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Boss only likes stuff he can see and that looks pretty. Doesn't understand code, servers, containers, DBs, etc. Praise is attributed by something looking nice in the frontend, whether or not it does crazy stuff behind the scenes.

Spent a week working on a project whilst boss was away. Got to about Thursday and thought, oh poop, I've built all this API stuff, but not much frontend. So I panic built frontend screens with no functionality just so I had something to show.

Wish I had another dev to share backend progress with (and code review)...

Comments
  • 6
    Dont always please your boss. Hacking a quick frontend together for him will cost him more than if you make it nice later on.
  • 3
    Introduce a few sleeps into your front-end code. Once they complain that the front end is slow, you can say that the backend is causing the bottleneck and you need time to "optimise" the backend.

    As an aside, must clients are the same because they can see and interact with the front end. Backend stuff is pretty much invisible to them.
  • 2
    @Nanos Sadly boss == owner. They spent some time in client relations at a big agency then started their own. So they just hired a designer and a dev (me) and got on with it. They love the designer as she can produce wireframe visuals for a whole app quickly, but it can take days to code some of them by the time components are created, unit tests written, validation implemented (in JS and API), security considered, and so on...
  • 0
    @ftyross I like it. It provides the opposite of planned obselecence - I can also speed the app up in future releases with little effort 😉
  • 0
    I feel your pain.
  • 1
    @MoreCoffee it also provides a nice side benefit in that you can reduce the sleeps incrementally over time as you "work" on performance ;-).

    I have done it a few times when I was doing agency work full time with front-end mocks so that the customer didn't confuse the mock with a live application and you could decrement the sleeps as the backend gets done. So you say start at 10sec sleeps and for every 10% on the backend, you decrease it by 1 second :P
  • 0
    @Nanos managers and bosses are most of the times atechnical or worked in the field 10 years ago and grew out if their position.
    And I personally prefer an atechnical boss, as long as there is a trust. I trust them to give me a good workplace and keep the customers in line. They can trust me of doing everything in my grasp to deliver a good product in a given time.
  • 0
    @Nanos i said Atechnical (so not technical) :) you are basically repeating what I said.
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