who does it.
And here is the disconnect between a coder and a good coder. A good coder has the people skills to interact with the client and understand their needs, and explain to them and get them to buy in when their perceived needs don't meet up with reality. Creating a working program is not just about tight code, it is defining a challenge and meeting it. Clean code is just a part of it.
Of course clients bear part of the blame when their delusions of grandeur lead them to overpower the coder instead of working with him. Best to walk away when this happens, it will not end well and better you not be associated with it.