The Developer's Code

Chapter 7Clients

In this business, clients are our lifeline. Without them, what we do amounts to nothing more than a hobby.

However, quite often, the working relationship between us and them feels more like Ali vs. Frazier than Penn and Teller. In an ideal world, our client is giving us back rubs and feeding us scoops of vanilla ice cream, all while dabbing the corners of our mouths as we labor over their application. In an ideal world, our customer knows the agony we sometimes go through to fit nascent ideas into real code.

The harsh truth is simply this: clients rarely see what pains we go through to bend to changing requirements. Customers think only about that one new feature they want—the one that, in their eyes, involves “just changing ...