As a former contractor and current hirer of contractors, I wish I understood this more when I was on the other side.
This story is an outlier (10x!) and probably should have involved more communication, but the ultimate lesson checks out.
I used to be so embarrassed to send my invoice or charge more as scope increased. If something went unpaid, I'd rather eat the cost than reach out with a reminder. Turns out it's more likely someone didn't think about it or forgot than any sort of malice.
As a contractor, you think of money in terms of actual dollars – rent, food, etc. When you're paying the invoice, you think of it as a resource used to get either get results or get your own time back.
It's not that companies don't care about money (they do, a lot), but the math is much different on their end. Money can feel like an equalizer (it's how we serialize time, resources, etc into a common way to transact), but if you're a contractor, you can make way more if you understand the perspective of the person paying you.
For example, proactive communication and hitting deadlines is much more important than saving costs.
I've had few contracts where I've made very nice money like $20K for what in average was 3 days. They were all urgent jobs from some very big companies whose managers knew about me (In their particular environment I was famous for doing "impossible" tasks in very short time). When they asked me to do the job I knew that they're big and can pay handsomely so instead of giving them my hourly rate I would just simply tell that I would take up to let's say 5 days and would charge them this total sum disregarding of how long it would take in reality. They were totally fine with it.
I've had one job like this where they were desperate for a solution and after months of searching couldn't find anybody to do the work. I just happened to have the intersection of several skills they needed and be available. It also helped that they were losing a lot of money every day they didn't have a solution.
On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price. They are usually doing that because they know something that you don't.
> On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price.
fixed price projects are like handling dynamite. A sophisticated client can use a fixed price contract to extract a huge amount of work/value from an ingorant consultant and a sophisticated consultant can use it to extract a huge amount of cash from an ignorant client.
My advice to both sides of the fence is clearly, _very_ clearly, define the scope, schedule, and a rock solid change order process for changes.
I second this. I see inexperienced business folks (including CEOs) think they are going to take advantage of an IT vendor by signing a fixed price contract and then demand constant additions to scope couched as something else. What ends up being delivered is a hot steaming pile that is dead on arrival. Act like shit; be treated like shit.
I've found that it's generally SMEs that tend to be stingy when they ask for a fixed price. Large corps ask for a fixed price just so that they can internally talk about money and budget the thing once and be done.
SMEs in my experience generally are able to handle change in scope and billing easier than larger ones.
When you have enough experience and the project fits, this is the way to go.
They don't pay for your time.
They pay for your output and you can bill them on the output.
I'm interested in working as an independent contractor when I finish college. Do you have any advice for how to become known as "that guy you call in when you need the impossble done tomorrow"?
This is the equation. When you quote on the input - that's the time you need to do the job, you multiply your rate for the weeks/days/hours, plus maybe some other expenses. This is the so-called "Hours and materials".
When you quote on the output, you take in consideration the overall value/gains you client will make by your work. This is called "value-based" pricing.
This equation is unbreakable, if your input is grater than the client output (ROI), something is very wrong, or completely illegal.
Some says value-based pricing is the holy grail for pricing anything, but if you're smart enough, you already understood that, based on circumstances, sometimes it makes more sense to quote on the input, other times on the output. Just do the math.
This may be a classic example of "value-based" pricing. It doesn't matter how long you take to make a static HTML page (input), the client overall project budget is probably over $100K (as stated by op), it's totally ok for them to invest ~20% of it to make sure it delivers on time and by specs.
As a contractor hourly work is often relationship suicide every 2-3 years when your value is questioned no matter how great the baseline.
To move towards value based pricing, and not splitting hairs on time and hours, by billing minimum half or full days with the understanding not much gets done less.
Of course value based pricing, at a weekly or monthly retainer is the next step.
I’ve done all of the above.
The client doesn’t care if it’s an html page it’s the value it creates or enables.
Rarely do most businesses wake up wanting to buy more tech and software dev, they have business problems or outcomes to solve.
If the solution was a single html page I wouldn’t even talk to the client in terms of an html page or not.
Depending on your confidence in yourself and your ability to execute sometimes also: Total Project Cost > Weekly rates > Day rates > Hourly rates.
Charging someone £10k for a solution can be better if you know you can do it quickly and changes the math for the buisness. They are more likely to pay a higher amount for a solution rather than an hourly rate.
I save my clients 20-30% across the board on their digital transformation projects, the solution price or rate doesn’t matter compared to the 6-7-8 figures I lace in their pocket.
Solution pricing can be further extended into contingency based pricing. Have the clients gather pricing for you and then hammer home a better deal and have a cheque cut for the portion of the savings.
I still remember how I felt when I sent that first invoice. I was beating myself for not sending the invoice every week in the process, yet there I was with what I thought was a giant bill.
For context, the company that commissioned the work paid over $100k for that single page (I was in the email chain). It was part of a wider campaign that involved a whole lot of work, interviews, filming, celebrity appearances, etc. I just checked and the page is still up!
