Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?
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I just got a mail for the referral program in my company, where you get a cut of any projects that result from a referral you gave, and it got me thinking about whether I'd actually want anyone I know to use the product.
I'd like to make it a poll but I don't know how (or if we even can anymore). So, the question is pretty much what's on the title: If you knew (and liked) someone who might have use for the product you work on, would you actually recommend your solution, or quietly hope they pick a competitor?
I'm curious to learn if most people work on things they're, on the whole, proud of despite the s. Or if knowing how it works makes you pray you don't saddle anyone you care about with it.
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My consumer offering, yeah, I would. But it's aimed at a specific market, and most people I know aren't in it. I think it's a good concept, and I've used it myself.
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@Kian said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
If you knew (and liked) someone who might have use for the product you work on, would you actually recommend your solution
Yes.
a) I get money for doing so, and they get a discount so everyone wins
b) It's actually a (mostly) good product
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I won't until it reaches the quality that myself would enjoy to use it.
From my memory this only happen to small tools that I write for my colleagues, I can't remember any "medium or above sized project that I did" reached that level of quality.
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@Yamikuronue said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
My consumer offering, yeah, I would. But it's aimed at a specific market, and most people I know aren't in it. I think it's a good concept, and I've used it myself.
That describes pretty much my entire career. :P
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Like @Yamikuronue my product is aimed at a very narrow audience, and it's B2B. However, yeah, if someone from that sector came up to me, I'd totally recommend it. It has its issues here and there, but we're constantly improving it, and the team I'm with doesn't have their head in the sand about its shortcomings, and fixes them as time allows.
In the past, I have worked on products with a more broad spectrum. Many years ago I was working on an iTunes competitor, and the only thing that sold me on the idea was the fact that our downloads were DRM-free. 2 months after our official release, Apple announced they were going to phase out wma's from their store, so there goes our edge there. Our product didn't last long after that. We had some other more unique stuff that came with the music store, with some exclusive deals with major retailers, but it just didn't really pick up. The only thing that kind of made me proud was walking into one of those retailers and for a little while, the logo of the software I had a pretty big role in creating (one of three developers all together, and we all had pulled our share of the weight) was displayed in an endcap.
There was another product that I did a lot of work on that was really cool. I don't want to get into too many doxxing details, but while the idea itself was great, we had a visionary CEO who was too concerned with minor aesthetic details that nobody would notice (but the CEO did, so that's all that mattered). So the major features that would have sold the product, both to consumers and investors, suffered as a result of his months of bikeshedding. We had a friggen awesome looking software that barely functioned. It was an embarrassment for me, especially since he twisted our arms to get our families and friends to use the software. That product, too, met an early death.
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Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?
Depends what they're looking for, I guess. If they're looking for airport parking, then probably. If they're looking to change their utilities provider, then probably not.
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Most of the things since Betfred I have worked on are rather bespoke products. So no.
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@Kian said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
If you knew (and liked) someone who might have use for the product you work on, would you actually recommend your solution, or quietly hope they pick a competitor?
I've worked on a bunch of things. Some I'd recommend to friends. ;)
My current stuff, we aren't going to sell specifically because we instead sell the hardware that you need to (usefully) run it. Which is sort of confusing when it comes to poll options: I'm working on software that supports custom hardware, so if you're going to use that hardware, you're definitely going to end up using my software (unless you really like writing and reading raw UDP packets in the right patterns). A semi-captive market…
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@dkf
Eh, that just means "your product" is the hardware solution, not the software.
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@Kian No, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.
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@Kian
I'm not entirely happy with the state of our product yet, but yes, I would recommend it, since I don't know any competing product that's significantly better. I'd probably point out the flaws, though, to make sure they know what to expect and can figure out whether it actually fits their needs. (I'd say that an estimated 50% of our customers don't actually need the part of the product my team produces, and only buy it because it sounds great.) I'd also be interested in hearing customer feedback directly.
