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Ask HN: Anyone else get these from their clients?
4 points by cubicle67 on Feb 13, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Just got an email from my client:

"Just to make sure you don't get too relaxed, I have had yet another brainwave re [app name]"

...

"From my simple understanding of programming I thought it shouldn't be too difficult."

I've no additional comment to make...



I'm still learning to say no. Here's the reply I just sent:

> From my simple understanding of programming I thought it shouldn't be too difficult.

It's not difficult, but it does take time. I think it's a good idea, but I would rather concentrate on getting the core of the programme done initially. I think once we have all the core functionality done and working well (and correctly, of course) we can then look at the available budget and think about where best to spend it.


Yes.

I currently am working on a web-app using cherrypy for my client, who has some small knowledge of PHP.

He's a great guy, and I love working with him; however, he likes to make suggestions, normally involving some way he could implement something in PHP to help out, and the suggestions invariably would add a lot of unnecessary complexity when a simpler solution is already available.

Not that his ideas are bad; they're almost always good ideas on a high level, but just really bad fits as far as implementation details go - normally of the "Yes, we can just kinda glue all this different stuff together" type, which is fine sometimes, but since we're using python there tends to be readily available solutions that don't involve all the overhead of gluing stuff together.


Are you asking if anyone else gets feature requests? Sure. And I'm not a programmer, but I get them all the time. A client isn't a client until the client starts coming up with "By the way, could you . . . ?"


I guess I was more looking for stories. Always nice to read about someone else's problems.

Edit: Also interested in how people handle this. I'm not so good at saying no as I love the challenge and the extra work. I'm getting better though.




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