Ask HN: Coping when your client is an asshole?

[codinginhell]

I'm a project manager for a ~60 person software dev firm. One project I'm on is with a large American enterprise, and the product owner and his direct manager are absolute assholes.

I've got 8 developers that I try to shield from accusatory questions and extremely aggressive and borderline abusive behaviour. In the beginning we we all agreed not to take anything personally and to let it just roll off the back. We agreed to tighten up our processes and try to avoid confrontations by being super proactive with all our work, but we're coming close to the launch date, and it's getting worse as more pressure mounts.

Ordinarily, we would have dropped the client by now and refused to put up with the end-justifies-the-means tactics, but unfortunately our company could not survive without this and a handful of other projects we have with this client.

My company is actively looking for new clients so we are not beholden to this one, and my manager is apologetic and tries to run interference when she can, but I'm largely left to my own devices. This is a very high profile project that stands to disrupt its market. It's exciting for them and us. I have to maintain this relationship somehow.

How do you manage your clients who are completely unreasonable, rude, and treat you and your staff extremely poorly?

[JamesBarney]

Firstly how are they assholes. Some people will smile and nod and gather evidence to get you fired.

Some will scream and yell all the time but when push comes to shove will act honorably and go to bat for you.

Others are just looking to pin as much stuff on you in order to the cya game.

Also figure out why they're assholes if possible. The solutions are very different if they're assholes because they're boss is an assholes (asshole by proxy). If they're assholes because they just care a lot about the project and are worried/anxious (asshole by circumstance). Or if they're just always an asshole (asshole by nature).

General advice though is document everything, dot every i, and cross every t because shit tends to go sideways when assholes are involved and you don't want to be the one to get screwed.

[badpun]

Hey, I love your asshole matrix! Should be taught at some kind of dark MBA school.

[jmalicki]

There's literally a whole book by a Stanford biz school professor about this exact subject.

One of my pet favorite tips: pretend you're a research psychologist observing a patient with a rare mental disorder (doesn't solve all of the problems, but at least helps to cope).

https://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Survival-Guide-People-Treat/d...

[omginternets]

>One of my pet favorite tips: pretend you're a research psychologist observing a patient with a rare mental disorder

I do this a lot, and can vouch for the general approach.

A tip from the trenches. When faced with bizarre and disturbing behavior, clinical psychologists will often verbalize the behavior they're currently witnessing. It's a way of helping the patient realize that their behavior is abnormal without moralizing or recoiling in horror.

Hence the pro-tip. Instead of getting indignant, just say something like "You're suggesting I actively undermined the project" or "you're smearing your own excrement on the wall".

[noir_lord]

My partner works in a total cluster fuck of an office with some horrible people (she won't quit without another job even though I offered to cover her while she finds work) so I told her to treat her office like she was David Attenborough narrating a documentary.

"And here we find the Donna in its natural habitat, scientists where surprised to discover the Donna can eat its own weight in fried chicken every week" that kind of thing.

If she's have a bad week I send her narration to make her laugh.

It sucks watching someone you care about get ground down though.

[gexla]

> pretend you're a research psychologist observing a patient with a rare mental disorder

Maybe more often truth than fiction. The mental disorders aren't so rare.

Today there is a thread on "burnout" being a "mental diagnosis." I suppose that covers many of us.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20026378

[Blaiz0r]

Observe don't absorb.

[dt_rsp]

Timely. From today:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-tip

[aitchnyu]

Philosphers from Socrates to the Stoics have a variant of "forgive them Father, for they don't know what they are they are doing". A person who values wrong things is bound to act bad. And its a handicap worse than blindness or lameness and therefore deserve compassion.

[gbersac]

direct to my to-read list. Thanks!

[lwansbrough]

This probably isn't the immediate answer you're looking for, but I've found a lot of value in a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (no affiliation, just loved the book.) It provides practical guidance on the subject of negotiation. However, in reading it you'll find that a lot of these rules of negotiation apply to broader aspects of life. The author, Voss, was a former negotiator for the FBI and was involved in a number of high profile hostage negotiations. (You can't be much more of an asshole than a kidnapper!)

Anyway, he says you can look at most situations as a negotiation. Once you fully understand the needs of your counterpart, you can assess your ability to meet those needs, or work with them (using "tactical empathy" and other strategies) so that both parties understand what the realistic outcomes are. Once both parties truly understand what the other is ultimately capable of providing, they will see no use in demanding more than that.

