My customer, a translations business owner, just told me that he has been reading about Ruby on Rails and told me that "there are more PHP guys around there" and "it seems the community prefers it".
What would you, as software engineer and freelancer, say to the customer to achieve these goals:
- Sell
- Make him see that the technology is my expert decision and Rails
is as good or better than PHP (+ whatever framework) for this
particular project.
UPDATE:
Thank you all for the suggestions! Tomorrow I've got another meeting with him, let's see how it goes, I will update again 🙂
UPDATE 2:
Finally I told him to read this thread and the result has been fantastic: He gave me the project and we are going to start right now. Thank you all for the help, you have free beer in my charge if we see someday 🙂
BTW: I learned the lesson: be as transparent as possible, because if you believe in yourself and your work, there is no question compromising enough to beat you.
regards
Best Answer
I think you make a mistake in assuming that the choice of technology is a purely technical decision.
The customer seems to be concerned about the business implications of picking a particular technology. Given that, you need to present a case that addresses his business concerns at least as heavily as your technology opinions.
Talk with your customer and understand why and how he formed his opinion. Perhaps he read that the local PHP community is particularly active or that the local college teaches a lot of PHP and no Ruby. Perhaps he's got a trusted developer that he can call in for the occasional emergency that is a PHP pro and a Ruby neophyte. Of course, it's also possible that he's using poor metrics like the number of job ads or resumes that mention various keywords.
Relatively niche languages like Ruby absolutely have the potential to create these sorts of legacy problems for companies who can't predict whether the language is going to fizzle out in a few years when people move on to the next fad or if it has real staying power. You can certainly mitigate this by pointing out that Ruby isn't dependent on one company or organization so no one can decide it is no longer a strategic product for the company. If your customer has been burned in the past by having applications developed in languages that became business headaches, you'll need to make a case that Ruby is more like Linux and other open source technologies that flourished without a company backing them than languages that have died out over the years.