Causality is for poor people

I'm contracting for a media company who has established itself as a solid solution for the visual advertising needs of gaming projects.  They crank out pretty high quality work in the art department and are trying their hand at web development.

You already know where this story is going.

They landed a contract with a huge game maker and are trying to set a professional tone that will hopefully result in repeat business.  Now, if such an outcome was truly your objective, one would think that you'd research, organize, establish objectives, setup communication channels, and generally do everything you can to minimize the chances of you looking like an average reality TV star.  This is what logical, opportunistic, smart, cognizant and/or not dead people do.

Not creatives.  Oh, no.  Creatives are in the moment, you see.  Everything they do will reveal itself to them at the right time, every time.  In fact, they even flock to a style of management known as "agile development" (which, when executed poorly as it is in eleven out of ten cases, is code word for "Fuck it, we'll do it live!") because it nicely explains away the need to have any organizational discipline.

So they hand me a wire frame for the project.

I'm just kidding.

So they gave me a design doc.

Now I'm just trolling.

So I'm given a string of PSDs, a ten word email, and brief hallway banter loosely indicating what is needed.  User experience is assumed.  Functionality is a postmodern exercise.  Now, I'd like to think I'm a sharp guy, so I start filling in the blanks by creating an engine that compensates for all of the flexibility they will need once they change their mind over and over and over again because, after all, this is what creatives do.  You can't rush artistic brilliance.  Of course, you can rush a developer because all he has to do is unwind all of the complex logical dependencies of what you asked him to do the last time... and then tie in new ones to meet  the needs of the newest creative abortion.  Easy peasy, lickity split.

It's very important to preserve the creative process, which always defaults into using expensive developers as a personal paintbrush to prototype design because these tender, emotionally driven artists can't use the only redeeming talent they have to fucking imagine graphical assets moving around until someone actually wastes hours coding it into existence.  Dudes are so fucking creative, they don't even need to use their imagination.

So, I assume a spec and then I code to it as defensively as possible.  They throw three "curve balls" at me (and by curve balls, I mean basic ramifications that anyone who has three and a half neurons could have deduced in a coma), which I've already anticipated and knock them out quickly.

No accolades.  Fine.  I can't expect non-techies to get it.  No big deal.

Then they throw another one that is a fundamental alteration of what they had loosely indicated.  Oh, and there is a demonstration of this project for the client scheduled for the evening.  I proceed to explain to them that asking for a fundamental alteration in functionality hours before a client demonstration is a recipe for disaster.  Promptly ignoring ten years of experience in this field, I am told that my request is not a fundamental change and that I should have anticipated it.

Let's ignore the fact I successfully anticipated the last three requests you made.  Now let's accuse me of being unable to anticipate a fundamental functional change from someone whom I have no working history with.  This is the actual scenario master creator creative of Createland offered.

If I could read minds and predict such things, I wouldn't be in this line of work.  I'd use that predictive ability to make myself a world-class tyrant whose only job is to send Bohemian dirt bags like you to the gulags to reduce your "feelie footprint" and make you "productivity neutral".

I then proceed to tell him that if it is my job to predict unpredictable change requests, at what point do I stop preparing for random outcomes?  Shall I expect the web project to suddenly become a Groupon clone?  Perhaps I am to code an artificial intelligent sentience that converts XML into math equations?  How about this: Your inability to establish clear communication, a disciplined workflow, and basic preparation for a big time client is not my emergency.  I'm not going to save the company's reputation just because I'm the last line of defense before the client sees whatever pixelated monstrosity you've squeezed out of your piss slit.  You can pay me triple for miracles.

And if you fire me for not rising to the occasion... I'll be hired again instantly somewhere else.  But you, on the other hand, will never get that contract back again... all because you failed to plan your approach and assumed a "highly paid" developer will magically kiss your boo-boos all gone.

Needless to say, the demonstration was postponed.  Oh, sure, I could have gotten the work done with thirty minutes of thought, but that's not the point.  These creative fucks have no discipline at all when it comes to any organizational awareness that affects the lives of others and I, for one, will no longer carry these impure beasts  of burden to the finish line.

I'm also expected to chop out the graphical assets from the PSDs.  I'm all down for that as long as graphical designers can modify the socket functionality of my Node.js framework when I'm too busy.