Ps: it involves that reliable car company, news paper, and mothers.
That was my first reaction reading your story -- "outside partner probably paid 5 to 10x for it" -- if you'd gotten up to 50k, you would have had a problem. :)
Fyi: NixOS would shine everytime a client handed you a laptop for the gig. Your working environment reproducible and declarative. Setup in minutes, not hours.
Having to figure out how to make whatever random god-awful corporate software they got sold work on nixos -- on a deadline -- sounds like seven circles of hell.
NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you may be in for some unexpected tinkering.
I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set up your environment just as well and is very portable, while still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's choice.
+1 for Home Manager, as someone who uses Nix extensively (NixOS for server, Nix devshells, Home Manager on my dev machine) it's by far the most versatile tool the Nix ecosystem has to offer!
yeah i was a little confused by the suggestion. If a client hands you a laptop to use for a project then there's corp. policy reasons why you have to use it as a contractor. (some companies have serious teeth in these policies)
It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall and listen in when infosec calls you and asks why your laptop disappeared from their monitoring tools and you told them you installed nixos (assuming that would even be possible) because that's what you prefer.
You don’t even need full on NixOS. I do the same with nix-Darwin and home manager. It’s not the perfect reproducible purists machine due to homebrew and Mac designs but it doesn’t really need to be, just mostly so
Purity here is a difficult ask without the whole "erase your darlings" impermanence. In general, there is something regardless which handles stateful interactions.
Often this is activation scripts, e.g. home-manager will complain at you if you are attempting to overwrite an existing file not managed with home-manager unless you tell it to forcibly overwrite the file.
You can get yourself into situations where even in NixOS land, switch-to-configuration will refuse to switch due to some kind of violation, e.g. a systemd mount service wholly failing. I've had an experience like that recently.
The Nix store is not a perfect get out of jail free card for this, everything impure must be wrangled by something eventually.
What I'm really trying to say is, the world is messy and full of impurity, it's unavoidable. The thing that manages Brew, casks and app store applications for you within nix-darwin is no different than home-manager managing home.files or switch-to-configuration acting upon systemd.
Knowing how to work with builtin tools would shine in that environment. I first learned this style in a Spolsky blogpost were they talked about Wasabi, a language that compiled to either PHP or Visual Basic I think it was, the idea being that those languages were preinstalled in most servers of the era.
In a similar sense, knowing how to work with the builtin tools of major OS is a huge advantage. If you can write your code in vim or nano or notepad without breaking a sweat over your favourite hotkeys not working, that's a lot of hours saved.
Thanks for reporting this. I'm assuming you are referring to the RSS feed?
The actual feed is https://idiallo.com/feed.rss in the meanwhile until I figure out the issue
No, they're referring to an error that pops up when you visit a page whose url ends in 'women-in-the-world.html'; you can click okay and still browse the page though :-)
Haha thank you. That went over my head. I dismissed that box without reading the error. But... I can neither confirm nor deny I understand what you are referring to ;)
IIUC, if that company had just let him be remote, and not demanded exclusivity, they could've gotten the same output, delivered at the same time, for less than 1/10th the cost.
One of the 'mistakes' (conscious at the time) I made when doing technical consulting remotely was only billing for productive, focused hours when I'd be actively typing and mousing on the problem.
Someone suggested that, if I wanted to go for a walk to think about a problem (which is something I did), I should bill that. I decided that was a slippery slope.
Had I been working on-site, which consumed all my time without flexibility, then I'd bill for every hour on-site, and maybe for travel time.
But since we were doing remote (this was before Covid), with hours that I set -- and my clients were serious people, working on serious stuff -- I wanted to be serious too.
Thinking back to my time as a contractor, this makes me wary.
In the UK at least, you would need to be careful that by allowing people to waste your time (and them paying for it) you would be breaking the dreaded IR35 tax rules by appearing as a “disguised employee”.
HMRC won’t tell you the exact rules but one of big tests is do you retain control of your time or not.
You need to be upfront with clients about what they are paying for or you could both be in for a nasty surprise.
It is a constant source of confusion. I see it constantly discussed in various freelancer whats-app and freelance groups.
I used to get contracts checked to see if they were Outside IR-35 and I knew I wasn't the only one. So it isn't straight-forward as you suggest.
It can also scare companies off, I have personally experienced this. As a result there are far less Outside IR-35 work. Almost every contractor I know has had to go back perm.
I understand there were many Contractors that basically milked forever contracts, but it kinda screwed over loads of freelancers.
I personally hate being perm. I used to work about 6-9 months a year and I found it relatively easy to find another contract. I had plenty of free time. Now I get the standard 1 month and bank holidays. Really pissed off about the rule changes.
The IRS in the USA has similar critera on the difference between a contractor and an employee, and it also boils down to who is dictating the time, place, and methods of the work.
Just the fact that they issued him a laptop and specific software would tend to indicate that he's an employee not a contractor.
The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.
My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.
Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.
