Comment by whstl
1 month ago
It's not luck.
Customers want to save money and see projects finished. That anyone can reason with.
Someone inside the company trying to climb the corporate ladder? Different story.
1 month ago
It's not luck.
Customers want to save money and see projects finished. That anyone can reason with.
Someone inside the company trying to climb the corporate ladder? Different story.
Okay. I'm glad you're privileged enough to where you can choose your customers. Customers that aren't abusive or otherwise out of their league thinking they know everything just because they have money.
Otherwise, you never feeelanced on the cheap.
Calling me "privileged" or "lucky" feels like a cheap attack on my competence.
I am certain that I went through the same problems you did in the past, maybe I just have a different way of dealing with them, or maybe I had even worse problems than you did but I have a different frame of comparison. We never stopped to compared notes.
All I'm saying is: for me dealing with business owners, end-users, CEOs and CTOs was always way easier than dealing with proxies. That's all.
>I am certain that I went through the same problems you did in the past,
And I'm certain you haven't if you really, never wanted a layer of separation between certain clients over behavioral issues that got in the way of the actual work. And I'm still male, so I'm sure I still have it better than certain other experiences I only heard third hand in my industry.
I don't see it as a cheap attack. Any teacher would love to be in a classroom exclusively made up of motivated honors students so they can focus on teaching and nurturing. Instead, most teachers tend to become parental proxies without the authority to actually discipline children. So they see a chair fly and at best they need to hope a principal handles it. But sometimes the kid is back in class the next day.
Its envy more than anything else.
5 replies →
+1, customers want their problem solved but at times they struggle to articulate that.
When a customer starts saying “we need to build X”, first ask what the actual problem is etc. It takes actual effort, and you need to speak their language (understand the domain).
But if you have a PM in the middle, now you just start playing telephone and I don’t believe that’s great for anyone involved.
Exactly. The game of telephone is prone to misinterpretation and, when this happens too much, it often answers with rigidity and lack of flexibility, out of fear.