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@Kian
If you are part of our very limited type of customers, then I would recommend certain applications and services and others not.
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Yes.
I work on an entirely bespoke system which couldn't really be used by anyone other than the company I'm working for without a lot of rewriting, but at the moment I'm working on the major rewrite which we hope will eventually replace the current implementation. I would definitely recommend that over the existing system.
If hypothetically some other company actually had a use for this thing, I don't think I'd recommend the existing system.
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@Kian I would recommend the product I work on, but it's not applicable to everyone.
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The SaaS system I work on is pretty good for what it does, I think. I would probably recommend it, though I don't know what our competitors' offerings look like.
It could probably have uses other than what it's used for, but the type of clients we have means we don't really do anything else. I'm not even sure if we would be allowed to use it more generically.
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In the last place I worked, no, I would not recommend the software I made. It was a tool designed to surprise mobile users so call centers would save money, and could easily be replaced by a web page. (The company also sold a library that held the one patented feature that was worth having. That one patented feature was not what I worked on.)
My current work? It's a one-size-fits-all internal product, where some teams have a specialized version that fits their own needs better. So... I recommend it as a good first implementation, but you might need something specific we won't be able to make for 6-12 months?
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@djls45 said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
The SaaS system I work on
Oh, yeah, to be fair, I would not recommend anyone become SaaS clients of ours. The whole thing was thrown at us last minute: "Surprise! You're becoming SaaS providers now." We need a while to mature and figure out the right way to do it.
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Yeah sure why not. WtfFramework is actually a leading edge way to solve a wide range of communications problems.
However, dealing with WtfCorp to get this shit set up and working is very much not recommended.
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I might be kind of worried. But most likely, anyone I know would see what our product produces rather than the product itself.
I still wonder if I will one day, and I've always wondered how I'll respond...
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@izzion said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
Eh, that just means "your product" is the hardware solution, not the software.
Yes and no. It's an integrated thing. The customers might be buying the hardware, but they really can't use it without the software. (Except for a very adventurous and crazy few.) We might structure the deal one way, but it's not what they're actually buying.
It's a bit like buying a graphics card but also needing the drivers. Sure you could try not using drivers, and the hardware will then happily convert electricity into heat. (If that's what you really want, get a graphics card. Our stuff's too efficient for that, because we scale up much larger…)
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I work for an ad agency now and we don't market any products yet. The last product company I worked for had a product which I would have used if I was running a specific kind of business online, but as an end user of those businesses I did (and still do) block their services with an ad blocker. So it depends what my "client" is (big business or end user), I guess.
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@aapis said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
I work for an ad agency now
Boo! Hiss! :P
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@RaceProUK the most interesting web stuff is normally doing tracking and ad work. Mainly because it is jacket as fuck.
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It depends on the product I am working on. Web applications are usually OK, as is the stuff I write from scratch, but the existing desktop applications built with Winforms are horrid. They have no idea UserControls exist, so they use MDI instead, which means you can minimize/maximize/close parts of each form.
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@RaceProUK said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
utilities provider
One does not recommend any utilities provider. The scale goes: bad, very bad, terrible, and horribly awful
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@lucas1 said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
because it is jacket as fuck.
This slang makes zero sense in American.
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@HardwareGeek iOS auto correct auto correct strikes again.
I was supposed to say "hackey"
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@lucas1 And that makes it interesting? Ok, I guess. De gustabus non est disputandum.
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The project I'm working on is a long way from being a product; I think it's two generations out. When it does get to market, it will almost certainly be the software rather than the hardware that makes or breaks the product, and I don't currently know anything about that. That said, I don't know of any to recommend against it.
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@HardwareGeek Yes because it is challenging. Most web work now is really boring because everything just works.
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The desktop publishing application I worked on forever ago I would have recommended, but they killed it off a year or two ago.
You're welcome to visit my little collection of websites, I guess. Not really a product there, just some stuff I've made over the years.
Everything else has been embedded or internal development tools, so there's nothing to recommend.
