Professional courtesy works both ways

Posted on Thursday, December 17, 2015 at 2:49 PM into personal, opinion & self-improvement by Steve Woods.
Roughly a 1 minute read.

I see a lot of text online bemoaning freelancers for not staying in timely contact, for reneging on their promises and generally being a pain to work with. I'd go so far to say that more-often-than-not, the default relationship between a new client and freelancer could be described as "wary" because of the preconceived notion of a freelancer being expected to disappear for weeks on end leaving the client high-and-dry.

It's important to remember that these frustrations can also be directed towards the client as well.

Case in point, I've been working with a client on a project who initially promised a large amount of work and did, to be fair, pay on-time for the work I ended up doing - no problems there. I was then "cut off" while internal processes were dealth with (so that they didn't need to pay my day rate for me being sat doing nothing). Fair enough. Normal.

However despite repeated e-mails asking for a status update, I've received nothing back. Not even an acknowledgement of receipt. 

Just to be clear there's no dispute about the work I've completed, I received an e-mail and phoencalls thanking me for the work and that it was in production, no issues and that they wanted to push forward with the next phase of the project.

However given the lack of communication I'm questioning if I want to work with them any more - if they can ignore me so easily when everything is fine, what will it be like if I ever have a problem with payment, or any other issue?

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, be nice to your developer. We also have a "shit list" of people we don't want to work with, don't end up on it for the sake of writing a two minute e-mail.