People don't want the truth. I recently helped a client build a PDF report generator that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. So I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Validating setup, Sorting, Generating" and other such nonsense. The PDF generation now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse some JS event for it to work. The users loved it.

People don't want the truth. I recently helped a client build a PDF report generator that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. So I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Validating setup, Sorting, Generating" and other such nonsense. The PDF generation now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse some JS event for it to work. The users loved it.

Paul Xue Tweet