Time is money
… and that is the problem in a nutshell.
When you work in an agency rather than a development studio, particularly one that frets more about kerning than navigation design, your product is time. You’re not selling a website, you’re selling the time it takes you to make it. As a developer, you fight a constant battle against realities of the business that need you to implement the quick fix today. Work is a series of temporary solutions that will have to do until they become problems themselves, because you’ve already gone over budget.
…part of a site that could be three dynamic pages becomes a nightmare of 80-odd HTML ones because there wasn’t the time to spend on learning a little PHP, that would have saved an enormous amount of time…
As you may have guessed, I’m in just such a situation right now. The solution is a database and simple UI. But there’s no time for that. What is going to happen is we’ll manually edit a truckload of XML files and bodge the id structure because it’s too complicated to be easy for a human to manipulate. Of course, the point was that a human wouldn’t manipulate it, a database would.
As much as I enjoy working in agencies, the variety of it all, I do long to be able to take the time to do things right.
Maybe doing stuff of my own is the only thing for it in the long run.
Recent Posts RSS
November 24th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
That’s what architecture design is for. Work out the problems, pitfalls and technology you need at the start.
Be agile, review the project regularly, know what is coming up in the next week, fornight, month of development, change your approach to co-incide with it.
And above all, study at home.
I’m currently using ChatRP as a study into the Composite Web UI Application Block framework, precisely because I know that we are going to have to find a solution in the next week or two into deploying our main smart client app to a website. There’s no time for it on the project, so I’m doing it in my evenings.
Sure, it means the odd weekend/late night, but that’s what one gets the bigbucks(tm) for.
November 24th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Work out the problems, pitfalls and technology you need at the start. - I always do this as fully as possible.
Review the project regularly - there’s never the time. We get a lot of what we jokingly refer to as “post-it note briefs”, which are just as they sound.
Coming up in the next week, fornight, month of development, change your approach to co-incide with it - I never know that.
…but that’s what one gets the bigbucks(tm) for. - One does not get the megabucks.
I do a lot of studying at home, in the form of freelance projects that I bring back into work. I learned what I know of XHTML/CSS and PHP outside of work.
Make no mistake, you and I work in very different environments. JMD was a tiny little bit like it, but the Foundry is a design/ad agency in every sense.
PR companies are even more hectic. If you were to say “be agile…” to Jon he’d probably cry.