Last week I let my frustrations go with “5 Reasons it Sucks to be a Web Developer“, which ended up being one of the most popular posts I’ve written. One point stood out, which I anticipated, and that was #4 – Clients Suck.
Today while doing my morning reading I read a great post (as usual) from Joel Spolsky about his first experience as a client rather than the contractor. He actually quoted himself from a previous article and it fits exactly in with my Clients Suck argument. Here goes:
“Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, “are you sure?” and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, “is this what you want?” and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you’ve gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you’re really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.”
So I am waiting for my Hulu invite to be approved but until then we can *hack* our way around using this embed clip – allowing you to view a bunch of related clips…
30 Rock – Seinfeld Vision
I know it’s not Friday, but you may as well waste your day at work watching TV.
Iowa’s House of Representatives recently passed HF829 as a means to grow Iowa’s tech industry. It calls for four things:
1. Boost high-tech training dollars for employers;
2. Promote small and large company collaboration;
3. Fund prototype and concept development with pre-seed capital; and
4. Connect students with IT companies through Internship Programs.
It is great seeing legislative support for IT growth, even though it is a very bureaucratic approach. That aside I am somewhat opposed to #2, especially after reading the *fine print*:
“The State has introduced a new program to provide financial and technical assistance to encourage joint-venture development of “orphan” IT innovations. Orphan IT innovations are those technologies which have commercial potential but the generators of the technology do not wish to further commercialize the innovation themselves.”
My question: if the parties responsible for developing the technology have not taken the opportunity to monetize it should that not throw up a very large red flag?
The example I have been given is that Wells Fargo has applications they’ve built sitting on their shelves (more realistically – on their servers) that have been deprecated but still have value. The idea is that smaller software firms can *acquire* this software in a joint collaboration effort with Wells Fargo to commercialize it. I’m sure there are other examples (please let me know in the comments). I’m just speaking on behalf of the small software firms but I’ll say “no thanks”.
Oh, and if anyone out there wants to take a week and do the paperwork for #3 for us that would be great!
A couple months ago I wrote about what I called the First Internet War in Estonia. Wired Science (new show on PBS) did a great piece on this “World War 2.0” and what they call BotNet.
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Iowa’s House of Representatives recently passed 
