Out of the frying pan

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Episode 20: 14/12/2021

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It is December 2021 and El Toco is inches from the finish line. The air buzzes with tension like a high voltage pylon.

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Well, that’s how it feels to me. The rest of the world isn’t exactly waiting with baited breath.

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Our team has also got a lot smaller recently. One by one, all our contractors have delivered their various bits and headed off into the sunset. The data collection team, the computer science team, and the cloud team are all in the past. El Toco now consists of just me and the company building our website.

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Given how close we are to launch, it is an odd coincidence that the website company has chosen this moment to massively jack up their prices.

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This unwelcome news is something of a last straw, because our website has mutated into one of those horror film monsters that refuses to die. In today's episode, we will discuss why it is still not dead yet. As usual with this blog, while reading, you are invited to spot the moments where you would have done things differently.

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The downward spiral

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Development of El Toco’s website has been stuttering along for three and a half years. It has been the subject of several entries in this blog. Mainly because we're a search engine, so our website is important. Also, though, because the twists and turns have been like a Latin American soap opera, but with less histrionics and a bigger cast.

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During the first six months of 2021, we created the advertisers’ section of our website. This part lets companies boost their rankings in El Toco’s search results by paying. It is the last big bit of development left, before we can launch.

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Technically, this section was pretty much done by summer. But, as we did it, I realised the design was starting to look a bit frayed around the edges. It would have looked great in 2006, but we are 2021, and it needed modernising. So I’ve returned to the company who developed the search section, to review aesthetics of the whole site.

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It is not, by any stretch, a complicated brief. The site is just ten pages. They just have to make them prettier. I do all the functional bits myself. But none of this matters, we’re still in for a rough ride.

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The design phase starts in July. It goes smoothly, taking just over a week, and the updated designs are a super move in the right direction:

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The designs are passed over to development. That is the point where things went south with this contractor during the previous year’s work. I am consequently a little nervous. We didn’t have a detailed brief last time, so I have tried to produce one this time, in order to minimise differences of interpretation.

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Despite the detailed brief, the weeks start to roll by, and nothing is delivered. I get more nervous, but don’t want to send chasers, because that opens the door for them to paint El Toco as an awkward client.

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The first batch of pages are delivered all in one go in September. Some pages are missing, and seem to have been simply ignored from the brief. I test the ones which have been delivered, and discover various issues.

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This time, most of the issues are design-related. I’m too inexperienced to know this yet, but the root cause is the designer focusing on the graphic design and not the user experience. The colour scheme is lovely, as is the artwork. But the navigation is largely absent, meaning you get dumped on a page with no way of knowing how to leave it. The controls do unintuitive things when you try to use them, and the overall result is so confusing that it’s basically impossible to use.

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Reporting these issues is a chore. This is entirely due to the company’s bug tracking software. It is very clunky, and has the annoying feature of not clearly showing when a ticket has been updated.

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Quite often, we are in the middle of discussing a bug and the conversation goes silent for a fortnight. Then, one party sends an email chaser, and it emerges that the other party was waiting for them to reply, because somebody didn’t spot an updated ticket.

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We get to October. The realisation sunk in slowly, but by now it’s clear we’re having an exact action replay of the previous year. Thing is, this is our launch. All our operations like crawling, sales, and marketing, are blocked until we have a website. I’m currently doing tidying up jobs, but can see a situation looming on the horizon were I run out of stuff to do myself.

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At this point, just like last year, the owner of the website company sails in to intervene. They start pushing back on the outstanding items. In fairness to them, some of the outstanding items are due to me. Some things were still not worded clearly in the contract. Others seemed clear until they were developed, whereupon it became clear they didn’t work properly. So we’ve had to iterate on the design, and this comes across as me moving the goalposts.

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That’s presumably how they see it. On the other hand, the minimum viable product has to be something that people will actually use. The pages that have been delivered are so confusing they feel like a brain teaser rather than a consumer product. Also, the main point of this round of work is to update the visuals, but the current mishmash of styles gives some pages the feel of a home made website again. If we launch this website, the only thing we’re going to discover is that nobody wants to use it, because Google is more user friendly.

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But falling out with this contractor is an even bigger setback than carrying on working with them. So, trying to be pragmatic and fair, we negotiate a second contract. In this contract, they will be paid more money, to add the outstanding pages and tidy up the issues with the work they have already done.

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One step closer to the edge

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More weeks pass. I do have work to do. But, really, I am just waiting around now, and it is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. All we’re supposed to be doing is some cosmetic updates to our website. Yet, somehow, this final sprint has turned into another marathon.

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In November, the owner of the website company reports a new problem.

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They are working for another client who “has to launch by the end of this month”. Whatever that means. The developer for that project is also the guy working on ours. They are imminently going on holiday, meaning that there isn’t time to finish both projects. Would it be ok if they stopped working on ours, in favour of the other client, and picked up our work in December?

