3 ms·

Sounds like your client was a moron.

dspillett 9y ago
Not exactly an unusual circumstance. And that is a good thing. If our clients understood the technicalities of what we do as well as we do for them, they probably wouldn't need to pay us for project work...
- tzahola 9y ago
  And it's our moral imperative to tell them why the thing they're asking for doesn't make any sense. If I were to ask a plastic surgeon to put wheels on my butt, the reasonable thing to do for him would be to reject my request, and explain me why it doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't expect him to do it and then brag on an internet forum about the clever hack he did to fit those Michelin tires onto my buttocks.
  - dspillett 9y ago
    > And it's our moral imperative to tell them why the thing they're asking for doesn't make any sense. It is, and I do. But if they still want it anyway, unless it poses a security problem or other ethical issue or would reflect badly on us (as doing something silly very publicly could do), then it comes down to "we get paid for it or someone else does".
tzs 9y ago
How so? The client, a major Japanese software distributor who was going to be selling copies of the software to end users, wanted a way to let the user decide how they wanted to trade off ripping speed with disk usage. That was a perfectly reasonable thing for the client to want, given his extensive knowledge of the hardware characteristics of the computers that were in widespread use among his potential customers, and his knowledge of Japanese usage patterns. What I gave him did that. So how exactly is he a moron for (1) asking for a reasonable feature, and (2) being happy that he received that feature?
- tzahola 9y ago
  Asking for a “compression slider” with a 0-100 range, when zlib already had compression levels 0-9, is not reasonable. It simply does not make any difference in compression/speed, and needlessly complicates the storage format. The fact that he pushed it through, and was so satisfied with such an ad-hoc, needless hack, clearly illustrates that he’s one of those moronic clients who think they know everything better than the contractor and keep coming up with an ever increasing number of ridiculous and infuriating change requests.
  - tzs 9y ago
    He didn't ask for 0-100. He asked for multiple settings so the user could do a speed/compression trade off, but didn't say how many settings I should give him. I tried zlib's compression level settings. Maybe it's different in modern zlib implementations, on today's hardware, but a couple of decades ago on typical hardware of the day the 10 compression levels of zlib really were clustered around only two or three performance levels. I'm the one who decided on the skipping block approach, and decided to give him a percentage slider. I didn't actually expect him to accept that as is. I expected he'd test it at various settings, and pick out 4 or 5 specific percentages and ask me to replace the slider with radio buttons that selected those, and give them descriptive names. But a lot of users like to have more knobs and tweaks on their software, especially their utility software, so my guess is that based on his understanding of the market he thought that his customers were those kind of users so accepted the slider.

Not exactly an unusual circumstance. And that is a good thing. If our clients understood the technicalities of what we do as well as we do for them, they probably wouldn't need to pay us for project work...

tzahola 9y ago
And it's our moral imperative to tell them why the thing they're asking for doesn't make any sense. If I were to ask a plastic surgeon to put wheels on my butt, the reasonable thing to do for him would be to reject my request, and explain me why it doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't expect him to do it and then brag on an internet forum about the clever hack he did to fit those Michelin tires onto my buttocks.
- dspillett 9y ago
  > And it's our moral imperative to tell them why the thing they're asking for doesn't make any sense. It is, and I do. But if they still want it anyway, unless it poses a security problem or other ethical issue or would reflect badly on us (as doing something silly very publicly could do), then it comes down to "we get paid for it or someone else does".

tzs 9y ago

How so? The client, a major Japanese software distributor who was going to be selling copies of the software to end users, wanted a way to let the user decide how they wanted to trade off ripping speed with disk usage. That was a perfectly reasonable thing for the client to want, given his extensive knowledge of the hardware characteristics of the computers that were in widespread use among his potential customers, and his knowledge of Japanese usage patterns. What I gave him did that. So how exactly is he a moron for (1) asking for a reasonable feature, and (2) being happy that he received that feature?

tzahola 9y ago
Asking for a “compression slider” with a 0-100 range, when zlib already had compression levels 0-9, is not reasonable. It simply does not make any difference in compression/speed, and needlessly complicates the storage format. The fact that he pushed it through, and was so satisfied with such an ad-hoc, needless hack, clearly illustrates that he’s one of those moronic clients who think they know everything better than the contractor and keep coming up with an ever increasing number of ridiculous and infuriating change requests.
- tzs 9y ago
  He didn't ask for 0-100. He asked for multiple settings so the user could do a speed/compression trade off, but didn't say how many settings I should give him. I tried zlib's compression level settings. Maybe it's different in modern zlib implementations, on today's hardware, but a couple of decades ago on typical hardware of the day the 10 compression levels of zlib really were clustered around only two or three performance levels. I'm the one who decided on the skipping block approach, and decided to give him a percentage slider. I didn't actually expect him to accept that as is. I expected he'd test it at various settings, and pick out 4 or 5 specific percentages and ask me to replace the slider with radio buttons that selected those, and give them descriptive names. But a lot of users like to have more knobs and tweaks on their software, especially their utility software, so my guess is that based on his understanding of the market he thought that his customers were those kind of users so accepted the slider.