D6E7WC2KUS97 One of the situations that annoys the hell out of, above a lot of things are the so called, “know it all” customers. The most dangerous type of customer, who has a tiny bit of passing knowledge on a subject, or even worse, knows someone (everyone of them seems to have a “friend”, “relative” or mystical third party nowadays …) who apparently knows about the issue at hand.
Through a horrible twist of fate (which is a blog post in it’s own right), I got into a conversation about caching and web pages with a potential client. The client (an electrician may I add), had clearly been onto Google before the meeting and throws in a couple of acronyms like APC and terms like “block caching”. We tend moved onto site speed and SEO impact. Same story, client threw in gems like “pages have to be fast to appear in Google, as you can get banned” etc. Now, without sounding like I’m some type of web development god (which I’m not) I perform web development as full time job, 8 hours a day. Personally, I wouldn’t have a meeting with an electrician and throw in a few random pieces of knowledge just to make myself appear more knowledgeable than I am. It’s bordering on being insulting as it totally insults my intelligence.
Another example came just last month. A customer wished to use their own hosting for a fairly large site I’d developed for them and owned their own painfully oversold, “super unlimited account”, all for 10 pence a year, all hosted offshore. I simply needed to know a few technical details about their account to determine if I’d be able to host their site there, reasonable enough, yes? The customer then spewed out some frankly laughable terms – I’m pretty sure he got them from Godaddy.com adverts. I asked him about htaccess file and custom php.ini support. His response you ask? “I have premium hosting, that is supercharged for htaccess web design”. Epic, epic fail. Granted, not everyone will know what a htaccess file is – and if they’re not a web developer type, why should they. I’ll never understand this.
The prize for the worst type of know it all client goes to what I like to refer to as the “Well it’s only [ABC]” – where [ABC] can be any technical topic, outside the client’s area of expertise. I had a client who wanted to directly edit their view files within a CodeIgniter application I’d built for them. As I’ve given up telling clients to not bugger around with a correctly setup site I very reluctantly told him where to find the view files so he could mess up the site. As annoying as this is, this isn;t actually thre thing that annoyed me, his next statement did. The client said, “at the end of the day views are just a bit of hyper markup [referring to HTML …] that are easy to edit.” I guess they are, but if your job is marketing then why would you be messing about about with raw HTML when you you have no idea wtf you’re talking about. In this instance, I did get some “revenge” as the HTML views are generted using Twig – a template parser. Needless to say, the client had to call back, lol. At the end of the day a view file does just come down to a bit of HTML, but some views can be bloody complex and aren;t all just plain old HTML.
At the end of the day, if the client is the all encompassing fountain of knowledge why are they sitting with me, asking me questions? Put it into perspective Mr. Client.
I’d go one step further and say if a client doesn’t know about a particular subject and haven’t read up extensively upon it, don’t act the opposite way – let me do my own bloody job! If you have the knowledge to contribute fine.
I’ve honestly never understood why a client throws a few acronyms or keywords together and thinks they’ll convince anyone that they know what they’re talking about. It’s particularly insulting when they’re doing exactly this to someone who knows exactly what the said acronyms and random keywords mean.