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No. It would not be ok. The idea of paying them a second contract was so to create an implicit agreement that they would treat us fairly in return. It’s pretty low quality behaviour to then turn around and say actually, we’ve got to work for somebody more important than you, so bye then.

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In our dealings with the website company up to this point, there was always some element of doubt as to whether we were being intentionally messed around. Looking back as I write this entry up, this is the point where it becomes clear that the website company is acting in bad faith. El Toco has been paused since July for a minimal amount of work, which has now been pushed back in the queue, in order to keep some other client happy.

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But again, throwing the toys out of the pram feels like the wrong path to go down. It’s not going to motivate them to do a better job if both parties also strongly dislike each other. So again, I agree to the delay.

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Showdown

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I spend the ensuing month designing some marketing pages. This is a filler exercise to kill time, but we definitely do need them. One obvious issue with our website is that there is literally nothing explaining how anything works, or why you’d use it.

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I design six pages to illustrate all this, starting with pencil and paper and culminating in the dizzying heights of Microsoft Paint. Creating good marketing copy turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Professional website teams have dedicated people to write all the text, which you take for granted until the day you try writing it for yourself. But I’m happy to muddle through because, for once in this project, we've got a bit of time.

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Work on the website proper resumes in mid December. The developer, fresh from holiday, crushes the remaining bugs in short order.

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Unfortunately, in their place, a load of new bugs springs up. As before, they're more about tidying the visuals than actual bugs. It is a matter of opinion as to whether they constitute a separate billable piece of work. But, by this point, I’ve finished designing the marketing pages, which are genuinely new. So I write up a third contract for the bug fixes and marketing pages, and ask the company to quote.

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And suddenly, dear reader, we arrive at the final showdown.

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The quote comes in at ￡6.5k. This may not seem like a lot, but my eyes nearly fall out of their sockets. To put it in context, our total outlay on the website has been ￡8k until now. This final contract is supposed to be the most superficial round of work. Based on what we’ve paid so far, I was expecting something more like ￡650.

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The company owner has some waffle about how their other clients are not working over Christmas so they’ve had to jack up their prices. Maybe that is true. But the explanation feels dubious, when you take into account all the other shenanigans up to this point, plus the fact that this is the very last piece of work so they know I'm desperate to finish.

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An emotional twenty four hours passes. We email back and forth, trying to negotiate this figure down to a more realistic number.

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The website company’s founder refuses to budge a penny. Our attempts to be fair by letting the other client go first and breaking the work down into smaller contracts don’t matter. I try to remove items from the brief, which doesn’t work either. The website founder has no interest in any of this. They want the full figure if they’re going to finish the job.

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It is a curious attitude, because what they’re actually going to receive is ￡0k. It’s time to find a new team.

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Out of the frying pan, into the fire

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That is the situation as of today’s entry, in mid December 2021. Rather than finish here, let's do our usual time travel trick to see how the situation resolved itself. Eventually.

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We definitely need two contractors: a designer and developer. Every time we’ve tried to roll these two jobs into one, it has ended badly. The immediate challenge with finding either is that it’s just before Christmas. When nobody works, or checks their email.

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I see out 2021 interviewing potential freelancers. Or trying to, because at least half don’t respond.

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The designer is found by a stroke of luck, which I think it's fair to say we were due by this point. A self-employed friend is also doing her own website and has been working with a freelance designer to create it. Such personal recommendations are worth their weight in gold in the rough and tumble world of internet freelancers. Ali Berry agrees to pick up the design work from where the website company left off.

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Ali’s first task is to convert the website company’s design files from Adobe Illustrator to Figma. Figma is a new tool which is gaining popularity with web designers. This is one of those times when a new colleague immediately shows up how bad their predecessor was. With Figma, we no longer bounce screenshots back and forth, we just look at the design together, which is the same one that the developer then uses.

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As January 2022 progresses, and Ali works, I pick a developer whose own website is very good. They are enthusiastic about the work and we agree a fixed price quotation.

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Things seem rosy until about a week before they are due to start. An email pings in, to say that they’re unable to do the work for some vague reason connected with another client. But they have a friend, who they can vouch for, who also works as a developer, and has agreed to do it for the same price.

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The whole thing feels like a bait and switch, but a personal recommendation is worth its weight, et cetera. So I accept the last minute substitution and hire the new guy.

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As well as Figma, we’ve also moved to another project management tool called Jira. This, too, reveals the hilariously vast inefficiencies in how things worked with the website company. On Jira, I can see what specific task the contractor is working on at any given moment. If nothing is updated, that means they're either stuck, or aren't working. Gone are the weeks of anxious waiting, wondering what the devil they are up to.

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What Jira reveals, in this case, are problems.