[mrmrcoleman]

I’m half way through that book now and so far it’s been a real eye opener. I think the challenge, which is assumed in most of the book, is being able to stay calm in these situations.

My guess is that the only way to get that is practice. Bring on the bad clients.

[Shorn]

I'm suffering serious Frequency illusion with Chris Voss - I feel like his stuff is popping up everywhere around me (ended up watching two videos yesterday).

I find myself actively fighting the impulse to read the book. I can't decide if I'm a savvy, advertising-aware consumer; or maybe I'm just another sucker.

[tamiral]

I cannot recommend this book enough!!!

[geocar]

I've been consulting for over twenty years at this point, and I've had my share of toxic clients (including one who actually sued me and was surprised when the judge wasn't amused by his suggestion I work for free either). You didn't say where you're from, where they're from (besides America), or what vertical you're working in, or what do you mean by "the end-justifies-the-means tactics" so I can only give the most general of advice here:

My experience is there are few VP who can stand up a project with an outsourcing firm without some risk of their own (either in their review, or in an extreme case: their career).

If that abuse is coming from people who report to your stakeholder, or from other people in the firm, a quick chat with the stakeholder would probably smooth things over. You might either find that obvious, or believe that it doesn't apply if you're getting abuse from multiple places, but it's not their money, just their job, so if you're not making your abusers' job harder in some way, your stakeholder will be in the best position to do something about personnel issues.

However if that abuse is coming from your stakeholder, you need to realise it's because they are receiving pressure, and you would do well to understand it because you might be able to help him/her with what they really need. Your stakeholder's job is to operate a P&L including your project against some revenue, or produce powerpoint slides for someone who does that job. Do those reports suggest this project is costing more than anyone expected? Try to attack the real problem here: Give your stakeholder some justification to go after the money, or to respond to the delay. This is what they really need.

[watwut]

> However if that abuse is coming from your stakeholder, you need to realise it's because they are receiving pressure

Some abusive people just believe that this is what makes them tough and effective. Has nothing to do with someone else pressuring them.

I used to give benefit of the doubt in these situations and think it is external, until I seen with such managers up close and it turned out it was them and only them begin source of their own assholery. The external parties were just enabling.

[WestCoastJustin]

Maybe exercise the company expense card and start having dinners / drinks with these folks. They might be less assholish if you wine and dine them a little. Normally, I would say fire them but from the sounds of it you are too far gone. Drinks, breaking bread, and having a few laughs might smooth things over. At the very lease you can eat out at some fancy places and tell the folks at work you are smoothing things over. This could be tough if you hate them though.

[raverbashing]

Sounds like a good idea

Another one is, depending on how their team is behaving w.r.t. your team, start pushing some responsibility back

Were they delayed when they shouldn't have been? Is it something on their side that's causing issues?

This needs to be done with some care, but it works. Though your suggestion sounds good and could be used in combination.

[seem_2211]

Best suggestion of the thread.

[logari]

My take on this is, often a problem is not itself: the symptom your client displays has a foundational problem elsewhere, which causes them to behave like this not only towards you but probably with most other people. So first, you need to be aware that it is not you, it is them and let them know it indirectly. How?

I read a great advice once that if you "dont react, you will not overreact". The flood gates of pent up emotion will cause severe problems for your business which will lead to outcomes unexpected even by you, and your team.

But suppressing negative emotions are proven to cause psychosomatic diseases, which is a boring way to say all this suppressed anger will kill you. What to do?

The problem begins to become a problem when you value the emotion more than it is worth. If you think this is making me angry, emotionally you will easily slide into feeling much more anger than is actually warranted. The reason for this is because our built up stresses want a release point, and when you feel angry, those release paths become known to your anger.

First, exercise in the morning, intense, fun like basketball and your team, so as to prevent daily stresses to seek release paths.

Then when the client starts to get on your nerves, your nerves will handle the client without becoming frazzled or excited. This calm will unnerve your client, and cause them to feel the futility of behaving like that towards you.

If it does not make you angry, they will not be likely to behave aggressively because they could wonder: they are so calm! But this would also make them behave even more aggressively sometimes. However, this will all come to an end if you remain calm.

In the mean calm time, you can seek clients that are less belligerent and reduce reliance on clients who want to vent it on you. But until then, treat it as a case study in abnormal psychology.

[mattoxic]

fantastic advice

[reallydontask]

Have you tried to explain what behaviours are unreasonable to your customer? I assume they want the project to succeed but they might not realize that their behaviour is actually hurting the team rather than helping.

