Turning down work, in practice

We take client work selectively, and a sentence like that is worth nothing on its own. What makes it real is a decision made before a number is on the table, and a record of what we turned down.

The order matters. The cheap disqualifiers come first — weapons, surveillance, gambling, predatory lending, anything whose product is deception. Those need no discussion and can be answered within a day.

The gate that actually catches things is the next one, and it catches decent clients: a brief that requires shipping without accessibility, without translation, or with a pattern designed to pressure someone. Nobody involved means any harm, and we still cannot build it. The last gate is quieter again — whether the budget and the timeline leave room to do it properly. Agreeing to something the schedule does not permit is the same as not agreeing to it.

We answer quickly, because a client told no in a day has lost nothing and a client told no after three weeks has been treated badly. And we log every refusal: what it was, which gate it failed, the date. Without the log, "selective" is just a nicer word for available.