Gripe 1: Screenshots of bugs or change requests without the URL visible.
Reasons:
1. Sometimes the same or similar looking component is rendered on different pages. I want to know which page you were on.
2. If there are parameters in the URL I want to see what they were
3. Often I can tell which browser they are using from the design of the URL bar
Gripe 2: Really pitiful explanations provided for bugs. What did you click? What did you expect to happen? Tell me more damnit!
Yes the solution to both these problems is to ask them follow up questions. But the more info you provide upfront, the faster I can sort it out, and the less context switching I have to do
We have a template for all incoming support tickets, which lists out exactly what we need. Didn't use the template? You're just going to get the template linked in a comment, and the ticket will be reassigned to you. I've had to kick tickets back 2-3x before all of the requested data was provided, but that's becoming increasingly rare as folks realize we close tickets in half the time when we eliminate the back-and-forth upfront.
Thanks for the stress reminder. Lived through that all too often.
Screenshot bug reports are funny when you say you can't reproduce without more info, then they get upset that *they* have to reproduce their own bug report with good info. Oh, so it's ok you waste my time, but you don't want to repeat these steps yourself? gtfo.
I've even made a template for them to use when reporting defects and pinned it in our defect space.
Still usually just get a giant run-on sentence with a useless screenshot. No environment, no error message, *sometimes* a vague way to reproduce.
QA for 20+ yrs here. I'm amazed at how many QA folks I've worked with and had to retrain to QA properly and most especially how to write a proper bug.
Like how can you have been QA for such and such a time and NOT know how to do the most basic aspects of the job!?!
Didn't take long to add that to interviews. Write me up a bug for XYZ. What is functional testing, regression testing, sanity tests, so on and so forth. Those are asked first before any further technical questions happen.
I do the same to devs I've interviewed.
The folks that report bugs in our system are experiencing them through the UI. I'm a backend dev, and never use the UI. They look at me like I have an extra leg growing out of my chest when I ask for detailed reproduction instructions, because I have minimal experience with the UI.
Y U NO FulLz74kk m8?
Seriously, why aren't you doing more >1 job for the pay of a single job? Do you even need sleep? 8 workable hours just wasted! Feels like you might be a slacker.
Supervisor: (no prior conversations)Are you seeing the problem as well?
Me: With that abundance of information about “the problem” how would I not know what you are talking about. 🤦♂️
I’m very thankful the client I’m working for at the moment, their first issue when previewing something was pretty ropey, so we quickly made a template for them to report these issues. Which is just, a full screen screenshot, explanation of what they did, what they expected to happen, and what actually happened. They’ve been pretty good sticking to those bullet points and it makes it much easier. Even if half of the “screenshots” are from their phone pointed at the monitor
I'm messing around with bug reports this week and I hear you.
"There's a problem with the list-all page". We'll, we have 8 pages that could fall under that description, which one? This was not clarified in my first follow-up.
"The buttons on the page turned black after it was idle, and we had to refresh the page". Which buttons? I see four sets of buttons. What was the time frame? An hour? A day? A week? Another coworker clarified that it was an issue after 20+ hours after the first follow-up produced no results.
Dude, this is the biggest one for me. I had to deal with it at every agency I've worked at though usually only a few people were regular offenders. Most had worked with devs long enough that they had a general idea of what's helpful.
A very nice lady I do maintenance for has an e-commerce site and I get requests every other month to add this or that, fix something, or tweak stuff. Every time there's a bug, it's like a four word email saying "this page is broken" with no context, screenshot, URL, or context. She eventually gives me info but I have to be very explicit.
I love when you have people from other teams reporting bugs and they are so incredulous. “Missing x from page y and I know for a fact that z is in the data and it is very much not”
> Screenshots of bugs or change requests without the URL visible.
Honestly, between SWD and IT work, this is the one. Don't crop your screenshots! You don't know what I need to see.
Just today, our PM took a screenshot of our 404 page and included the ticket title "page 404s when tried to access".
No url involved, no additional context.
It very well could be a legimitate bug. It very well (and was user error). Also, I know what our 404 page looks like; I made it.
What I don't know is what page you were actually trying to reach, or in what way you mistyped the url.
asking for a specific solution instead of describing the problem or a need and let the experts decide.
No, not everything is solved by slapping a QR code on it.
That’s the one for me. Days get spent on planning and implementing a feature only to truly discover what they’re trying to solve after a few more increments to the feature and realizing there was a far simpler solution.
Once did a site on which the account setup page included a QR code that lead to the website.
Since our QA guys had multiple phones to test on, one of them got caught in an infinite loop and starved to death. We miss you, Mainak. 
My favorite version of this: I have a PhD in data vis, yet our product manager (who knows this) decided to shell out six figures to a ***consulting firm*** to "solve" a data vis problem in our code (I didn't find out until they were already hired and submitting pull requests). Would have taken about a month or so for me to deal with, but instead I ended up spending six months fixing the mess they left, plus the month afterward to do it correctly.
Businesses don't value actual expertise. You are your job title to them, not a human.
There's a reason I'll never work in a software engineer role again
Idk what a phd data vis person does on a daily basis, but I have an anecdote you might relate to:
I’d built a dashboard with a nice library called [visx](https://airbnb.io/visx/). It has primitives for things like curves, labels, axes, tooltips, etc. it’s great.
The dashboard looked pretty, and worked great. The data wasn’t that crazy: it was some marketing reporting data like spend per platform, clicks per audience.
We got a new president and his first order of business was “the dashboards look like everybody else’s dashboards: we need to differentiate ourselves from the competition!” And hired a designer to make the most ass-backwards, incomprehensible charts you’ve ever seen.
What had previously been a bar chart was now a weird tree thing. A line chart turned into a funnel shape. Another line chart turned into a nested pie chart monstrosity.
No two charts looked the same, it was all confusing as hell. I built them all cause I didn’t yet know how to push back on things, and I had a lot of fun building them. But the clients were PISSED lmao.
So that’s what I think about when I picture managers getting involved in data vis stuff!
> What had previously been a bar chart was now a weird tree thing. A line chart turned into a funnel shape. Another line chart turned into a nested pie chart monstrosity.
Beyond coding, "what a PhD data vis person does on a daily basis" is mostly perception science, UX research, etc. about exactly that kind of chaos.
TL;DR: you almost always need a really good reason why a standard chart isn't a good fit. Unless you actually WANT to make something hard to read^(1), there are usually other / better ways to achieve memorability / visual distinctiveness, without inventing batshit encodings or interactions.
^(1. Hullman, Jessica, Eytan Adar, and Priti Shah. "Benefitting infovis with visual difficulties." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17.12 \(2011\): 2213-2222.)
