Ask HN: Coping when your client is an asshole?

A very common issue is Project Managers asking for regular (several a day) updates of varying degrees of detail. This is done, normally, because the programme manager is being pressured by the account executive to provide these updates,to, as best as I can figure, give the illusion of control in front of the customer (if project important enough, there could even be VPs involved)

Unfortunately, providing detailed updates that might trigger an email back and forth do not help to deliver the project and yet this is very common.

Sometimes all it takes is for somebody, it can even be a developer to say no, this is counter productive, as the time would be better spent doing actual work. A single daily update will be provided.

Finally, always remember that if everything else fails, you can quit. This is not to say that this might not be without consequences but your personal circumstances might allow it.

Best of luck.

In the end, the only way we were able to deal with the situation was to play some extreme politics with the asshole's organization to get them to move him to a different org within their company. The company itself (rightly) has a reputation for having an asshole management culture, so things only became marginally better. They were our only client at that site.

I helped some of my team move to different sites within our company to get away from that client. Interestingly enough, I found out about a year into this that my company had given up another site for this same client to our main competitor for that business because it was physically very near their headquarters, and so was frequently visited by asshole executives who created even greater levels of stress.

I also tried to move myself by out of there, but was unsuccessful by the deadline I had set for myself, so I exercised Plan B and changed careers. That was five years ago and just reading this pissed me off again thinking about that situation.

Whatever you do, protect yourself. The damage from enduring that kind of work environment happens faster and lasts longer than you realize.

If you are, then there's a fair chance that a decision to go with you was forced on the company's PMs against their will, likely as a cost-cutting measure and, perhaps, causing their friends and colleagues to lose their jobs or some such. You will be then viewed as an unfortunate and unwelcome trade off that they have to put up with. This would apply in double if you are an Indian outlet, because of a sheer scale of general incompetence and outright fraud in Indian outsourcing firms.