The Hardest Conversations

I always thought the hard part was the code.

Give me a complex problem, and I can get lost in it for hours, building a solution. That world makes sense. It’s logical. It’s comfortable.

When I started working for myself, I ran into a different kind of hard problem. It had nothing to do with logic or code.

It was the conversations.

The ones where I had to tell a client, "That feature you love is a bad idea," or, "What you're asking for will take much longer than you think."

For a long time, I would avoid those talks. I’d tell myself I’d bring it up tomorrow. I hoped that if I just worked harder on the code, the problem would somehow fix itself.

It never did. The silence just made things worse. It created a small gap of doubt that grew over time.

I learned a simple lesson. People can handle bad news. What they can’t handle is uncertainty. They can’t work with someone they feel is hiding something.

Now, I have those conversations as soon as I see them coming. I try to be direct and clear. My job isn't just to build the product, but to help the client make good decisions. That means giving them the full picture, even the parts that are hard to say.

Building things is still what I love to do. But I’ve learned that the strongest projects are not built on perfect code. They are built on trust. And trust starts with an honest conversation.