In early February, the developer gets to work. Except they are not doing any work, which is now plain for everybody to see, thanks to Jira. Days go by, and nothing happens.

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I politely chase. Don’t worry, they say, I’m on it.

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Except they’re not. We get to March 2022. By this point, Ali has finished her design work. Meanwhile, a large slize of nothing has been achieved on the website.

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Here we go again. Infuriating as they were, this is exactly why I was so reluctant to change from the website company.

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You can probably imagine how I am feeling by this point. We are not building the USS Enterprise here. We are window dressing a website. We started it in July 2021, here we are in March 2022, and it is still not done. I’ve run out of adjectives to describe the situation and am beginning to wonder if this website is simply cursed.

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Instead of work, what I do get, unbelievably, from the developer is an email. Saying that since they’ve been “working” for a while, please can I send some more money.

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The request is so cheeky it makes me worried, rather than angry. What alternate reality does this person live in? We’re now six weeks into a piece of work that should have taken two. That work hasn’t been delivered and, although they were recommended, I don’t know this person from Adam. So no, no money is going to be changing hands, until the work does.

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I explain this gently but firmly. The following morning, the developer emails me again, to say that they’ve got to stop doing nothing on our project entirely. Unfortunately, they’re having problems with their mental health and need to have a break.

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Now this may well be true, in which case it’s obviously very sad.

But also, hold on a second matey. Yesterday you were asking for more money. The answer was no, and the very next day a mental health issue surfaces, and you’ve got to stop working. You may have undermined your story a little there.

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Obviously, we’ve got to replace them. Three months have passed since we changed contractors, and we have to change contractors again. Argh!!! Turning up for work involves a ten metre walk from my bed to my living room. This is one of those days when I wish I hadn’t bothered.

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But also, there’s a more acute issue. I paid the absentee a portion in advance. This far down the road, El Toco's budget is extremely tight. Eating Tesco Value baked beans kind of tight. What little money is left cannot be handed out willy nilly to randomers on the internet. I’ve got to get it back.

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A very delicate conversation ensues by email. If they are genuinely unwell, I don’t want to say anything to make it worse. On the other hand, what’s happened is indistinguishable from theft. They signed a proper contract so litigation is an option. But this close to launch, with still no website, it’s a route I’d dearly like to avoid.

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After I’d been at Barings for a few years, they started letting me meet clients. Many of these clients were large institutions, in command of hundreds of millions or billions of pounds. The sums of money in play during those meetings make venture capital companies look like children getting excited about spending their pocket money on pick and mix sweets at the cinema. In meetings with large institutional investors, every single word in every single sentence needs to be correct. Your hair needs to be perfect. Your clothes need to be perfect. Any decision, positive or negative, taken during those meetings will have serious implications for your company, your colleagues, and you.

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Even people who do those meetings regularly get nervous. But, in all the time I did them, never was I as nervous as while waiting for the reply from this web developer.

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Fortunately, we come out of it with a settlement. The developer receives a token gesture, we receive the majority of the money back, and both sides go on their way without prejudice.

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Peace at last

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You end up in the good relationships by going through the bad ones first. So it has been with the website team. We will cover the story of the replacement, replacement web developer in a future episode. For now, let’s wrap up with the final chapter in the website company story. Oh no, they’re not working for us any more, but we’re not done with them yet.

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Copyright is a surprisingly hazy area of law. We have found the most internationally recognisable way to assign it is a deed. A deed must be signed in hard copy. Before any contractor starts, we get their consent to sign it, and their doing so sets the copyright ownership in stone.

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The copyright deeds for the website run to about twenty pages. During 2022, these lumps of tree will thump down onto the doormats of everybody who worked on the website. All those people, across several countries, will sign and return them. All except one.

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What a surprise, the website company don’t return theirs.

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I give them a month, then send a chaser. The founder responds in their usual work-hard play-hard style, saying that somebody did mention a document but they never agreed to sign it and have far more important things to do than even look at it.

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Far more important things, it seems, like pen condescending emails to me. Their reply is intended to be cutting. It rather backfires because I can produce the email, from the founder, where they enthusiastically agreed to hand over the copyright, before we started working together.

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Rather than just sign the copyright deed, the following two months are then spent on a journey of self harm, where they waste their own time penning a series of contradictory emails on the subject of copyright. Before eventually signing the deed, which takes about two seconds.

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No single factor did more damage to El Toco business prospects than this contractor. We would have probably launched about one year earlier than we eventually did, had it not been for their behaviour. At every stage, I was concerned about preserving working relations, and so took a diplomatic tone. I think in hindsight this may have been a mistake.

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But we did, in the end, find some excellent freelancers to work on our website. It wouldn’t be have been clear just how good they are, had we not been through the bad ones first.

This episode is dedicated to Ali Berry and Alex Cachia. For helping us scramble out of the fire.