From a nice web-log on which 404 errors are awesome

Few days ago, one of my friends told me a short story which happened to him a very short while before:

My friend is a web developer, and so, his customers usually want him to code online software. One of his customers, though, wanted an e-commerce website «Like another one». So, my friend immediately thought at a huge web application which was dedicated, would have scaling abilities, advanced features, etc.  The customer then told him that he only had slightly more 700 bucks to start the project. My friend, conscious of the fact that the price of something like that application would cost at least ten times more, told his client that he could do something «light» to start, on what the client agreed. So, he started to work, hard, and got something working, then he put the stuff online. All has been okay for some weeks, ’til the customer wanted to do some slight modifications on his website… These slight changes would have been so if my friend would have done a complete and finished product, what he obviously hadn’t done for this little amount of money. So, despite the fact that his work has been thought to be evolutive, he had to recode most of the website in order to make the site suitable for these slight modifications. So he told that to the customer, who didn’t accept the quote. After arguing a short while, they both agreed that a simple e-commerce website would be sufficient.

So, my friend migrated his customer on an e-commerce website solution, and him and his client are both satisfied with that. The moral of this story is to NEVER trust a customer on his needs: they always are either distorted by the customer’s ambition, or, rarely, willingly lowered, in order to pay less (and, unfortunately, have less) than really needed. The role of a developper is also to understand his customer’s needs, and to explain them why and what they really need.