[Person5478]

From my perspective, that back and forth is a natural part of software development. If they wanted red and once they see it they decide they want a different shade, to me that's good software development (as long as it doesn't turn into bikeshedding).

Often people aren't sure themselves what they want until they see it, or they get new/better ideas after seeing it in motion (or decide they don't like it). Good software dev is like boiling water. It's tumultuous with a smattering of chaos, but in general drives towards the goal.

It also allows you, as a developer, to take more ownership of the software as a solution. At the end of the day you're helping solve someone's problems. For me that's satisfying, even if it's a small problem.

And it's been my experience when you do that well, people love you for it.

And to be clear, I put customer in quotes for a reason. Sometimes the problem you're solving is that batch job needs to be realtime, or that one query is slow as the data got too large, ad nauseum. It's not always non-technical people.

What I never want is a PM to just tell me to make a query faster without being able to discuss with the people it affects what their use case is so I can start optimizing for the specifics rather than just in general (although sometimes that's the right approach).