Code is Easy. People are Hard.
A few months ago, my college asked me to rebuild their website. I figured it’d be a straightforward weekend-warrior type of situation: build the frontend, hook up a CMS, migrate the data, ship it, and move on.
The actual dev work went exactly like that. The pages were clean, the content models made sense, and the site worked. I thought the hard part was out of the way.
I was dead wrong.
The second people started reviewing it, the entire project derailed into a chaotic mess of conflicting priorities. While I was obsessing over component architecture and build times, everyone else was fighting over sitemaps, URL hierarchies, and SEO.
Management only cared about branding. Faculty wanted endless content silos. Prospective students just needed to find a damn link.
I spent weeks getting frustrated, thinking people were sabotaging the project or arguing over solved problems. The site worked, right? Why are we still talking about this?
Then it hit me: I was treating this strictly as a software problem. Nobody else was.
Nobody was criticizing my React code or the architecture. They didn't care. They were looking at the site through an entirely different lens. Once that clicked, the friction made sense. We were looking at the exact same screen but solving completely different problems.
Even after that realization, the scope creep was brutal. The second non-technical people see a working staging link, their brains melt and they start imagining features. One department page suddenly needs to be five separate sub-sections. A single placement block turns into an multi-year archive. Every small edit fundamentally shifts the project scope.
Then came deployment—which I used to think was just a glorified git push.
Turns out, shipping software in the real world means dealing with legacy infrastructure, bureaucratic approvals, content freezes, and institutional red tape. A website can be 100% finished on your machine and still sit in limbo for weeks.
I went into this project expecting to sharpen my tech stack. Instead, I got a crash course in human psychology.
Devs see systems. SEO guys see discovery. Suits see reputation. Users just want speed. Nobody is wrong; they’re just optimizing for their own world.
The code was never the bottleneck. Managing the people around it was.