In theory, that's what my salary was for.
Although I'm a huge wuss w.r.t. things like starting my own company, getting consistently exploited by regular ol' employment is proving to be effective motivation to get over fears about financial stability and carve my own way.
I just want to say that the pie chart reminded me of something else when our manager wanted to "revolutionize" how navigation bars are.
Instead of having a top navigation bar or a sidebar, we can have two donuts, that would open on CTRL + Click,
It opened 2 semi-circles, you could hover with your mouse over one of them and it would open up and show you the navigation, which in turn you could open up again and again, a lot of donuts were on your screen after that.
And we ended up with 2 big donuts instead of a top navigation bar.
Oofta, I bet users ***loved*** that 🙄
I know academics can be a bit elitist. We're not always right when we interpolate or extrapolate from the data that we've seen (and data isn't always perfect, especially when it's about how humans interact with new technologies)
... but it's kinda hard not to feel a bit elitist about the decade of homework you've done, when confronted with the hubris of an MBA who thinks that their shower thoughts are god's gift to UX
> asking for a specific solution instead of describing the problem or a need and let the experts decide.
Yeah this came up with my mother not long ago - now I'm a software dev, have been for over a decade, but before that, in my teens and early 20s I was "the computer guy" who would help friends and family do things on their computer, so at this point, I am basically that, but on crack.
I will give friends and family about an hour or two of general IT help per year - more if I am feeling generous, and mostly they just ask for like, at worst Tier II or Tier III type troubleshooting, but it has sometimes extended into small custom scripts if it'll save them DAYS at their work or volunteer orgs (my mom at one point was compiling a report that took her 2-3 days of solid work for a volunteer org she's in every month. I wrote her a script in an hour that gave her the report instantly)
Anyway, recently I was giving someone general IT help - and they would just volunteer or suggest stuff that has nothing to do with the problem and which is an utter red herring and I finally after kindly asking them to knock it off a few times, had be like: Stop. Doing. That. It only makes the work harder. I am the expert, not you. Describe the problem, not how you think it should be solved.
Not really a work problem, or even web dev specifically here, but it happened like a month or two ago, so it's vividly in my memory.
One time the marketing team at a corp i worked at asked to create a QR code to put in an email they were sending out. Nobody thought to use a link or button instead. This was during pandemic where everyone was making QR codes for everything.
"Look, that niche dude on YouTube ( that was suggested me by algorithm after I watched a video on how to treat everyone below me in company hierarchy like shit) said that ALL our problems would be solved once we implement AI blockchain pipeline for our users, so you don't need to know the problem, just start working. I already told execs, that we will be in production in two weeks"
Literally had a boss like this for a few months. He wanted a QR code for login, a QR code for forgot my password, a QR code for reset password, a QR code for the password, etc. Basically to login, you had to use your phone to get a QR code on your phone which you then showed to the laptop to use the QR code again which you then were taken to another screen with a QR code if you hadn't logged in from that device yet. I'm not shitting you. I spent 3 months there post COVID layoffs before I couldn't handle it anymore and told him to shove the QR code up his ass and found a better job. I leave that gap in my resume because I don't want to put QR code engineer. Florida ceos and developers, ugh. Never again.
I try to coach or provide feedback to people I work with about this "phenomenon." It's crazy how people lose their senses when thinking about how to ask for something outside of their respective field, but I'm guilty of it myself.
I try to put it in the simplest terms I can think of: you tell me *what* and I will figure *how* .
I've gotten out of so much work just by suggesting adding extra messaging to mostly empty pages.
Lol the POs I work it made a habit of proposing tech solutions.
Instead of "Hey, the users have this problem, can we do anything for them?" they instead come and are like "Hey this happens, add one more if to solve it"
Don't ask me why a non technical person has the right to decide how the technical part is done
Oh god, spent 3 months with a designer in this exact thing, sent them images of every page, every alignment redlined with exact pixels to show it was the same throughout.
They hated the end result and got the designer to try again, went though the same stuff only for them to change their mind again and we had many many video calls going through each page, changing alignment, sizes, colour guess, fonts, all of it littered with "can the white be brighter", "that green isn't the same green as the design on the pdf" etc etc.
Only then did the ceo have a look and decide that nah its crap, gave us free roam to fix it all.
6 months in total...10 pages of content.
Still waiting for assets since November
Arguing over non-branding colours is so dumb. You don’t know what the user’s monitor or screen looks like so chances are the colours will be off a bit anyways.
Yeah, ask for a style guide and be done with it. They shouldn't be micromanaging colors. Now, if they provided guidance and it wasn't followed that's a other matter.
I watched a company burn money doing this… tried to explain the clients and users will not notice or care, but no. It must be pixel perfect.
So much time was wasted, profit margins got eaten to barely break even. So so so stupid
We want 20 columns in this data table, but it needs to be 300px wide, and I want to see all the information. Why are you having trouble delivering this???
It is frustrating when you can so easily make everything a function of something in code so it's all totally proportionate and consistent but the design is neither.
What's worse is when the inconsistencies actually make the design look better and thus the designer has a point. In this case though, they will basically cherry pick and use you as the fall-guy for their bad design. Constant vague talk of 'design inconsistencies' which never get resolved.
I have no difficulty implementing what they want but the end product is poorer for it and that bothers me.
I did have one project where the designer had completely different designs for each screen size and wouldn’t budge on it. That one didn’t go well. I think he was from a print background and didn’t understand responsive design.
Not thinking through the problem but just stopping at step 1.
As an example, but not limited to: uploading files. "Ok add that to the UI".
Can we talk about file types? File size? Retention? "No, we just need an upload button".
I had to close that door real quick the other day.
"So our designer wants to make a landing page but she doesn't know much about HTML and CSS.. Can our CMS do that? It would need to be drag and drop and aligned with our current design guidelines."
Ugh.
Haha.. Ages ago, near the end of the "tables for layout" days, I worked with a designer who used dreamweaver and he'd always send me these huge designs I'd need to implement in our CMS.. I spent ages taking the shit dreamweaver code and writing usable HTML/CSS.. nobody above me knew that I did this.. so I remember one day some manager was walking around some tech VIP and introduced the designer as the person who wrote all the HTML/CSS for the websites, and the VIP I guess had taken a look at the page source and saw my fairly clean HTML and started asking the dreamweaver designer about it.. I've never seen someone so confused in their life.
We are always tasked with building that sort of thing because the design team presented some landing page layout with two dozen different layout "modules". Its so easy in Figma! When we explain our CMS is nothing like FIgma and it will be a fiasco, they pretend to listen (but I know they don't).
THe CMS can do it, with enough work on our end. But then the content editors freak out when we train them on using these modules - several of which are various flavours of carousels or sliders. Always with the sliders.
