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Clients from Hell

clientsfromhell.net

23 pointsshdon10 comments

I would like to see a more serious take on this idea. I would like to be able to read about badly managed web projects and be able to post my own, with details such as company names and people removed/obfuscated so that there is nothing personal going on.

Ideally, when in a situation where the project is being ran into the ground (we have all been there), one would be able to pull up a few 'other-peoples projects' that have failed due to the same scenarios/decisions taken. So things would not be personal conjecture, but a bit more evidence based. So, instead of saying 'we shouldn't do this because I think it is doomed to failure' you would be able to show that 'doing x' really can doom a project and has done so in many situations. You could then make the case for doing 'y' because it is quite clear that 'x' is just plain wrong or old fashioned.

It could also be useful if there was some contrasts, so, if a programmer found himself on a team where the product turned out to be jolly good then the reasons for how that happened could be described in contrast to experience found elsewhere by said programmer.

There could also be an award attached, quite a fearful award because company names and individuals would get their names in print. Similar to the awards for bad films etc, it would be a reputation that would stick around on the web for a long, long time.

The Daily wtf has a number of articles like these, but I guess the problem is that you either have to change the story so much that it barely resembles the original in any useful way. Simply changing the names is probably not sufficient for people involved not to guess what it is referring too.

I love the site but I'm convinced 80% of these stories are fake or highly embellished.

As is the rest of the internet.

All of them are well within the realm of possibility.

A friend of mine is an animator and a whole team of his was employed working on an educational cartoon. Two weeks before the close of the project, the client said "God told me in a dream not to do this project anymore." The client ended up not paying for any of the months of work already completed on the project and the team ended up sacked by the studio.

On the East Coast, being paid 6 months after completion of a project or not at all is almost the rule.

More than 15 years in the job I've also experienced a lot of situations that were similar. Probably mostly because in the early years I was doing quite a lot of web development for small companies and always had direct contact with the clients. One of many, many funny situations was the media agency that needed to send me digital pictures of their team, and they didn't send me the jpeg files, no, they send me a Word .doc files with the pictures placed into the doc. They didn't know that you could also just send the images. They only knew how to send docs.

Received this message from a client recently:

"Make sure the design you prepare for our iPhone app take into consideration, the upcoming iPhone 6 screen size apart from iPhone 4 and iPhone 5"

Not sure who to blame...

And the IT version: http://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport

There's also http://thedailywtf.com/

I'd also recommend reading the comments on each CFH post. They're surprisingly not terrible.

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