Chapter 7
Clients

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 this one little thing” when there’s so much more to it. Stakeholders care only about the bottom line.

And that’s OK. Like any relationship, the client-programmer relationship is a continual work in progress. It gets better when each side of the table understands what matters to the other. Working with clients well starts with understanding the view from their end so that we can start to teach them how things work from ours.