4 ms·

Definitely weird. ;) You should let clients know when it's time to 'put up or shut up'. After all, talk is cheap?

NikolaNovak 3y ago
I don't follow. What's the context or meaning of put up or shut up? Did you reply to right thread or did I inadvertently misrepresent anything? My point is that on all my projects for 25 years now, it's normal for many roles to need a significant amount of studying to become productive. That studying may involve project or client specific material such as design and architecture documents, functional specs, process and procedure documents, business overview, etc. On bigger projects there might be a part or full time training / L&K coordinator who would prepare and maintain training materials for new team members, create on boarding paths for roles etc. I read on HN about developers who start coding week 1 and I'm always impressed and astonished but also puzzled - coding what? In ERP world all code satisfies a specific business purpose and a random outsider wouldn't understand business functionality to create or fix business code day 1. Is it actually our goal to be interchangeable cogs, knowing only technology stacks but nothing about business or functionality? Either way, I don't understand what client shoild put up or shut up?
- joshspankit 3y ago
  If they are indeed replying to you, I suspect they are coming from a freelance background where it’s sometimes beneficial to have a hard line in order to either get the project moving or drop the client (and move on to more serious ones)
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    Ah. If so I still think we don't understand each other. It's not "we don't know what to do with you go read some books". It's "we have 80,000 time and labour business rules that are unique to our public sector organization and you should not code any business rules into our payroll system until you have a vague understanding of how we operate". That IS a serious client and a serious project and that study time IS serious. It's important. It's a success predictor. If you ignore it or are coxky and go "meh I've seen it all before " you'll make an expensive business error. Not necessarily a technical error, not a memory leak or suboptimal sql. But people will get paid wrong or your ledger will be wrong or another business impact. Again, I may live in different it world than average active HN participant. But developers on my projects speak business to functional analysts. They understand payroll or Financials or hr or whatever in general, and also understand them in particular as it pertains to client. It's not wasted time or inefficiency. Not sure if I'm presenting my case well or persuading anybody - but I'm used to paying people to learn when they join projects, including senior niche experts :-)

I don't follow. What's the context or meaning of put up or shut up? Did you reply to right thread or did I inadvertently misrepresent anything? My point is that on all my projects for 25 years now, it's normal for many roles to need a significant amount of studying to become productive. That studying may involve project or client specific material such as design and architecture documents, functional specs, process and procedure documents, business overview, etc. On bigger projects there might be a part or full time training / L&K coordinator who would prepare and maintain training materials for new team members, create on boarding paths for roles etc. I read on HN about developers who start coding week 1 and I'm always impressed and astonished but also puzzled - coding what? In ERP world all code satisfies a specific business purpose and a random outsider wouldn't understand business functionality to create or fix business code day 1. Is it actually our goal to be interchangeable cogs, knowing only technology stacks but nothing about business or functionality? Either way, I don't understand what client shoild put up or shut up?

joshspankit 3y ago
If they are indeed replying to you, I suspect they are coming from a freelance background where it’s sometimes beneficial to have a hard line in order to either get the project moving or drop the client (and move on to more serious ones)
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  Ah. If so I still think we don't understand each other. It's not "we don't know what to do with you go read some books". It's "we have 80,000 time and labour business rules that are unique to our public sector organization and you should not code any business rules into our payroll system until you have a vague understanding of how we operate". That IS a serious client and a serious project and that study time IS serious. It's important. It's a success predictor. If you ignore it or are coxky and go "meh I've seen it all before " you'll make an expensive business error. Not necessarily a technical error, not a memory leak or suboptimal sql. But people will get paid wrong or your ledger will be wrong or another business impact. Again, I may live in different it world than average active HN participant. But developers on my projects speak business to functional analysts. They understand payroll or Financials or hr or whatever in general, and also understand them in particular as it pertains to client. It's not wasted time or inefficiency. Not sure if I'm presenting my case well or persuading anybody - but I'm used to paying people to learn when they join projects, including senior niche experts :-)