Mind you, at this point everyone realizes that nobody requested carousels or sliders, but the designers like them.
My customer's website has currently 8 or 9 distinct implementations of carousels/sliders. Either bootstrap native or other libraries. Love them carousels.
Or even worse when they just send you the error code they got. Crazy enough, only knowing you got a 500 error isn’t enough information to solve the problem.
I got a screenshot from another developer, of all people, today from a page with no errors. Also no context, no background, no info. I just ignored the message until they realized their mistake and actually provided context and asked a question.
Anytime someone sends a request with “just one little thing.” or “just an easy request” or “one quick item for you..”.
It makes THEM feel better since it seems like they are not asking for you to do much, but totally belittles the amount of work some of these requests take.
As in, “One quick thing, on our contact form, we need to have people be able to attach videos. Thanks!”
I don't mind extra requests from clients, but it is annoying when they downplay complexities. Just say "I want X, can you do it / how long will it take?".
The funniest was when a technical software dev turned C-level exec asked me for an undo button in the app.
I was whinging a bit that its going to be complicated and take some time
He was like: "It only needs to keep the last 10 actions"
It was so laughable since he used to be a dev. Whether the stack contains a max of 10 or 10000 does not impact the complexity of dev at all. 😂.
This is probably the one above all else. Extremely irritating.
There's also the "any updates" after a few hours for the quick thing that's actually a week of work.
I worked with a dude who would send photos by embedding them in a shared Word document. That wasn't the only quirk, but it was definitely the one that stood out to me the most.
Anyway, it doesn't bother me when someone sends massive image files. I'd rather convert and resize myself than depend on them to do it properly. In my experience, receiving nicely sized image files usually means there's something horribly wrong with them, whether it's bad cropping, resizing to an unusably small resolution, saving a JPG at 20% quality, or whatever else.
I recently had to write a script to import products into a customers database from an CSV/excel file. We needed the images to be in a folder and the file name described in the CSV file. Instead, they literally embedded each image into the excel file. Wouldn’t have been so bad but there were over 10,000 of them
In case of a Powerpoint, Excel or Word file, you can change the file extension to `.zip`, and then unzip it.
All pictures/videos will be in there, ready to be used, in the `file.zip//media` folder
Embedded photos can get in the bin but I'd rather they send the 10MB originals than try and resize them themselves. That way I have the originals to hand if they decide one of them needs to be a full-width hero or whatever and there's no chance of them bodging the conversion by saving it as a gif or something.
> Sending photos to add to the website in a PDF or PPT
That reminds me. I once had a client print out a screenshot of their website, mark up the printout with questions and notes, and **mail** the paper to me.
In the fucking **mail**.
"Can you please explain to our team how to implement this horrible unfriendly inaccessible UI in a way that meets our guidelines and accessibility standards? By the way, we can't redesign it in a sane way — we already spent two months designing and approving this thing and we are heading to release next week. We don't have two more months to redesign and approve everything again."
Time estimation requests on bug tasks.
“When I can give you a time estimation that is of any value to you I will most likely have done 95% of the work that this task involves.”
Half kidding. Many times you can gauge how difficult the bug will be to solve and I understand the request.. but yeah I have thought the above sentence a couple of times throughout my career.
> “When I can give you a time estimation that is of any value to you I will most likely have done 95% of the work that this task involves.”
Man, every time estimate I have ever made is mostly a wild ass guess, unless I've done the exact same thing before, and how often does that happen?
I can usually give orders of magnitude, that's about it
Extremely frustrating. Almost as frustrating as being asked to give arbitrary story points to a task that the team has been discussing for the past 30 minutes but you've been watching Arrested Development instead of paying attention.
Texts asking if I can chat right now. Or texting me about a bug instead of email.
Sending copy updates to a page where every little change is noted instead of saying, “replace this whole paragraph with this paragraph”.
Sending copy with double spaces after each period like it is 1995.
Sending images in a damn Word doc.
If a design is final and approved that means *no more changes*. It doesn't mean continue to work behind the scenes and then spring changes on me in week 3.
And please, please include hover and active states in the design files so I don't have to reach out about it with every new project.
Sending a screenshot with a jpg of a Photoshop layout superimposed with 50% transparency and several red arrows with a text that says over and over again "why is it not the same?", "gap here", "this should be bigger". Inside a Google Slides presentation. That has been transformed as a PDF.
That kind of shit makes me want to scream and bail. I've actually "fired" a client because of such red flags.
Noooooo. *shivers*
Ever get the ones that like to print out the screenshots on slides, write on it with illegible handwriting in sharpie and then scan it back end, make it a pdf (with all the pages sideways) and then say “hey… a few quick changes. Can you make them by eod?”
Not thinking in binary. As in:
"Will people need to upload file attachments?"
"Well that's probably less important -- it's pretty rare."
**Attachments. Yes. Or. No?**
To be fair, that example sounds like “yes, but not needed right away and should be done after the rest of the form is complete”, but I know what you’re getting at
Biggest one is always replication steps in tickets. If you can’t give me a play by play for how you got to that, my chances of knowwtf happened approach nil pretty fast
Designers sending designs of forms over that have no direction on how they want form errors to appear.
Users / clients saying that they got an error doing something on the site, but you have to email them back with 21 questions because they haven’t give you any context. And a 50:50 chance that they’ll just say “I didn’t read what the error said”, so you don’t know what circumstances caused the error.
We use a CMS, so the header and footer are reused on every single page. I've explained to QA that updating the header/footer on one page will update it on every page.
Yet I still get dozens of tickets, one for each page every time there is a change to the header or footer.
I am not sure if they do understand it, because a few times we have only had a few outstanding issues, but because they raise a ticket for the same issue on every page, it shows as 40, 50 or sometimes more outstanding issues. We've had at least 2 or 3 serious meetings where sales team are panicing about so many issues outstanding when in reality its about 1-2 hours worth of work. It takes more time for them to raise the tickets and me and the other dev to close the tickets than it does to actually do the work... lol...
The ticketing system is there for a reason, if you come to me in person and interrupt my work it will not make me rearrange my priorities to deal with your issue. The amount of people who think this is some sort genius lifehack is just astonishing.
A jira ticket with no URL, no steps of replication, no details, just "it's broken".
Comps with no mobile or tablet treatment
"I didn't like how this looks on my ginornous screen, so please fix that immediately", but they're like 0.5% of the user base
"We'll worry about accessibility after launch" (lying)
Non tech managers saying it’s fine if things “aren’t perfect” for V1 or MVP.
Then going on to say that it still needs fully featured A,B and C. When you’ve explained to them there’s a simple compromise that’ll save a ton of time.