A very common issue is Project Managers asking for regular (several a day) updates of varying degrees of detail. This is done, normally, because the programme manager is being pressured by the account executive to provide these updates,to, as best as I can figure, give the illusion of control in front of the customer (if project important enough, there could even be VPs involved)

Unfortunately, providing detailed updates that might trigger an email back and forth do not help to deliver the project and yet this is very common.

Sometimes all it takes is for somebody, it can even be a developer to say no, this is counter productive, as the time would be better spent doing actual work. A single daily update will be provided.

Finally, always remember that if everything else fails, you can quit. This is not to say that this might not be without consequences but your personal circumstances might allow it.

Best of luck.

[mickael-kerjean]

On my first day as a PM leading a team of 5 developers, I had a meeting with the Marketing director as I was brand new to the company. She welcomed me by telling me: "Your developers are total idiots who don't understand anything to the business" while smiling to their faces which has marked me forever. What I learnt from that experience is you can't reason an asshole (I tried too many times over and always failed), if this asshole happen to be your main stakeholder and you can't change that, then get another project or step aside.

[sverige]

I had a horrible experience with the site director for a Fortune 50 company that lasted almost two years. I tried most of the techniques mentioned by others here to protect my team.

In the end, the only way we were able to deal with the situation was to play some extreme politics with the asshole's organization to get them to move him to a different org within their company. The company itself (rightly) has a reputation for having an asshole management culture, so things only became marginally better. They were our only client at that site.

I helped some of my team move to different sites within our company to get away from that client. Interestingly enough, I found out about a year into this that my company had given up another site for this same client to our main competitor for that business because it was physically very near their headquarters, and so was frequently visited by asshole executives who created even greater levels of stress.

I also tried to move myself by out of there, but was unsuccessful by the deadline I had set for myself, so I exercised Plan B and changed careers. That was five years ago and just reading this pissed me off again thinking about that situation.

Whatever you do, protect yourself. The damage from enduring that kind of work environment happens faster and lasts longer than you realize.

[andrei_says_]

Could you share a few specifics on what actions made your experience with this client terrible? “Terrible” and “asshole” are very subjective terms and mean different things to different people.

[jacquesm]

Take it to the top. Have the CEO of your company sit down with the CEO of their company and get it all straightened out. Since you've already decided they are on the way out as a customer as soon as your company can support itself there is nothing to lose.

Also, this didn't happen overnight and if someone - anyone - on your side would have set this client straight when they first crossed the lines it would have never gotten this far. I've seen my share of toxic customers over the years and the most important takeaway from me is that it takes two, if I let myself be abused once by a customer they'll use that as a baseline for future pushes and it is up to me to stand up for myself and my crew and to push back hard enough that they realize that it is a two way street.

On another note: never depend on a single customer, no customer should be more than 15-20% of your total business, max, and that is likely where it went wrong: your company is afraid to lose this valuable customer and so they accepted more from them than they really should have and it went downhill from there.

[gbersac]

It's easy to say, but if you begin, it is very difficult to do.

[huhtenberg]

Are you an outsourcing company by any chance?

If you are, then there's a fair chance that a decision to go with you was forced on the company's PMs against their will, likely as a cost-cutting measure and, perhaps, causing their friends and colleagues to lose their jobs or some such. You will be then viewed as an unfortunate and unwelcome trade off that they have to put up with. This would apply in double if you are an Indian outlet, because of a sheer scale of general incompetence and outright fraud in Indian outsourcing firms.

[davidg109]

I’m surprised by some of the responses on here. You don’t have to take this shit. Your client is a bully.

Log everything, inform your management you will not be bullied, and in a professional tone, parrot each assholish thing your client says.

If they remain unmoved, tell them upfront this is abusive behavior and it ends now. This will either stop them in their tracks or you will eventually be fired. That’s when you consult a lawyer.

I called out two executives in my workplace for similar shit. I was prepared to be fired. Instead the abusive behavior ended immediately.

[andrei_says_]

Thank you this is very useful. Paper trails work.

[juZDM6]

There's no managing an asshole. It's very rare for an asshole to become a nonasshole. It's common for assholes to become bigger assholes over time as they get use to shitting on you. Either drop the project or leave the firm. You're in an unstable situation, working with assholes can take years off your life.

[green_plains]

You don't, this is the kind of project which causes "emotional bankruptcy". The company you are working for is defined by the team working there, not by the disruptive projects you make. Especially if you're doing something like consultancy.

