What not to say to a software developer
At the end of the Less Than Perfect Apps panel at this year’s Macworld the panel took to discussing how to communicate with developers about making their apps better. Two points that came up were well made and personal bugbears of mine.
Any sentence from a non-developer beginning with “It would be easy to…” immediately inspires vivid fantasies of LART-ing said non-developer into submission with an IBM Model M. If it is “so simple”, they could then extract said keyboard from their forehead and add the feature themselves.
The reason you engage a developer to write software is because you lack the skill, experience or time to fully understand the complexity of the software in question. Therefore those other than the developer are by definition the least qualified to make pronouncements about the difficulty of adding features. To suggest otherwise accuses the developer of incompetence or at the very least indolence. So do not say anything of the sort unless you mean that.
