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I'm not a dev, but this feels like arguing with a strawman. There are really customers who complain that a change to their codebase took a single day to impleme

I'm not a dev, but this feels like arguing with a strawman. There are really customers who complain that a change to their codebase took a single day to implement? I would be utterly thrilled if I could get a vendor to turn around anything that quickly

HEHENE 7y ago
A day would be incredible. We have a show stopping issue with a vendor's software. Several reports we have to run daily takes 6-12 minutes to run, when it should take seconds at most. I've been communicating with their lead reports developer. The fix is done, tests are written, QA has given it the rubber stamp, but he's simply not allowed to push it to our instance until their next code release on the 22nd. It makes no sense, and it's certainly not how I run our side of things. In the meantime, my users will lose 6-12 hours of productivity this month (15 days, 4 reports, 6-12 minutes each.)
jrockway 7y ago
I am guessing they want to pay $50 for 10 minutes of work instead of $2400 for 8 hours of work.
- paganel 7y ago
  You’re most likely correct and it’s a thing that has bugged me on and off ever since I started realizing that some of us, programmers, are not very well suited to linear working (for a lack of better word) like for examples accountants or lawyers. Sometimes you spend an entire day on trying to fix an issue/bug with no luck, until the following day when all of a sudden a brilliant idea comes to you and you solve everything in 15 minutes. Also, should we bill our clients for the time we spend in the shower? Because for me that’s when most of the “eureka!” moments happen (that and when washing dishes by hand). I don’t know of any solution for this issue, just wanted to point out that this perspective tends to be often ignored when discussing about how to pay for programming work. Also, programming is hard, not so much the languages or the frameworks themselves, but the human relations that any software program ultimately ends up resembling.
  - a-afterglow 7y ago
    Sometimes it's not a brilliant idea but actually something you just kept overlooking....
Sahhaese 7y ago
It's not a strawman, it tends to be an issue if you work somewhere where the core business is not software and client managers are less used to dealing with software or saas products and make commitments based on what they are more used to. If the bulk of the business that clients deal with are happy to make ad-hoc changes and updates to delivered delivery materials on a per-hour basis they can often turn those around in a few hours, and then they ask for the same from a computer system and get a shock when they are quoted 10 times the price for a change to a "cheaper" thing. They're paying more for the manual work generally and see the computerised system as a "cheap option".
reallydude 7y ago
> I'm not a dev, but this feels like arguing with a strawman. It's not. I make the same complaint about developers I manage and it's so prevalent across the industry, I'm surprised you think it could be fiction. Of course, in large companies with a glut of process, making a change on a production system without testing is basically unthinkable. The reality is that most businesses have nothing more than production to work with. People STOP saying things like this, when they are berated and/or overwhelmed and/or discouraged by details, as outlined in this letter...enough times. Interesting fact: I worked on DrLaura.com's forum website in the late 90's when the naked college photos of her came out. They constantly were deleting posts and threads regarding the photos. Then, they ROUTINELY deleted entire forums. I put 7! popup warnings in front of this action, and the owners kept complaining that the moderators were doing it "accidentally" too often. Never underestimate the tenacity and willful blindness of customers.
- ww520 7y ago
  Interring story. 7 warning dialogs were funny. I guess they were under so much stress to delete the nuke pictures that their mind automatically filtered out any obstacle.
Raphmedia 7y ago
I've worked in a web agency that billed by the hour. Clients would ask for justification on why something would take 5h of support instead of 2.5h because the previous similar request was done in half the time during the development of the app. What they don't understand[1] is that if they ask for an urgent fix after deployment, they're going to pay for a developer that had free time this very moment to pull and install the project. That dev then need to read and understand the codebase, make the fix, test it, make a pull request, ask for someone else's billable time to approve the pull requests, merge any conflicts, schedule a release, push the release, test again and document the new feature. And that's if the request is in fact as simple as it look like. Often, requests look very similar but are very different to each other. "Why does it takes 3 hours to add a button on the sidebar while it takes 1 hour to do it in the content of the FAQ page?" Well, one is done by the content team and require no code or release. The other needs to be done in the code. Etc. [1] They are told in very simple words that this is how it works.
- adrianmsmith 7y ago
  > Often, requests look very similar but are very different to each other. "Why does it takes 3 hours to add a button on the sidebar while it takes 1 hour to do it in the content of the FAQ page?" There is a good XKCD on this topic: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

