Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Writing just sounds like IT.
"The Boss" tells customers that it's no problem: of course you can have that new function by next Friday. (It's now Monday.)
Then he 'asks' his employees if this function can be written, tested, and documented before Wednesday (looking very surprised when the answer is 'no'), so the customer can take a look at it on Tuesday, offer some suggestions regarding changes to be made, after which this update can be installed on the customer's 37 systems on Friday.
True story. I've encountered in numerous times in more than one company.
And no, I don't mean
function Hello()
{
echo "Hello World!";
}
|
Well, icing on the cake:
(Or...insult added to injury)...after I told them how to cover their butts for the "pre-sale" thing on Amazon, BUT then told them, no, I couldn't have this book (474 pages, 181 images, poetry, yadda) done by the 15th, they went with "another conversion house" that said that they could.
Now...I know what this means. It means, that house is going to run this POS through Calibre, tweak it ever so slightly, and give them a MOBI (that is either made with C or with KG). But...it also means that this book will NOT be properly made; the images won't be optimized for all the HD issues; it won't have media-queries to address the KF7 devices; and the poetry won't line-wrap correctly. But, bygod, the "other conversion house" will tell them to look at it on K4PC, and, "yowza!" it will LOOK PERFECT.
Right up to the point that some poor buyer actually buys it and downloads it.
What kills me--what really bloody kills me--is that you CANNOT explain these quality issues. People don't care. They want their crap fast, and if it looks like a cake with icing, well, then, howdy, it's all good. They don't use Previewer; they don't test the books...it's so damn frustrating. The lower-quality houses just have them all download K4PC or K4Mac, in which almost everything
LOOKS great, and bobs-yer-uncle.
(n.b.: I received a mostly-complete book that a former, now-gone competitor of mine had done. I was SHOCKED to see how badly the book was coded. Absolutely gobsmacked. That, atop this...makes me want to shut my bloody doors. They were charging SUBSTANTIALLY more than we.)
Hitch