How to avoid the IT cowboys

Simon van Wyk is the director of HotHouse, one of Australia’s largest independent strategic web companies.

He talks about how to deal with the IT industry’s cowboys.

“We get a number of emails from people complaining about things that haven’t been delivered and done particularly around web development and design.”

“I don’t think this is a joke: I think there are more web developers in Sydney than there are milk bars. I’m sure Microsoft did a survey and actually found that that was true. There are a lot of cowboys in the industry. It’s an industry that continues to move exceptionally quickly. It’s very, very hard to get anybody with long-term experience and a deep level of experience.”

“Web development is a little bit like marriage, when it doesn’t work generally there are two people involved in the fact that it doesn’t work.”

“A lot of times companies get themselves and their web developer into trouble because they don’t start these things off the right way. They don’t start with a clear sense of what they’re going to do. They don’t make sensible decisions about the technology and they’re not deliberate about it and then they change scope, change their mind, move off somewhere else and these things run into trouble.”

“A lot of the time these things run into trouble because there are two lots of people involved and they’re just not communicating effectively. And I think that’s the starting point, when they go off the rails. I’ve seen one recently where the client would have been so much better off if they’d just stopped.”

Read the full interview Simon van Wyk.