Honesty

Having worked as a freelance web/software developer on/off for about 18 years, there is one thing I think has been extremely important.

When I started out I had been working as a webmaster for a couple of years. It is what I would call my first autonomous role, I’d worked elsewhere and been told what to do, but as the webmaster I was the one technical person in the company. In the course of doing my job, I ended up teaching myself how to convert static HTML websites into CMS-style websites with admin areas that were much easier and quicker for anyone to update. But all that came after trying to figure out exactly what was going on with the computer and trying to connect to the web hosting.

That was a baptism of fire, but I dealt with it and I learned a lot very quickly, and I’d say did a pretty good job for my employers.

The main quality I’ve taken from that time right up to today and beyond is honesty.

In a world dominated by flashy marketing jargon and exaggerated promises, there’s something refreshingly honest about embracing honesty, even when it can sound negative. In freelancing, I’d say honesty is also good for expectation management. I want to do the best work I am able to do for every client, I can’t do this if I am rushing or cutting corners because I have over-promised.

My first freelance client came from an email I’d sent. One single solitary email about a website I thought could be a lot better. I can’t remember exactly what I said but after a few emails I’d offered to make them a small extension to their website for free to show them what I could do for them. I didn’t make any crazy promises, but I knew that if I was honest, asked them what they wanted, and talked them through what I was going to do for them, it would be a good base to build from.

I am still in contact with that same client 18 years on. Similarly, quite a few of those early clients went from project to project over many years.

Sometimes, someone new would contact me and say something along the lines of “the guy who made the website has gone AWOL and I can’t make any updates”. They knew what I’d done for the people they knew and they wanted me to convert their current website to something they could manage themselves. In these cases, I often did not fully know what I was letting myself in for at the start. I had to somehow get access to what I was able to access and figure out a way to make sense of it and order the data nicely so that I could re-create their website. Again, if the website was built in a language I was going to have to learn about I was honest from the start. Back then, it tended to be that there were multiple parts of a website that were all completely different, collating the data from each part was its own task.

I’d characterize my flavour of honesty as “brutal honesty”. Of course, brutal honesty doesn’t mean being unnecessarily harsh or negative. It’s about delivering the truth in a direct and respectful manner, trying not to sugar-coat or be misleading in any way, even if it may not always be what the client wants to hear. I’ve found that by giving honest estimates and guidance, I’ve been able to help clients make informed decisions. Sometimes that decision will be the first idea they had, other times we’ll discuss the situation and find something better that they did not know was possible.