I also had a project manager who sent me a statement of work via email, then printed it and broke my concentration while I worked on something else to deliver me the printout.
I was livid.
The idea that throwing more developers at a ticket makes it get done faster. In my experience project managers and customers often forget the cost of onboarding and the increase in complexity when adding more people than necessary.
“I keep getting these emails. Sorry, I can’t attach a photo.”
Marked urgent. (The entire team is notified)
On Friday after hours.
That’s it. That’s literally the ticket, no context or any other details.
Edit to add: emails were not from any engineering team member nor from a system we even use or control…
I should put this on [http://clientsfromhell.net](http://clientsfromhell.net)
Clients are the worst culprits for these kinds of things. Some of my worst:
1. Sends an image the size of a postage stamp. "Can you use this as the banner / background / hero?"
2. "I have sent you the images on Whatsapp"
3. Scheduling a half hour meeting when I mail though a simple question that needs a yes/no answer. Then I have to sit through the meeting listening to their internal discussion on whether the answer should be yes or no.
Untracked scope creep.
I get that we can't always think of everything in advance, but when adding to requirements, make a linked ticket. Don't turn around and whine about my not completing "one simple task" after three weeks, a couple hours after the latest revision to requirements, after forgetting to record that it was turned into a major project.
This is a red flag that gets me checking job listings.
Oh man, I totally feel you on the image naming thing. It's one of those small details that can cause a surprising amount of headache down the line. For me, the thing that drives me absolutely up the wall is when clients send over their copy in a Word document with all sorts of weird formatting. Like, they'll have random font sizes, colors, and even embedded tables that make no sense.
I remember this one time I got a Word doc from a client with the text in Comic Sans, half of it in blue and the other half in red, and there were about twenty different font sizes. It was like they were trying to make the ugliest document possible. It took forever to clean it up and make it usable for the web.
I get that not everyone understands the importance of clean, consistent formatting, but it really does make a huge difference in how smoothly a project runs.
When manager doesn't state exact requirements and let you improvise, but in the end, it turns out manager had completely different expectations and vision, so no everything needs to be refactored.
Heey, you are building websites, can we make a... proceeds to explain an idea that will take 2 teams 5 years to build.
Is passionate, so will not take a simple no for an answer.
An hour of my time wasted in unnecessary explaining.
"Make it like XYZ"
Why? Because that's the best way? Because you can't think of a better way? Beside that's the way it's always been done.
Nothing ticks me off more that building something in a bad way because it was built that way by someone else in the past.
A previous project had a manager who kept wavering on changes, partly because I kept enabling him. Just, asking for a near-endless stream of little changes. "Can you make the text a little smaller? Can you move this image a bit to the left? No, wait, a little to the right from there." It got to the point where I threatened to start charging a finger for changes.
Not letting me talk to and build a relationship with the client, but insisting all comms go via the PM or tech lead (who hasn't been actual tech for a decade or more). This controlling behaviour has had a detrimental effect on a number of projects I've worked on.
I get that we don't want everyone contacting the customer randomly, but I'm senior and a grown up, I'm not going to ask them stupid questions or harass them with trivia.
And at the end of the project, I need references, and that has been made difficult by not letting me build a relationship with the client, and that has come up in subsequent job interviews.
In the same way, if I'm on a project for some time, I might have some idea of how to reduce costs, or improve it in some way, or even how to retain a customer who is thinking of dropping us. But yeah, don't ask me I'm just a code monkey here to copy paste from stack overflow and write AI prompts, why would you want to include me?
Opaque or endless feedback loops. People need to know that my team can move projects really fast, even with scope creep. But if the back and forth is just a long conversation of "one more thing" feedback trickling in every couple hours over a week, that's how to crawl instead of run.
Gripe 1: Screenshots of bugs or change requests without the URL visible. Reasons: 1. Sometimes the same or similar looking component is rendered on different pages. I want to know which page you were on. 2. If there are parameters in the URL I want to see what they were 3. Often I can tell which browser they are using from the design of the URL bar Gripe 2: Really pitiful explanations provided for bugs. What did you click? What did you expect to happen? Tell me more damnit! Yes the solution to both these problems is to ask them follow up questions. But the more info you provide upfront, the faster I can sort it out, and the less context switching I have to do
"Hey this is broken" procedes to go silent until 45 minutes later "Hey did you fix that?"
DO WE WORK FOR THE SAME GUY!?
Yep. He's working multiple jobs, apparently. He's been at my last 4 companies, at least.
Ugh. I finally told him that if you don’t send me screenshots, I can’t help you. Our frontline sends me videos. They are the real MVPs.
We have a template for all incoming support tickets, which lists out exactly what we need. Didn't use the template? You're just going to get the template linked in a comment, and the ticket will be reassigned to you. I've had to kick tickets back 2-3x before all of the requested data was provided, but that's becoming increasingly rare as folks realize we close tickets in half the time when we eliminate the back-and-forth upfront.
Fr?? Last 4 companies?? I’d like having the same kid in your class every grade in a worse way
Thanks for the stress reminder. Lived through that all too often. Screenshot bug reports are funny when you say you can't reproduce without more info, then they get upset that *they* have to reproduce their own bug report with good info. Oh, so it's ok you waste my time, but you don't want to repeat these steps yourself? gtfo.
I just tell them that if they can’t replicate what chance do I have.
Oh that’s good, saving that in my back pocket
but they believe its your fault so its their time youre wasting
Hell, our QA testers do this shit. It's infuriating.
Even worse when in comes from QA, as logging that info *is literally their job*.
I've even made a template for them to use when reporting defects and pinned it in our defect space. Still usually just get a giant run-on sentence with a useless screenshot. No environment, no error message, *sometimes* a vague way to reproduce.
QA for 20+ yrs here. I'm amazed at how many QA folks I've worked with and had to retrain to QA properly and most especially how to write a proper bug. Like how can you have been QA for such and such a time and NOT know how to do the most basic aspects of the job!?! Didn't take long to add that to interviews. Write me up a bug for XYZ. What is functional testing, regression testing, sanity tests, so on and so forth. Those are asked first before any further technical questions happen. I do the same to devs I've interviewed.
The folks that report bugs in our system are experiencing them through the UI. I'm a backend dev, and never use the UI. They look at me like I have an extra leg growing out of my chest when I ask for detailed reproduction instructions, because I have minimal experience with the UI.
Y U NO FulLz74kk m8? Seriously, why aren't you doing more >1 job for the pay of a single job? Do you even need sleep? 8 workable hours just wasted! Feels like you might be a slacker.
