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My current client is the worst I have ever encountered; he seems extremely over-demanding, cheap, and both slow and reluctant to pay as many clients are, but worse, he seems to be terrible at planning, management, documentation, and even simple communication. Furthermore, he has proven unreliable in his claims about such things as what is already done and what remains to be done.
Nor do his two main server-side developers communicate well or demonstrate much competence in their work. In fact, both seem quite sloppy, which is relevant to my work because my client-side work depends upon their server-side work for various data, media, and functionality. Neither seems to do much unit testing before declaring functionality ready for others to use and one of them has at least sometimes obviously not tested his functionality at all before declaring it ready to use.
The latter of the two main server-side developers is easily the worst colleague I have ever encountered. His tender ego seems to have been so bruised by my many bug reports, discussions thereof, and other reports, suggestions, and discussions (all at the request of the client) that he wrote a long, obnoxious, puerile, name-calling e-mail in which he said he would be blocking my e-mail address so he would not have to further discuss the project with me let alone receive any rebuttal to his telling-off missive.
Naturally, that developer's refusal to directly receive bug reports or otherwise participate with me in critical project discussions has made progress even more difficult. His refusal to even listen to me let alone participate in rational discussions combined with the many problems with his work and that of the other main server-side developer has reduced the progress of the project to a fraction of its previous already-crawling speed.
Tonight, when the client convinced that developer to have a conference call between the three of us, that developer immediately interrupted the client to complain that he doesn't see why I cannot finish part of my work that depends upon part of his work and that of the other server-side developer when one of his programs is providing data that it is not, in fact, reliably providing. It is a simple matter of those two server-side developers not naming files and entering metadata into the database consistently between the two of them. It is not even really a client-side issue, so I should not really be involved or even have to hear about it, but since the client lacks the competence to plan for harmonious common data let alone notice or resolve such problems and both main server-side developers lack the competence to avoid, notice, or resolve the problem themselves, I have been forced to step in and try to explain how and why their work is blocking mine. Anyway, since the problematic developer did not seem to be interested in hearing about the problem, things went downhill fast.
This client and his particularly problematic developer have repeatedly misinformed me, wasted my time, and otherwise mistreated me, which has been severely pissing me off. They have both proven terrible people with whom to work and while the client is not my first horrible client and his developer is not my first horrible colleague, each of them easily wins the gold medal in his respective category.
