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I’ll be the first to admit that web developers, regardless of their coding platform, religious preference (microsoft or unix? mac or windows?), and personal hygiene standards have one thing in common:

They love computers, but they sometimes have a hard time dealing with the people part of the business.

In the spirit of this statement, I decided to compile a short list of things that you can do to make a web developer (actually, any programmer) stark raving mad:

• Be sure to confuse requirements with specifications. In other words, don’t tell a web developer that you want to track customers as they travel through your web site, spend lots of useless time telling us exactly what kind of fields to use in the cookie, when and where to dump that info into a database table, and while you’re at it, give us the fields in that database. Might as well tell us what colors and fonts you want to track in the cookie too, while you’re at it.
• Bring up at least two things you read in magazine articles (or heard at a conference) that directly conflict with each other. My favorite one came from an old friend working at big-firm-whose-name-is-withheld for obvious reasons. Said firm wanted to implement an Ajax application, but the application had to work with Javascript turned off. Hello! The j in Ajax stands for Javascript. It no workee without it! Somehow my friend stuck with it. He’s a better man than I.
• When reporting a bug, don’t provide any details. In no way would it be good if we knew the URL involved, the steps you took to get there, your browser, and your platform, or anything else that might impact the situation (such as hitting the page via a VPN that sucks the life right out of your available bandwidth). Please don’t mention if you’re in a hotel room going through a dialup connection, or if you’re using a never-before-heard-of browser on the Mongolian edition of Ubuntu linux loaded on a vintage 1993 IBM PC XT.
• When you talk to us, make sure that you do it in an ad-hoc way. We’ll remember everything you tell us as you bump into us in the hallway, or as we’re leaving work for the day. Don’t write it down, for heaven’s sake, not even on a whiteboard, nor give any thought to vetting what you say or prioritizing it. And if you do send us email, make sure that you send about 15 of them, each with a separate little snippet of information, all of it mixed up without a sense of flow. We analytic types love puzzles!
• Bring in a third-party vendor at the last minute and then have that vendor’s requirements impact the foundations of the project right before launch. Extra points if the third-party vendor is a viral marketing or SEO expert (or some other field that involves instinct and hunches). Make whatever they say binding, and force the web developer(s) in question to put in 10x the work to make it all work. Then blame the web developer for (a) being late or (b) not understanding the new requirements or (c) implementing it all to perfection such that the whole thing implodes.
• Hype whatever product the web developer is working on past all point of recognition, such that when it’s finally launched, no one understands what the big deal was. I call this the “moon launch” effect. There you are, happily working on an ecommerce site, but behind your back, the boss (and the boss’s boss) is going around giving slideshow presentations about how you’re building the next generation of social marketing commerce tools….what a slap in the face that’s going to be!
• If you give us a task, make sure that you omit a deadline. I have nothing else to do, so I’ll just jump on this right away! No deadline means no urgency. Plain and simple.

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