If architects had to work like web designers

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Eran
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If architects had to work like web designers

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josh
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Re: If architects had to work like web designers

Post by josh »

funny, I agree we should not be expected to magically "move this wall from here to there" but you gotta admit to some degree our job is to build things in such a way that we anticipate some of the changes, maybe an impossible goal in a literal sense but there is definitely lots of scumbag programmers who dont want to get off their butts

Edit - For instance domain driven design minimizes the BS to a degree because you focus your design on the conceptual models rather then some inane feature the client keeps repeating throughout the analysis period
Last edited by josh on Wed Sep 16, 2009 11:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Eran
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Re: If architects had to work like web designers

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I generally agree, though this article talks about more than just moving a wall from here to there (which architects actually do). I think the main point of the article is about the overall attitude web developers / designers have to deal with from clients as opposed to similar fields, as well as the unreasonable expectations.
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superdezign
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Re: If architects had to work like web designers

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This article fell to the Digg effect the first time it was posted. Then, it was copied onto multiple websites, none of which seemed to know who the originator was. It was re-posted to Digg multiple times, and got a little old. However, it is still a nice metaphor. :lol:

I'd have to say that the part that I hate most about web development is that customers expect you to work for free before you actually go to work. They want mock-ups and design templates. They don't know what they want, but they assume that we do. They want us to be able to "ask the right questions," rather than have them tell us the right answers from the start. This is why prototyping is so prominent in web development.

In web development, the customer is always wrong. :p
Doug G
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Re: If architects had to work like web designers

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If builders built buildings the same way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization!
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Re: If architects had to work like web designers

Post by josh »

superdezign wrote:In web development, the customer is always wrong. :p
About which subset of the questions though? They don't know if they want "superpackage 2000" to handle their document hosting, but they do know what they want the application to do, its just a matter of wether or not you are asking them about the implementation specifics or not I think

let me rephrase my point a little different, if you were out to eat and ordered a nice meal and the waiter came and made it out like he was offering you a complimentary appetizer 2 stories tall, and when you accepted your main course never came, and the reasoning they gave was that the entire chef staff was worn out from cooking the first round, whos fault is that :lol:

Most clients, if they know they just need an .html table of information, will let the programmer code a horribly over engineered control panel for setting up the columns and rows ( even if that part never changes ). Clients can't be expected to understand the full implications, period

but if a customer is simply expecting you to do stuff you never agreed to that is a different story. I think this applies more to non-greenfield projects too, I should say.
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