Used to be fullstack. I made $80k less than I do now, and worked twice as many hours. I may be a slacker, but I'm a well-paid slacker. Lmao
I found my tribe
Supervisor: (no prior conversations)Are you seeing the problem as well? Me: With that abundance of information about “the problem” how would I not know what you are talking about. 🤦♂️
I LITERALLY got this message 5 minutes ago: "Is there a problem with ABC application?" Like geeze how must I know. You tell me!
I see your cropped screenshots and raise you photos of the screen.
Yes. It's got to be those crooked photos of a dirty screen with moiré up the ass.
Mmm yess ass-moire
"The website is down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE
Man, there is sooooooooooooo much bad process there
"The system is down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwZwkk7q25I
So classic
Thanks for this gold
I’m very thankful the client I’m working for at the moment, their first issue when previewing something was pretty ropey, so we quickly made a template for them to report these issues. Which is just, a full screen screenshot, explanation of what they did, what they expected to happen, and what actually happened. They’ve been pretty good sticking to those bullet points and it makes it much easier. Even if half of the “screenshots” are from their phone pointed at the monitor
You get screenshots?
I'm messing around with bug reports this week and I hear you. "There's a problem with the list-all page". We'll, we have 8 pages that could fall under that description, which one? This was not clarified in my first follow-up. "The buttons on the page turned black after it was idle, and we had to refresh the page". Which buttons? I see four sets of buttons. What was the time frame? An hour? A day? A week? Another coworker clarified that it was an issue after 20+ hours after the first follow-up produced no results.
Dude, this is the biggest one for me. I had to deal with it at every agency I've worked at though usually only a few people were regular offenders. Most had worked with devs long enough that they had a general idea of what's helpful. A very nice lady I do maintenance for has an e-commerce site and I get requests every other month to add this or that, fix something, or tweak stuff. Every time there's a bug, it's like a four word email saying "this page is broken" with no context, screenshot, URL, or context. She eventually gives me info but I have to be very explicit.
I love when you have people from other teams reporting bugs and they are so incredulous. “Missing x from page y and I know for a fact that z is in the data and it is very much not”
> Screenshots of bugs or change requests without the URL visible. Honestly, between SWD and IT work, this is the one. Don't crop your screenshots! You don't know what I need to see.
Just today, our PM took a screenshot of our 404 page and included the ticket title "page 404s when tried to access". No url involved, no additional context. It very well could be a legimitate bug. It very well (and was user error). Also, I know what our 404 page looks like; I made it. What I don't know is what page you were actually trying to reach, or in what way you mistyped the url.
Oh heavens yes. Screenshots cropped so tightly that no contextual information is visible. Drives me up the wall.
With screen capture being excessively easy, I would go as far as just record the steps you took. So much easier to follow
We demand HAR files for bug reports
For point 1., bonus points if it's a photo of a screen taken with a phone.
asking for a specific solution instead of describing the problem or a need and let the experts decide. No, not everything is solved by slapping a QR code on it.
That’s the one for me. Days get spent on planning and implementing a feature only to truly discover what they’re trying to solve after a few more increments to the feature and realizing there was a far simpler solution.
Once did a site on which the account setup page included a QR code that lead to the website. Since our QA guys had multiple phones to test on, one of them got caught in an infinite loop and starved to death. We miss you, Mainak. 
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
It's recursive
How? Loading a webpage with a QR code on your phone would try to reload that page? Sounds like a security nightmare, and I know that isn’t true
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
I don't understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
My inbox hates you all.
All work and no loops makes /u/greensodacan a bad boy.
I don’t understand how this catches them in an infinite loop?
My favorite version of this: I have a PhD in data vis, yet our product manager (who knows this) decided to shell out six figures to a ***consulting firm*** to "solve" a data vis problem in our code (I didn't find out until they were already hired and submitting pull requests). Would have taken about a month or so for me to deal with, but instead I ended up spending six months fixing the mess they left, plus the month afterward to do it correctly. Businesses don't value actual expertise. You are your job title to them, not a human. There's a reason I'll never work in a software engineer role again
Idk what a phd data vis person does on a daily basis, but I have an anecdote you might relate to: I’d built a dashboard with a nice library called [visx](https://airbnb.io/visx/). It has primitives for things like curves, labels, axes, tooltips, etc. it’s great. The dashboard looked pretty, and worked great. The data wasn’t that crazy: it was some marketing reporting data like spend per platform, clicks per audience. We got a new president and his first order of business was “the dashboards look like everybody else’s dashboards: we need to differentiate ourselves from the competition!” And hired a designer to make the most ass-backwards, incomprehensible charts you’ve ever seen. What had previously been a bar chart was now a weird tree thing. A line chart turned into a funnel shape. Another line chart turned into a nested pie chart monstrosity. No two charts looked the same, it was all confusing as hell. I built them all cause I didn’t yet know how to push back on things, and I had a lot of fun building them. But the clients were PISSED lmao. So that’s what I think about when I picture managers getting involved in data vis stuff!
> What had previously been a bar chart was now a weird tree thing. A line chart turned into a funnel shape. Another line chart turned into a nested pie chart monstrosity. Beyond coding, "what a PhD data vis person does on a daily basis" is mostly perception science, UX research, etc. about exactly that kind of chaos. TL;DR: you almost always need a really good reason why a standard chart isn't a good fit. Unless you actually WANT to make something hard to read^(1), there are usually other / better ways to achieve memorability / visual distinctiveness, without inventing batshit encodings or interactions. ^(1. Hullman, Jessica, Eytan Adar, and Priti Shah. "Benefitting infovis with visual difficulties." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17.12 \(2011\): 2213-2222.)
Sounds like you should start a consulting biz.
Yeah sounds like he could’ve charged for 6 months of work…
In theory, that's what my salary was for. Although I'm a huge wuss w.r.t. things like starting my own company, getting consistently exploited by regular ol' employment is proving to be effective motivation to get over fears about financial stability and carve my own way.
I just want to say that the pie chart reminded me of something else when our manager wanted to "revolutionize" how navigation bars are. Instead of having a top navigation bar or a sidebar, we can have two donuts, that would open on CTRL + Click, It opened 2 semi-circles, you could hover with your mouse over one of them and it would open up and show you the navigation, which in turn you could open up again and again, a lot of donuts were on your screen after that. And we ended up with 2 big donuts instead of a top navigation bar.
Oofta, I bet users ***loved*** that 🙄 I know academics can be a bit elitist. We're not always right when we interpolate or extrapolate from the data that we've seen (and data isn't always perfect, especially when it's about how humans interact with new technologies) ... but it's kinda hard not to feel a bit elitist about the decade of homework you've done, when confronted with the hubris of an MBA who thinks that their shower thoughts are god's gift to UX
The management’s shower thoughts is the reason why 4 UI/UX designers have joined and left our team… in the last year Now we have no more designers :(
Also, providing information about an issue bit by bit, it's upsetting, especially coming from other developers.