I had a similar situation, we needed 1.5 years to fully recover from something like this, people left after the deadline, productivity dropped, everyone was demotivated.

Me and my friend drifted apart because of a project like this, only to build another company in completely different industry together later and properly discuss how emotionally straining the experience was.

Nevertheless all companies are still running and fine, but it's not something that should be treated lightly. Have a serious talk with your manager if this is affecting you and your team. Most likely the team is more valuable than the project by orders of magnitude.

[mindcrash]

"How do you manage your clients who are completely unreasonable, rude, and treat you and your staff extremely poorly?"

Go up the executive chain. Someone is paying handsomely for your project to end succesfully and that particular someone will probably not be very pleased when he hears that a project is being sabotaged (== $$$) by two asshole underlings. Use that to your advantage.

[snori74]

Your main point of leverage is always going to be the willingness to drop them. In your case this doesn't appear to be possible, so you have no control. Us non-nasty, reasonable people can't expect to win against people who've been practising this their whole lives.

Suck it up now, but get an iron-clad agreement from your management to never again court or sign up a client unless they're "nice". And bake it into your company culture. Yes this will limit you to only a section of the market, but unless you're realistically looking at "world domination" you can afford to be a bit picky.

[watwut]

Document everything all the time. All the promises, complains, make minutes from all calls and meetings and send them over with cc to boss or whoever. Answer accusations respectfully, but don't ignore them. Again, make sure both are documented. When the "bordeline abusive behavior" is actually accusation of something that is not true, address the accusation (but not necessary emotional tone).

Assholes will lie, willingly mis-remember, accuse you of their own mistakes and of consequences of their own decisions the moment first bug shows in production or something is not perfect. Be ready for that with documentation. Documentation does not make it easy and it will sux, but without it is even harder.

Let staff vent and talk about it, validate their feelings. But, make sure they are calm and respectful in their behavior toward client. Again, keep documentation.

Do not let abusiveness and rudeness dictate process. Do not do things that are irrational wrong or slow you down just because they were abusive or confrontational. You can do them as "client management" of course occasionally, but don't do them just because you are afraid of further abuse or rudeness. Again, document such things in a way that makes your objections very visible and makes it clear they insisted on it.

[fergie]

Sadly, this is a pretty typical scenario in consulting. In my own experience, the best and ultimately only thing to do is to be a gentleman as long as you can, and then to walk away once a clients behavior becomes abusive.

You don't say what level your client is in their organisation. If, (as is generally the case with ineffective managers), they themselves have a boss, one of the best ways to address abusive behavior is to withdraw your services, thereby forcing your client's organisation to make a decision about whether to remove them, or force a change in their behavior.

The most important thing a consulting firm has is its reputation. Unsatisfied customers talk to potential customers and dissuade them from entering new contracts. There is a real financial cost to entertaining abusive customers- it is better for all concerned to enforce a code of conduct.

[gbersac]

I've seen multiple shitty IT contracting firms failing projects over and over and still get contracts.

[ilaksh]

Probably the client is just an asshole and nothing can fix that. However, I have some additional theories that may partially explain it.

My suspicion is that business schedules and contract structures may have something to do with this.

I'm guessing pressure is mounting because a lot of money has already been paid out before they received a final working product. It seems that people like to create large lump sum project fees and collect them immediately. This leads to crunch time and pressure to collect working software without extending the contract for additional money.

If possible I think it's best to have contract structures that are actually billed for the time of the developers and also have relatively short releases. So the idea would be that there is some working software with some features, then every few weeks you add a feature or two. This results in less pressure than if there are very few software deliveries.

But it sounds like there is some fundamental contempt the other party has for your group. It is risky but in order to understand and possibly combat that you could try changing the mode of communication. Perhaps no emails and only phone or Skype or face to face. Maybe you can have a discussion about where the contempt is coming from.

Also if you haven't delivered software for awhile you may not want to wait until the delivery date. Although that could make things worse also depending on the situation.

[sam_lowry_]

Seems like they are not complete assholes, since the project is meaningful.

Think of the situation where the client is not an asshole but just incompetent, and the project does not pass simple logic tests, let alone business health checks.

And the only reason your project exists is because the client has to make himself busy and spend his budget.

And it pays you well, e.g 150% of market average. And you have extra perks, like the luxury to cycle to work through the forest.

And imagine living this life for years.

With family to support ahd kids on your back.

Um...