u/OkSun4925

I'm lead engineer on a Salesforce enterprise project I began in late February. It's a brand new build to handle the merged business of two companies. The customer looked at the project plan and insisted we cut one month out of it, which, obviously, rushed the project. We cut the timeline with the understanding that we could only maintain it if the customer delivered all their requirements on time. They missed every one of their deadlines and piled on more requirements for us to squeeze into the limited timeline. When I pointed out that their missed deadlines posed risk to the timeline, they aggressively told me it wasn't useful to point out the things that stress everyone out. I genuinely don't know how to handle a client this aggressive without the conversation going sideways.

They insisted we continue developing new functionalities through UAT. Several teammates and I have had to work six-day weeks for months, sometimes seven-day weeks, and had to work every day of the Labor Day weekend. At 8:30 on the day we began deployment, the client told us to change a basic setting that affects the way everything is priced and calculated. After deployment, their project lead noticed a single picklist she didn't like and said she couldn't sign off on a project that wasn't well built or well thought through.

At no point in this saga would the company listen to my entreaties to hold the client accountable. The reason my superiors gave me is that the client is paying so much money and our company wants future business, so we have to make them happy. Is this normal in consulting? If I leave for another consulting firm, will I have the same experience?

I'm lead engineer on a Salesforce enterprise project I began in late February. It's a brand new build to handle the merged business of two companies. The customer looked at the project plan and insisted we cut one month out of it, which, obviously, rushed the project. We cut the timeline with the understanding that we could only maintain it if the customer delivered all their requirements on time. They missed every one of their deadlines and piled on more requirements for us to squeeze into the limited timeline. When I pointed out that their missed deadlines posed risk to the timeline, they aggressively told me it wasn't useful to point out the things that stress everyone out. I genuinely don't know how to handle a client this aggressive without the conversation going sideways.

They insisted we continue developing new functionalities through UAT. Several teammates and I have had to work six-day weeks for months, sometimes seven-day weeks, and had to work every day of the Labor Day weekend. At 8:30 on the day we began deployment, the client told us to change a basic setting that affects the way everything is priced and calculated. After deployment, their project lead noticed a single picklist she didn't like and said she couldn't sign off on a project that wasn't well built or well thought through.

At no point in this saga would the company listen to my entreaties to hold the client accountable. The reason my superiors gave me is that the client is paying so much money and our company wants future business, so we have to make them happy. Is this normal in consulting? If I leave for another consulting firm, will I have the same experience?

Everyone talks about hustle culture and landing new clients, but nobody talks about the slow bleed of churn. Is acquisition actually the bottleneck, or are we just bad at retention and too proud to admit it?

I've seen businesses pour everything into ads and outreach, only to watch clients quietly disappear after 3 months. At some point you have to wonder if a leaky bucket is the real problem. What's been your experience: where does your business actually lose?

Everyone talks about hustle culture and landing new clients, but nobody talks about the slow bleed of churn. Is acquisition actually the bottleneck, or are we just bad at retention and too proud to admit it?

I've seen businesses pour everything into ads and outreach, only to watch clients quietly disappear after 3 months. At some point you have to wonder if a leaky bucket is the real problem. What's been your experience: where does your business actually lose?

So I'm a bit stressed out and annoyed. Maybe it's because I don't know how changing requirements should be handled and what's fair towards us developers. I also wonder why some clients don't sit the f*** down for a minute and think things through before they start ordering something when they don't even know what they want.

Our client keeps changing requirements, so I have to keep deleting many hours of work because those new changes made that old code useless, including all the integration- and unit tests. And I'll be honest, I'm also someone who tends to get emotionally reactive in client conversations, so I'm probably not the best person to be handling these discussions without some kind of framework to fall back on.

My question is, if we have an initial estimate that we gave our client, but we start running out of time because the client keeps changing the requirements, then we should get more paid hours for those changes right? Because we have to keep reimplementing those features again and again, like deleting the code, rewriting it and rewriting new tests for covering new cases etc. It's impossible for us during the initial estimate to foresee into the future that the client has no clue what they want and will keep changing their mind.

How do you handle this?

Thanks!

So I'm a bit stressed out and annoyed. Maybe it's because I don't know how changing requirements should be handled and what's fair towards us developers. I also wonder why some clients don't sit the f*** down for a minute and think things through before they start ordering something when they don't even know what they want.

Our client keeps changing requirements, so I have to keep deleting many hours of work because those new changes made that old code useless, including all the integration- and unit tests. And I'll be honest, I'm also someone who tends to get emotionally reactive in client conversations, so I'm probably not the best person to be handling these discussions without some kind of framework to fall back on.

My question is, if we have an initial estimate that we gave our client, but we start running out of time because the client keeps changing the requirements, then we should get more paid hours for those changes right? Because we have to keep reimplementing those features again and again, like deleting the code, rewriting it and rewriting new tests for covering new cases etc. It's impossible for us during the initial estimate to foresee into the future that the client has no clue what they want and will keep changing their mind.

How do you handle this?

Thanks!