Is the title link bait? Nah, I don’t think so. It’s what I believe.
It’s what I say to lots of people I know who say that working in the web is the coolest thing ever and that they only ever work on cool stuff and that they love what they do and amazeballs and so on.
Let me explain a bit more on what I am saying. I have to stress, this is my opinion based on my 10 years of experience and my 10 years of listening to others. It’s also not about the actual projects/products, it’s about the work that goes into them…oh and of course a few projects too yes
Most projects start out as exciting. There is nothing quite like creating that first template, those first few layers of a PSD or that complex prototype. There is nothing like reaching the end of the design phase or getting your complex javascript to spit out cats on rollover. This is the cool stuff we’ve been training up to do.
And then this is where the game changes.
Outsiders get involved.
This is when those amends start to come in, when you have to scale that logo up or rewrite that complex back end code.
This is when what you do starts to become a lot less exciting.
You see, I believe every project, ok not every project maybe but certainly most have a tipping point. You’ve done all the nice stuff and now it’s time to maintain and fix. And we don’t really like doing that do we. Nobody wakes up on a Monday morning excited about changing all that text or fixing IE bugs. Nobody.
And this is why I believe most work we end up doing is rubbish simply because we spend a lot of time doing stuff we don’t really want to be doing.
But the stuff we don’t want to be doing is really important and vital and also means that *95% of the time, the client feels the work we’ve done is awesome and not rubbish.
Which is what matters at the end of the day.
So what do you think? Am I talking nonsense? Are my figures well out or do you really only work on cool stuff?
*made up that figure. Clients are not always happy are they?