HEHENE 7y ago

A day would be incredible. We have a show stopping issue with a vendor's software. Several reports we have to run daily takes 6-12 minutes to run, when it should take seconds at most. I've been communicating with their lead reports developer. The fix is done, tests are written, QA has given it the rubber stamp, but he's simply not allowed to push it to our instance until their next code release on the 22nd. It makes no sense, and it's certainly not how I run our side of things. In the meantime, my users will lose 6-12 hours of productivity this month (15 days, 4 reports, 6-12 minutes each.)

jrockway 7y ago

I am guessing they want to pay $50 for 10 minutes of work instead of $2400 for 8 hours of work.

paganel 7y ago
You’re most likely correct and it’s a thing that has bugged me on and off ever since I started realizing that some of us, programmers, are not very well suited to linear working (for a lack of better word) like for examples accountants or lawyers. Sometimes you spend an entire day on trying to fix an issue/bug with no luck, until the following day when all of a sudden a brilliant idea comes to you and you solve everything in 15 minutes. Also, should we bill our clients for the time we spend in the shower? Because for me that’s when most of the “eureka!” moments happen (that and when washing dishes by hand). I don’t know of any solution for this issue, just wanted to point out that this perspective tends to be often ignored when discussing about how to pay for programming work. Also, programming is hard, not so much the languages or the frameworks themselves, but the human relations that any software program ultimately ends up resembling.
- a-afterglow 7y ago
  Sometimes it's not a brilliant idea but actually something you just kept overlooking....

Sahhaese 7y ago

It's not a strawman, it tends to be an issue if you work somewhere where the core business is not software and client managers are less used to dealing with software or saas products and make commitments based on what they are more used to. If the bulk of the business that clients deal with are happy to make ad-hoc changes and updates to delivered delivery materials on a per-hour basis they can often turn those around in a few hours, and then they ask for the same from a computer system and get a shock when they are quoted 10 times the price for a change to a "cheaper" thing. They're paying more for the manual work generally and see the computerised system as a "cheap option".

reallydude 7y ago

> I'm not a dev, but this feels like arguing with a strawman. It's not. I make the same complaint about developers I manage and it's so prevalent across the industry, I'm surprised you think it could be fiction. Of course, in large companies with a glut of process, making a change on a production system without testing is basically unthinkable. The reality is that most businesses have nothing more than production to work with. People STOP saying things like this, when they are berated and/or overwhelmed and/or discouraged by details, as outlined in this letter...enough times. Interesting fact: I worked on DrLaura.com's forum website in the late 90's when the naked college photos of her came out. They constantly were deleting posts and threads regarding the photos. Then, they ROUTINELY deleted entire forums. I put 7! popup warnings in front of this action, and the owners kept complaining that the moderators were doing it "accidentally" too often. Never underestimate the tenacity and willful blindness of customers.

ww520 7y ago
Interring story. 7 warning dialogs were funny. I guess they were under so much stress to delete the nuke pictures that their mind automatically filtered out any obstacle.

Raphmedia 7y ago

I've worked in a web agency that billed by the hour. Clients would ask for justification on why something would take 5h of support instead of 2.5h because the previous similar request was done in half the time during the development of the app. What they don't understand[1] is that if they ask for an urgent fix after deployment, they're going to pay for a developer that had free time this very moment to pull and install the project. That dev then need to read and understand the codebase, make the fix, test it, make a pull request, ask for someone else's billable time to approve the pull requests, merge any conflicts, schedule a release, push the release, test again and document the new feature. And that's if the request is in fact as simple as it look like. Often, requests look very similar but are very different to each other. "Why does it takes 3 hours to add a button on the sidebar while it takes 1 hour to do it in the content of the FAQ page?" Well, one is done by the content team and require no code or release. The other needs to be done in the code. Etc. [1] They are told in very simple words that this is how it works.

adrianmsmith 7y ago
> Often, requests look very similar but are very different to each other. "Why does it takes 3 hours to add a button on the sidebar while it takes 1 hour to do it in the content of the FAQ page?" There is a good XKCD on this topic: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]