Welcome to The McDonaldification of Web Development
When I was a kid I remember McDonald’s as having some of the best food and providing the best experience ever. Just the thought of going there was exciting. Breakfast, lunch and dinner; it didn’t matter what meal it was. They went out of their way to, at least try, to make the experience fun for the kids. Yes, this was part of a plan to get the kids hooked to bring in the family (which it did in spades) but it was one of those rare strategies that was win-win for both the customer and company.
Welcome to The McDonaldification of Web Development
Fast forward 20 years (sigh…) and McDonalds and it’s ilk are the lowest of the low when it comes to quality of service and product. It’s been years since any fast food restaurant has provided me with an experience worthy of my money; the food is always horrible processed shit, and the service (even at the most basic of basic levels) is completely nonexistent. Hell, I can’t remember the last time I was given ketchup with fries without having to ask for it…
Having worked in web development professionally for the last eight years I’m starting to notice a similar pattern in this industry. What was once an industry ruled by high profits for a job performed by professionals (mostly anyway) has quickly become an industry full of amateurs and scammers (mostly) trying to make as much money with as little thought to quality as quickly as possible. I’ve spoken before about the lack of quality I find in a lot of programmers I work with, and while I’m not saying it’s the complete cause, I do think there’s a link.
Oddly, I’m in the minority here. In my, limited, exposure to other programmers I can say definitively that the majority just plain suck; mostly because they refuse to grow and learn.
I’ve heard all the arguments before, “My weekends are mine”, “I work hard enough; I don’t have the energy”, and the best ever, “My employer should pay for this like Google does. Whah!!”. (I know Google doesn’t, in fact, do this but people still say it.) All just pure crap excuses for maintaining a level of competence just high enough to not get fired.
Bottom line: working 8 hours a day is just not enough to matter. If you think you’re a programmer and you don’t spend time improving your skills you’ll quickly, really quickly, become obsolete. It just doesn’t matter if .Net is going to be around forever and your employer won’t ever upgrade from 1.1; you’re a hack (and not in a good way).
Now that I’m an active freelancer I’m really, really, starting to see the differences. Time and time again I end up taking a meeting with someone who has just been worked over by others in this field. The stories some of these companies and people have are just appalling and I’ve heard some doozies. Worst of all, behavior like this tends to skew their perspective and they view all freelancers as suspect. Too much of my time is spent building confidence in me as a professional it’s really starting to become laughable.
It was all really quite the mystery until I recently reached out on craigslist to find a designer for a WordPress theme (I need to update this site BAD). I was pretty explicit that all I was looking for was a PSD file that I would personally turn into a WordPress theme but 4 out of 5 responses to the ad indicated that the respondent hadn’t even read the post. Frankly, it was irritating wading through the crap and, obviously, automated responses.
This is troubling for a couple reasons. For one thing it basically indicates, to me anyways, that the person (company, freelancer, whatever) had very little regard for what I wanted, instead opting for a fastest gun approach. The number of emails I received immediately after posting my ad was around 20 and after reviewing each one it was obvious they were automated. I pity the individual or company who entertains these people.
The long term harm this can cause for other programmers (much less themselves) is completely short sighted. Crappy work begets a crappy experience for the client. Simple.
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This is something I have noticed in the online art world too; people will offer crap but cheap service, pushing prices down and making it near impossible for hard working artists to get work if they’re new to trying to get commissions. I always make sure to right a personal response, and when I did finally get a commission I was told it was what I had written that got the attention (same story with a job and my CV – I was told they’d pretty much made their mind up based on that).
I don’t understand how these people think they’ll get serious work with really obvious cut-and-paste applications, let alone if it’s clearly automated (I mean come on, a sensible programmer would at least add a delay based on how long it would take to write the cut-and-paste text, let alone all the wonderful things they could do by extracting data from the ad).
It’s a case of a few (hundred per post) people ruining it for the rest of us and it sucks there’s nothing we can do about them
It’s especially frustrating because your average person has no idea what’s going on when dealing with a web developer. I imagine they liken the experience to buying a business card when they should thinking it’s like dealing with a used car salesman. Rarely are the right questions asked by the client and, if morality isn’t an issue, it would be easy to dazzle them with tech speak and low cost.
Take a typical project for a blog: if the project fits a good route would be to use WordPress or a similar platform. IMHO a good, professional and competent, programmer will start with the most current build and write plugins and themes to achieve the functionality the client wants. They will NOT modify the core and WILL explain the importance of updates and system house keeping. They will quote a fair price and schedule and will stick to it.
Instead what I tend to encounter is people who were just hosed by developers who used old, and insecure, software that’s been heavily modified so updating is not an option. Across the board they were all quoted one price and one deadline and ended up waiting longer and paying more than I would have charged. Sadly, when they washed their hands of the situation they now look at us all as crooks.
One thing I’m trying to do is educate all my clients on just what they’re getting themselves into and what they can expect from me. While I lose more clients through sticker shock than anything else the ones I do keep appear to be more loyal and understanding of the process than those who don’t.