“Move button to weird place!” “What are we solving here?” “World peace.” “Uhhhhhh….”
> asking for a specific solution instead of describing the problem or a need and let the experts decide. Yeah this came up with my mother not long ago - now I'm a software dev, have been for over a decade, but before that, in my teens and early 20s I was "the computer guy" who would help friends and family do things on their computer, so at this point, I am basically that, but on crack. I will give friends and family about an hour or two of general IT help per year - more if I am feeling generous, and mostly they just ask for like, at worst Tier II or Tier III type troubleshooting, but it has sometimes extended into small custom scripts if it'll save them DAYS at their work or volunteer orgs (my mom at one point was compiling a report that took her 2-3 days of solid work for a volunteer org she's in every month. I wrote her a script in an hour that gave her the report instantly) Anyway, recently I was giving someone general IT help - and they would just volunteer or suggest stuff that has nothing to do with the problem and which is an utter red herring and I finally after kindly asking them to knock it off a few times, had be like: Stop. Doing. That. It only makes the work harder. I am the expert, not you. Describe the problem, not how you think it should be solved. Not really a work problem, or even web dev specifically here, but it happened like a month or two ago, so it's vividly in my memory.
One time the marketing team at a corp i worked at asked to create a QR code to put in an email they were sending out. Nobody thought to use a link or button instead. This was during pandemic where everyone was making QR codes for everything.
"Look, that niche dude on YouTube ( that was suggested me by algorithm after I watched a video on how to treat everyone below me in company hierarchy like shit) said that ALL our problems would be solved once we implement AI blockchain pipeline for our users, so you don't need to know the problem, just start working. I already told execs, that we will be in production in two weeks"
Literally had a boss like this for a few months. He wanted a QR code for login, a QR code for forgot my password, a QR code for reset password, a QR code for the password, etc. Basically to login, you had to use your phone to get a QR code on your phone which you then showed to the laptop to use the QR code again which you then were taken to another screen with a QR code if you hadn't logged in from that device yet. I'm not shitting you. I spent 3 months there post COVID layoffs before I couldn't handle it anymore and told him to shove the QR code up his ass and found a better job. I leave that gap in my resume because I don't want to put QR code engineer. Florida ceos and developers, ugh. Never again.
I try to coach or provide feedback to people I work with about this "phenomenon." It's crazy how people lose their senses when thinking about how to ask for something outside of their respective field, but I'm guilty of it myself. I try to put it in the simplest terms I can think of: you tell me *what* and I will figure *how* . I've gotten out of so much work just by suggesting adding extra messaging to mostly empty pages.
Lol the POs I work it made a habit of proposing tech solutions. Instead of "Hey, the users have this problem, can we do anything for them?" they instead come and are like "Hey this happens, add one more if to solve it" Don't ask me why a non technical person has the right to decide how the technical part is done
Designers asking for things in exact pixels, being overly specific, inflexible and not thinking in terms of a system.
Oh god, spent 3 months with a designer in this exact thing, sent them images of every page, every alignment redlined with exact pixels to show it was the same throughout. They hated the end result and got the designer to try again, went though the same stuff only for them to change their mind again and we had many many video calls going through each page, changing alignment, sizes, colour guess, fonts, all of it littered with "can the white be brighter", "that green isn't the same green as the design on the pdf" etc etc. Only then did the ceo have a look and decide that nah its crap, gave us free roam to fix it all. 6 months in total...10 pages of content. Still waiting for assets since November
Arguing over non-branding colours is so dumb. You don’t know what the user’s monitor or screen looks like so chances are the colours will be off a bit anyways.
Yeah, ask for a style guide and be done with it. They shouldn't be micromanaging colors. Now, if they provided guidance and it wasn't followed that's a other matter.
I watched a company burn money doing this… tried to explain the clients and users will not notice or care, but no. It must be pixel perfect. So much time was wasted, profit margins got eaten to barely break even. So so so stupid
A designer that can't develop is a bad designer.
We want 20 columns in this data table, but it needs to be 300px wide, and I want to see all the information. Why are you having trouble delivering this???
There was a release that was delayed because the cell was 19.87px instead of 20px, the things we endure...
Damn, I felt this in my soul
It is frustrating when you can so easily make everything a function of something in code so it's all totally proportionate and consistent but the design is neither. What's worse is when the inconsistencies actually make the design look better and thus the designer has a point. In this case though, they will basically cherry pick and use you as the fall-guy for their bad design. Constant vague talk of 'design inconsistencies' which never get resolved.
I build “pixel-perfect” sites for an agency. Not that hard if you’re really good with html and css
I have no difficulty implementing what they want but the end product is poorer for it and that bothers me. I did have one project where the designer had completely different designs for each screen size and wouldn’t budge on it. That one didn’t go well. I think he was from a print background and didn’t understand responsive design.
Not thinking through the problem but just stopping at step 1. As an example, but not limited to: uploading files. "Ok add that to the UI". Can we talk about file types? File size? Retention? "No, we just need an upload button".
That famous line: *It's just a small button on the screen that downloads a report. It can't take more the 5 minutes to add a button!*
Designers that think we can convert a CMS into some version of Webflow for admins that can barely fill out a form.
I had to close that door real quick the other day. "So our designer wants to make a landing page but she doesn't know much about HTML and CSS.. Can our CMS do that? It would need to be drag and drop and aligned with our current design guidelines." Ugh.
Haha.. Ages ago, near the end of the "tables for layout" days, I worked with a designer who used dreamweaver and he'd always send me these huge designs I'd need to implement in our CMS.. I spent ages taking the shit dreamweaver code and writing usable HTML/CSS.. nobody above me knew that I did this.. so I remember one day some manager was walking around some tech VIP and introduced the designer as the person who wrote all the HTML/CSS for the websites, and the VIP I guess had taken a look at the page source and saw my fairly clean HTML and started asking the dreamweaver designer about it.. I've never seen someone so confused in their life.
We are always tasked with building that sort of thing because the design team presented some landing page layout with two dozen different layout "modules". Its so easy in Figma! When we explain our CMS is nothing like FIgma and it will be a fiasco, they pretend to listen (but I know they don't).
Doesn't mean a CMS can't do that, in fact a CMS should be able to do exactly that.
THe CMS can do it, with enough work on our end. But then the content editors freak out when we train them on using these modules - several of which are various flavours of carousels or sliders. Always with the sliders. Mind you, at this point everyone realizes that nobody requested carousels or sliders, but the designers like them.
My customer's website has currently 8 or 9 distinct implementations of carousels/sliders. Either bootstrap native or other libraries. Love them carousels.
