Sales dude vs Web Guy

Saw this posted on Techcrunch, and it’s hilarious.

Sounds like a bit like a typical day in a web agency.

Servicing and retaining loyal clients…

One of the incompetent account executives from one of our agency clients recently got pissed that we didn’t respond to their request to look into a problem on their client’s websites.  Part of their message in our project management system was:

“To service [client] and retain them as our loyal client I will need more prompt communications regarding timings up front.”

Hilarious. “To service [client] and retain them as our loyal client”. Clearly drinking too much of this company’s kool-aid. He must be screwing the CEO’s daughter or something.

Dumb Account Managers

An account manager from one of our traditional media agency clients recently said:

I havn’t (sp) coded HTML for 7 years, just out of curiosity I’m guessing you remove the attached code?

I’m actually fascinated how an account manager working in the web industry can not touch HTML for seven years. Unless they’re bullshitting, which based on previous dealings, is probably the case.

In fact, I wonder if they even know what HTML stands for.

Incapable Account Managers

Many of the account managers in traditional media agencies are assigned to one big client. The primary reason for this is that they are too stupid to be able to deal with more than one client at a time.

Our digital agency is a busy one. The small team has a lot of work, and deals with a multitude of clients and projects on a day-to-basis, often skipping rapidly between projects tackling issues and solving problems. Our primary project manager is nothing short of spectacular, juggling no less than 7-10 projects at any given time, for at least 5 different clients.

So, it’s disgusting when the account executives are so lazy that they can’t even make basic copy changes. Not one of these idiots we work with has taken the time to learn basic HTML, nor familiarise themselves with our CMS system, which is a breeze to use thanks to the excellent RadEditor.

I hate account executives. Bastards.

It’s all about passion

One of the great things about being a developer is that a lot of people you work with are passionate about software development. We all live and breathe code.

As Pardesi Blogger says.

Nowadays, it’s refreshing to just crack open my laptop and leisurely write code. Now to some people I know, they probably just think that such an activity is just plain sad.

A lot of people would think that it’s a plain sad, but forget that a lot of people who write code for a living enjoy writing code for a living.

Most of us were doing it before we started getting paid for it, and we’ll probably keep doing it even when we stop getting paid for it.

Have to agree with Pardesi:

You have to have passion….It’s what you live for and a bit of design & development, for me, is what it’s all about.

It’s about passion. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing – whether it’s programing or something else, nothing else matters.

Some thoughts on print design agencies

Is it any wonder that web developers look upon traditional marketing agencies with such distaste. Many of them pitch web work to their clients without so much as a basic understanding of the web, and come from a background in print media, which is very different from interactive media. Every web developer working in a digital agency has had to work with a traditional agency at some point, and looked at their web designer’s work with utter dismay.

Marketing is bullshit. Let’s make no mistake. If you’re one of those people who most print adverts (magazines, billboards, etc) don’t make sense, you wouldn’t be wrong. In fact, an intelligent individual has created a website to randomly generate print adverts, which are scarily realistic. As Techcrunch describes it:

The Ad Generator is a simple site that’s kind of fun to watch. It’s not a business at all – it was created by Alexis Lloyd as part of her thesis project at Parsons The New School for Design.

She’s taken “words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans,” and remixed and randomized them to generate new ones. She then takes “related” images from Flickr (I assume using Flickr tags) and generates fake advertisements.

Her goal is to “show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold.”

When the kind of work being produced by the designers we have to work with can now be done by a computer algorithm, who can blame us for disliking them so much? It just shows how little creativity is really required in their work. I’m yet to work with a capable designer from a traditional agency. They simply don’t understand the media, and make no attempt to learn, instead applying their skills from one industry to another and sweet-talking clients into accepting substandard work.

Call me a bitter developer if you will, but I’ve worked with too many dumbass designers on too many projects, to realise that the majority of them just don’t get it. If traditional media agencies are selling web work, they need to get web designers, or allow their digital partners to handle the creative element too.

It’s not all fun and games

Sometimes being a web developer actually means being a skivvy.

I’m the unlucky [insert expletive] who has to go through a 100+ page word document of copy changes, and make these changes to pages in the website.

You’d think account executives would realise that a big word document is not an effective way to communicate copy changes, and use something more effective (even a spreadsheet is better). At least tell us developers the damn filenames of the files you’re referring to rather than expecting us to just know by looking at the text.

The problem lies with the fact that agencies, clients, whoever think that developers actually care about the text we’re copying and pasting from your stupid word document. Let’s be clear: we don’t give a crap. Could be pasting latin text for all we care.

What is a web developer anyway?

A person who undertakes programming tasks for a Web site. This can include producing e-commerce applications or implementing a site search tool, for example. Occasionally used interchangeably with ‘Web designer’.

It’s a person who undertakes programming tasks for a website. We enjoy writing code. Not copying your stupid text from your word document and putting it into web pages.  If you’re going to give us mundane work, at least make it clear what needs doing so we can get back to the exciting stuff quicker.