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Yes. For all the WTFs and legacy horrors lurking underneath, our product has the distinction of actually working. Our sales folks have the mantra "do a proof of concept; make the sale."
Contrast to a formerly-major competitor, which had the mantra "do a proof of concept; lose the deal."
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@lucas1 said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
Most web work now is really boring because everything just works.
Thankfully, the world is always busy producing better idiots who continue to fill said webapps with XSRF, SQL injection, and plenty of other vulnerabilities.
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@Groaner No I don't think you understand. When you had some proper browser incompatibilities. You tended to have to write shims, actually understand what the browser was doing when it was rendering. Loops and vars weren't optimised by JITTing and you couldn't have too much JS running in the browser otherwise you could crash it. Most smaller jobs they don't care if the frontend is optimised as long as it is fast enough.
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Anyone want a Steam key for the product I'm recommending on?
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@ben_lubar
Ben, nobody is interested in DF
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Sure I recommend it, the product is frikin cool and the code quality is top notch. Only problem is the customers are businesses and I am no friend with billionaires in charge of then.
Now if it was any of my previous 2 jobs :--) funny I wont recommend them to my enemies let alone people I consider friends.
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The particular product I work on, although the code is full of ridiculous shit, is actually pretty good at what it does. It's B2B though, so not something I could recommend to a friend. Once I convince the higher ups to let me do a rewrite it will be much better
My last job, although they were pretty much the only company in their niche, I wouldn't have recommended. The code was so spaghetti that even a minor change would take months of work and probably break two other features you relied on
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Yes. Like many other people here, what I do is highly specialized (scientific data processing), so the market is very small, but I am quite confident that it does what it should do at least as well as other similar products. I am actually actively involved in trying to promote our software to other divisions internally.
Even on the code itself, either all the other devs (outside our team) are totally crap, or we do a rather good job, since everyone that has seen another codebase tells us that ours is by far the best. And that's despite us having no tests and almost no process at all...
And our team is also mature enough to mostly know when it doesn't work and not hide it. We're not so good at actually trying to fix these shortcomings, but I would say this is mostly because we're so few people for some much code.
Which gives me an idea of another vaguely similar question...
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@ben_lubar said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
Anyone want a Steam key for the product I'm recommending on?
Is it Dorf Ortress?
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@RaceProUK said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
@ben_lubar said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
Anyone want a Steam key for the product I'm recommending on?
Is it Dorf Ortress?
Why would I have Steam keys for someone else's non-Steam game?
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@ben_lubar Because you're Blubar ;)
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@aapis salesmen focus their attention on the best stuff on their products, while developers spend their days on the most buggy and unfinished parts
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@RaceProUK
Did you mean Blue Babar?
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I want to say no, just for the lulz. But yes, I obviously would and have recommended our projects to others. I would be pretty shit at sales if I did not.
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@lucas1 said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
Most web work now is really boring because everything just works.
Unless you have to support IE. Fuck you, Microsoft. Fuck you.
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My clients are my students' parents, so I hope I can recommend the product to the client. If not, something has happened along the way.
Fortunately I work at a pretty good school. Good staff, good admin, good students (not necessarily academically, but personality wise). The worst we deal with is teenagers being
lazy, self-centered, moody, etcteenagers.
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@Luhmann If he was ToadyOne that would answer a lot and at the same time raise so many questions
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More necro!
@Kian said in Would you recommend the product you're working on to your clients?:
If you knew (and liked) someone who might have use for the product you work on, would you actually recommend your solution, or quietly hope they pick a competitor?
I consistently lament that I never got to keep the source docs for the AutoDeck suite I built in Microsoft Office. I would recommend it to many people who mentioned they need repeatable downloading and info demangling (so long as the format is mostly consistent and predictable) for munging into a report, all based on Excel and PowerPoint.
I spent two years developing and improving it and I kick my mental self every time someone mentions doing similar things and I can't offer my turnkey solution...
Now to read the thread.