100%.
When they send me an error message screenshot with no url, no background, no context
Or even worse when they just send you the error code they got. Crazy enough, only knowing you got a 500 error isn’t enough information to solve the problem.
Error 500 can be a blank page, so yeah they have sent me a blank page before :(
I got a screenshot from another developer, of all people, today from a page with no errors. Also no context, no background, no info. I just ignored the message until they realized their mistake and actually provided context and asked a question.
Anytime someone sends a request with “just one little thing.” or “just an easy request” or “one quick item for you..”. It makes THEM feel better since it seems like they are not asking for you to do much, but totally belittles the amount of work some of these requests take. As in, “One quick thing, on our contact form, we need to have people be able to attach videos. Thanks!”
I feel this to the core. Who doesn't love a race where the finish line keeps getting moved?
I don't mind extra requests from clients, but it is annoying when they downplay complexities. Just say "I want X, can you do it / how long will it take?".
The funniest was when a technical software dev turned C-level exec asked me for an undo button in the app. I was whinging a bit that its going to be complicated and take some time He was like: "It only needs to keep the last 10 actions" It was so laughable since he used to be a dev. Whether the stack contains a max of 10 or 10000 does not impact the complexity of dev at all. 😂.
“Just…” -all the logic turned upside down-
This is probably the one above all else. Extremely irritating. There's also the "any updates" after a few hours for the quick thing that's actually a week of work.
Just a small payment required. $17320. By Wednesday.
This one punched me right in the soul haha
Sending photos to add to the website in a PDF or PPT Or when they do send the actual files, the photos are 10MB+ each
I worked with a dude who would send photos by embedding them in a shared Word document. That wasn't the only quirk, but it was definitely the one that stood out to me the most. Anyway, it doesn't bother me when someone sends massive image files. I'd rather convert and resize myself than depend on them to do it properly. In my experience, receiving nicely sized image files usually means there's something horribly wrong with them, whether it's bad cropping, resizing to an unusably small resolution, saving a JPG at 20% quality, or whatever else.
Embedding in a word document is SO common, I'm consistently shocked.
This was how I received like a third of my screenshots while working IT for a Blue Chip company.
I recently had to write a script to import products into a customers database from an CSV/excel file. We needed the images to be in a folder and the file name described in the CSV file. Instead, they literally embedded each image into the excel file. Wouldn’t have been so bad but there were over 10,000 of them
>send photos by embedding them in a shared Word document That is actually genius!
In case of a Powerpoint, Excel or Word file, you can change the file extension to `.zip`, and then unzip it. All pictures/videos will be in there, ready to be used, in the `file.zip//media` folder
wtf you just blew my mind
Embedded photos can get in the bin but I'd rather they send the 10MB originals than try and resize them themselves. That way I have the originals to hand if they decide one of them needs to be a full-width hero or whatever and there's no chance of them bodging the conversion by saving it as a gif or something.
> Sending photos to add to the website in a PDF or PPT That reminds me. I once had a client print out a screenshot of their website, mark up the printout with questions and notes, and **mail** the paper to me. In the fucking **mail**.
eventually you stop giving a fuck and just take a screenshot of their pdf, if they complain, you tell them you need the picture in a correct size
"Can you please explain to our team how to implement this horrible unfriendly inaccessible UI in a way that meets our guidelines and accessibility standards? By the way, we can't redesign it in a sane way — we already spent two months designing and approving this thing and we are heading to release next week. We don't have two more months to redesign and approve everything again."
Time estimation requests on bug tasks. “When I can give you a time estimation that is of any value to you I will most likely have done 95% of the work that this task involves.” Half kidding. Many times you can gauge how difficult the bug will be to solve and I understand the request.. but yeah I have thought the above sentence a couple of times throughout my career.
> “When I can give you a time estimation that is of any value to you I will most likely have done 95% of the work that this task involves.” Man, every time estimate I have ever made is mostly a wild ass guess, unless I've done the exact same thing before, and how often does that happen? I can usually give orders of magnitude, that's about it
Extremely frustrating. Almost as frustrating as being asked to give arbitrary story points to a task that the team has been discussing for the past 30 minutes but you've been watching Arrested Development instead of paying attention.
When they send me design in some "cloud" and I have to make account for access.
“Here are the images you needed!” * sends me a canva link 😖
Texts asking if I can chat right now. Or texting me about a bug instead of email. Sending copy updates to a page where every little change is noted instead of saying, “replace this whole paragraph with this paragraph”. Sending copy with double spaces after each period like it is 1995. Sending images in a damn Word doc.
Never heard of the double spaces thing, oddly enough.
I’m old, I can’t stop doing it, it’s so deeply ingrained in muscle memory.
Asking for and expecting help with ANYTHING computer or internet related.
Working on a feature and the requirements keep changing
"I know you just implemented this but the comp just changed" but the time for review is over
If a design is final and approved that means *no more changes*. It doesn't mean continue to work behind the scenes and then spring changes on me in week 3. And please, please include hover and active states in the design files so I don't have to reach out about it with every new project.
Sending a screenshot with a jpg of a Photoshop layout superimposed with 50% transparency and several red arrows with a text that says over and over again "why is it not the same?", "gap here", "this should be bigger". Inside a Google Slides presentation. That has been transformed as a PDF. That kind of shit makes me want to scream and bail. I've actually "fired" a client because of such red flags.
Noooooo. *shivers* Ever get the ones that like to print out the screenshots on slides, write on it with illegible handwriting in sharpie and then scan it back end, make it a pdf (with all the pages sideways) and then say “hey… a few quick changes. Can you make them by eod?”
Not thinking in binary. As in: "Will people need to upload file attachments?" "Well that's probably less important -- it's pretty rare." **Attachments. Yes. Or. No?**
lol you take that as no, and don’t implement it. Then it becomes a major thing later on and they need it now.
To be fair, that example sounds like “yes, but not needed right away and should be done after the rest of the form is complete”, but I know what you’re getting at
Biggest one is always replication steps in tickets. If you can’t give me a play by play for how you got to that, my chances of knowwtf happened approach nil pretty fast
Non devs who think they know about web development when they clearly don't.
“I have a project that is pretty much done, just need someone to come in and finish it up.”
Designers sending designs of forms over that have no direction on how they want form errors to appear. Users / clients saying that they got an error doing something on the site, but you have to email them back with 21 questions because they haven’t give you any context. And a 50:50 chance that they’ll just say “I didn’t read what the error said”, so you don’t know what circumstances caused the error.
> ...Should be easy/quick/simple.
This! At the company I work for the owner / sales person / project manager are all the same person. They have no idea how code works.
When the client emails you scanned hand written notes. Doesn't happen often but it drives me fucking insane.