Ideally, we’d be using a CMS system, though this site was created quickly and evolved.  Having said that, our agency created several websites for this client using our custom CMS product, and the account executives are way to stupid to use it. If only they would learn HTML. Or resign. Assholes.

Problems with dumbass contractors

Although the account executives are the biggest idiots you’ll work with most of the time, once in a while the people causing grief can be within the agency itself.

This is typically with freelancers. Like many companies, our agency has an internal test which candidates are required to complete before we consider interviewing them. Ironically, in excess of 50% of candidates who submit their CVs fail at this stage.

It’s not like it’s a hard test, and we even allow the candidate to choose which areas they want to be tested on, though of course, this will have to match with their CV.  Anyone applying for a developer role and refusing to do the web development and database tests would not bode well and reflect negatively on them.

But, back to the point, anyone applying to an agency should have a grasp of basic HTML, CSS, Javascript and if relevant, Flash, ASP.NET, SQL Server, etc.

To be honest, even a resourceful person with two browser windows open could probably Google some of the tricky questions and answer with vaguely correct answers. A finance dude at our office once done this for fun and achieved surprisingly good marks.

So, no excuse to get the test completely wrong then. But you’d be surprised at how many crap programmers are out there, writing frikkin appaling code and putting the rest of us to shame. These people shouldn’t be allowed to work in software development.

Just over a year ago, I had the opportunity of working with such developer. He’d come from a background contracting at a large management consultancy, but scored reasonably well in the test and interview.

We found it amusing when he came to our small agency for a three week contract to cover another developer being away during a development drive to launch on time, and the first question that came out his mouth was to ask how much annual leave he gets. It’s a frikkin three week contract, dumbass. The second question? Who’s the fire warden on this floor? Everyone had a good laugh at that one.

But the funniest part, and also the saddest, was his code. After three weeks on the project, the amount of usable work he done amounted to only a few hours.  The rest was built using pages of inline functions, completely ignoring all code in the business and data layers. On his last day, he said call me if you need anything else done. Dumbstruck at his comment, all I managed to splutter was “I don’t think that will be necessary”.

In an interesting twist of fate, a friend who is also a recruitment consultant came across this developer’s CV and noticed that he recently completed a contract at this agency. A short IM conversation later sealed his fate and ensured that he’d have to look to other recruitment consultants with find unsuspecting clients to hire this stupid fellow.

But, I’ve no doubt he found a recruiter willing to spend time on him. There are just as many pathetic IT recruitment consultants as there are developers, all trying to make a quick buck – commissions for these guys can run into the thousands. Don’t get me started on the time I spent half an hour on the phone with a dumb f*k recruitment consultant who kept confusing Java and Javascript, and clearly didn’t know a thing about computers.

Although I wish he ran off (at least we wouldn’t have to pay him then), this developer stuck around and done his time. Recently heard about a story at a web agency where a developer stuck around for a week, though when other senior developers realised he done nothing and held a meeting in another room, he left a note and left the building.

Hah! Damn right you foched up. Why don’t you do us all a favour and give up programming. Go do a job where you can’t foch up,  like working in a food store or something. Make the world a better place, have the common sense to realise you can’t cut code, and stop wasting your time and our money.

And damn right you won’t bill us. Hell, you should pay us for wasting our frikkin time and making our other competent developers work late on a Friday night to finish the work you were meant to do and pick up the pieces.

Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. And don’t hit the door on your way out, dumbass.

Sheesh.

Meeting between big agency and client

Ever wondered what a meeting between a big agency and a client is like?  This isn’t too far off the mark.

Client who was promoted to his level of incompetency some time ago and has a love-blame relationship with the agency: We need to do something new, something fresh – why aren’t we on myspace or dogster? Why aren’t people visiting our site every day for the fun and entertainment?

[Frazzled account person, thinking to herself, and worrying that she might accidentally say something true out loud: Gee, could that be because you have wildly unrealistic expectations and no consumer anywhere goes to ANY corporate Web site every day to do anything???]

Hilarious. Get the full dose at Advergirl.

It’s not so bad

Although my career to date has an agency focus, it’s by no means the only thing I’ve done, with brief stints in both a large global management consultancy and a small property company.

Despite these experiences, I’ve always found myself drifting back to agency work. In some ways, web development for the marketing sector isn’t as intense as developer roles elsewhere.

As Mark says, compared to the process at a global management consultancy, we’ve got it easy (though I don’t entirely agree with his comment, but that’s a post for another day).

There are things I love about working in a web agency (which tends to be quite small), as oposed to a 10,000+ employee global management consultancy.

A close-knit team. Everyone has one or two key areas of expertise. There’s a lot of respect within the organisation. Flat hierarchy and little or no politics. The power to innovate and bring about change.

Working in a web agency isn’t so bad. Even with dumb clients.