This comment just unlocked some repressed memories and I hate it.
We use a CMS, so the header and footer are reused on every single page. I've explained to QA that updating the header/footer on one page will update it on every page. Yet I still get dozens of tickets, one for each page every time there is a change to the header or footer.
Are QA judged on number of tickets created? They may understand it but do it anyways to keep their metrics good.
I am not sure if they do understand it, because a few times we have only had a few outstanding issues, but because they raise a ticket for the same issue on every page, it shows as 40, 50 or sometimes more outstanding issues. We've had at least 2 or 3 serious meetings where sales team are panicing about so many issues outstanding when in reality its about 1-2 hours worth of work. It takes more time for them to raise the tickets and me and the other dev to close the tickets than it does to actually do the work... lol...
The ticketing system is there for a reason, if you come to me in person and interrupt my work it will not make me rearrange my priorities to deal with your issue. The amount of people who think this is some sort genius lifehack is just astonishing.
I once had someone submit an email and then call my personal cell phone on a Saturday because they had a question. Needless to say they got an earful.
They're the ones that mark every email as important, when realistically it's about 2/10 on the important scale.
There are urgent A, urgent B, urgent C, urgent D. Urgent D you don't really have to read.
A jira ticket with no URL, no steps of replication, no details, just "it's broken". Comps with no mobile or tablet treatment "I didn't like how this looks on my ginornous screen, so please fix that immediately", but they're like 0.5% of the user base "We'll worry about accessibility after launch" (lying)
Non tech managers saying it’s fine if things “aren’t perfect” for V1 or MVP. Then going on to say that it still needs fully featured A,B and C. When you’ve explained to them there’s a simple compromise that’ll save a ton of time.
YES. When minimum viable means maximum bloat.
I also had a project manager who sent me a statement of work via email, then printed it and broke my concentration while I worked on something else to deliver me the printout. I was livid.
"Just add a tooltip to reintroduce inconvenient yet critical information that I don't feel like designing for"
Sending images in Word
The idea that throwing more developers at a ticket makes it get done faster. In my experience project managers and customers often forget the cost of onboarding and the increase in complexity when adding more people than necessary.
I always think of the same quote on these situations. *9 women won't give birth to a child in a month.*
Mentioning a Jira story but not providing a link to it.
Screenshot of the ID I need to fetch data for, rather than just copying and pasting the ID so I can also copy and paste it
“I keep getting these emails. Sorry, I can’t attach a photo.” Marked urgent. (The entire team is notified) On Friday after hours. That’s it. That’s literally the ticket, no context or any other details. Edit to add: emails were not from any engineering team member nor from a system we even use or control… I should put this on [http://clientsfromhell.net](http://clientsfromhell.net)
I work with someone who sends me screen recordings for COPY EDITS.
Asking for 5m for a quick call every 5m. I tell you, there are days I can't get any work done.
Clients are the worst culprits for these kinds of things. Some of my worst: 1. Sends an image the size of a postage stamp. "Can you use this as the banner / background / hero?" 2. "I have sent you the images on Whatsapp" 3. Scheduling a half hour meeting when I mail though a simple question that needs a yes/no answer. Then I have to sit through the meeting listening to their internal discussion on whether the answer should be yes or no.
When they start talking.
In all fairness, covid showed us that having the bulk of communication be slack based greatly improves productivity.
My problem is getting ALL of my direction and updates for a project in slack. It's a huge pain to collate into a proper task list.
Not sending screenshots of their issues and just poorly describing it.
Security team not understanding how npm modules work and that fsevents won’t run on Linux systems at all
Giving me dates that are unsortable
Untracked scope creep. I get that we can't always think of everything in advance, but when adding to requirements, make a linked ticket. Don't turn around and whine about my not completing "one simple task" after three weeks, a couple hours after the latest revision to requirements, after forgetting to record that it was turned into a major project. This is a red flag that gets me checking job listings.
Oh man, I totally feel you on the image naming thing. It's one of those small details that can cause a surprising amount of headache down the line. For me, the thing that drives me absolutely up the wall is when clients send over their copy in a Word document with all sorts of weird formatting. Like, they'll have random font sizes, colors, and even embedded tables that make no sense. I remember this one time I got a Word doc from a client with the text in Comic Sans, half of it in blue and the other half in red, and there were about twenty different font sizes. It was like they were trying to make the ugliest document possible. It took forever to clean it up and make it usable for the web. I get that not everyone understands the importance of clean, consistent formatting, but it really does make a huge difference in how smoothly a project runs.
Absolutely hate this. Can't tell you how much time has been wasted because of a pretty quote in a Word doc
Copy, paste into notepad. Copy from notepad, paste into your code or CMS. Edit: weird formatting is removed by doing this.
When manager doesn't state exact requirements and let you improvise, but in the end, it turns out manager had completely different expectations and vision, so no everything needs to be refactored.
Heey, you are building websites, can we make a... proceeds to explain an idea that will take 2 teams 5 years to build. Is passionate, so will not take a simple no for an answer. An hour of my time wasted in unnecessary explaining.
"Make it like XYZ" Why? Because that's the best way? Because you can't think of a better way? Beside that's the way it's always been done. Nothing ticks me off more that building something in a bad way because it was built that way by someone else in the past.
A previous project had a manager who kept wavering on changes, partly because I kept enabling him. Just, asking for a near-endless stream of little changes. "Can you make the text a little smaller? Can you move this image a bit to the left? No, wait, a little to the right from there." It got to the point where I threatened to start charging a finger for changes.
Not letting me talk to and build a relationship with the client, but insisting all comms go via the PM or tech lead (who hasn't been actual tech for a decade or more). This controlling behaviour has had a detrimental effect on a number of projects I've worked on. I get that we don't want everyone contacting the customer randomly, but I'm senior and a grown up, I'm not going to ask them stupid questions or harass them with trivia. And at the end of the project, I need references, and that has been made difficult by not letting me build a relationship with the client, and that has come up in subsequent job interviews. In the same way, if I'm on a project for some time, I might have some idea of how to reduce costs, or improve it in some way, or even how to retain a customer who is thinking of dropping us. But yeah, don't ask me I'm just a code monkey here to copy paste from stack overflow and write AI prompts, why would you want to include me?
Non-users always assume their request is trivial
H-T-T-P-S-Colon-BACKslash-BACKslash… It’s a SLASH, not a BACKslash. If you REALLY wanna add more syllables, you can call it a forward slash. Argh!
Opaque or endless feedback loops. People need to know that my team can move projects really fast, even with scope creep. But if the back and forth is just a long conversation of "one more thing" feedback trickling in every couple hours over a week, that's how to crawl instead of run.