True. Remember that as well. I think I worked remotely for another client while I was waiting 3 weeks (paid) for my login, so had 3 weeks of double pay.
My record is about 9 weeks to get onboarded enough to do work, where "onboarded" was getting my Laptop to work and login and access to a few critical systems.
These kinds of costs are baked into every level of the company. This is a place where they calculate it costs about $30,000 to add a period to the end of a sentence in a static website.
Over the summer, the "friend of a friend" the bosses hired to run the website had up and fscked off (and not answering calls), and the rented VPSes had expired. Since I was the only person there (of a dozen or so in an e-waste recycling company) who did websites once upon a time, they said that if I could get a website for the company up, they'd give me $200. I threw a plain HTML page together in 15 minutes (mostly copy-pasted from the old site on Internet Archive), then spent about 45 minutes to figure out how Github Pages works with custom domains. I don't think I've ever gone from nothing to deployed website in an hour before!
I’m willing to bet this person was paid a one-time fee (just like you) and the bosses expected him to provide free maintenance and tech support for life. And if you’re not careful this will be your fate as well. I’ve been in this position myself, and after a point you are forced to say “sorry, I’ve done my part, you are on your own now”. People aren’t willing to accept that even a simple website can have a recurring cost of a few engineering hours a month. And those hours aren’t free.
No clue. A week later, they hired a reputable local firm to get the old site back up in entirety, and design a whole new site. I'll have to ask tomorrow how that's going.
I never had any issue asking for a 5 figure sum. It was always the small payments I had to chase. I won't do small work as a result because it is barely worth the effort.
As long as you're organized and quantify every line item and have proof of sign off on things that increase scope and have emails to back them up, you can usually established your ethos as someone that is honest and doesn't try to fleece them, then companies are fairly reasonable.... that is, unless they are in a bad situation where they probably can't pay their vendors or contractors.
And that is something that is a burden on the contractor. Don't agree to work for a company if there are red flags present from the get go. Even if the promise of pay looks good.
The best are boring large to mid size companies.
I tended to avoid start ups that just needed a specialist for a few days. The issue of money was always a sticking point. Let's just say if they could barely pay their own or themselves then how would that bode well for you?
> As long as you're organized and quantify every line item and have proof of sign off on things that increase scope and have emails to back them up
if you're doing this then you likely will never have a problem no matter how much the invoice is. Organization and authorization (sign-off) is the key, if there are no surprises then they'll pay every time.
> The best are boring large to mid size companies.
I agree, Accounts payable doesn't have any emotional attachment to any amount at these companies. If the invoice has the right approvals/criteria then a check is cut no matter what the amount is.
Yes of course. You can get paid anything from $5 to $1000 per hour depending on how good/lucky you are at sales and connections. Not through upwork. My current contract is a full time for over a year now so five figures is expected per month
The title is kind of misleading, no? The author charged $18k for a "7 weeks adventure where I enjoyed free lunches, drove 50 miles everyday, and dug through emails." Which seems like a pretty appropriate price to buy two months of life.
But look, they occupied his time for 7 weeks full-time. He could have taken another project (opportunity cost) if not for this project. I mean, the inefficiencies of their business processes are not his point of concern - they occupied his time and they should pay for it.
i think most developers would be surprised how small a part writing code actually plays in making money in software development. If you look at a piechart of the effort/time involved in making contact with a client, contracting, delivery, and close out writing the actual code is maybe 15% of that pie.
I've been on similar projects where the client is paying through the nose to a consultancy. I was being paid about £500 a day for my time, but I am sure they were charging the client much more.
I got flown out and put up at a hotel for a week for a PR emergency (it was the 5th anniversary of a merger no one cared about but the new CEO wanted to do something about it) ultimately to make a wordpress site. Everything on my expense report got marked up some percent and passed off to the hiring company. I maybe got a little bonus for the whole thing, so not terrible? Not great. I read Bullshit Jobs a little bit later and it hit a little close to home.
I was invited to a meeting with a group of investors to provide feedback on a tech project.
Afterwards, two of them and I went to a nearby hotel for a sandwich and a soft drink to discuss the project. The bill for three sandwiches and some drinks was £125. They didn't even blink.
For me, that was the price of a month of groceries at the time.
During the dot com boom I bought my first car by doing a weekend of overtime at my day job, on an emergency project. They asked me how much it would take for me to work the weekend, I said the number that was the price of a car, my boss said OK.
(it was a classic 1972 FIAT 500L, it was ~£3200 at the time IIRC)
I was told flat out by freelance clients I was (too) cheap. But one time I quoted a much larger project than I was used to, and the client (who was also a relative of someone close to me) insisted on a higher number.
It ended up roughly being the down payment on my first house.
I've come to believe that the software industry is the least meritocratic industry in the history of mankind. I've also experienced similar situations as the author. It's all 100% about company selection. You've got to choose the right company. The rest does not matter AT ALL.
The most I ever got paid working for a company was for a basic project where everyone was moving super slow and people felt comfortable enough to watch YouTube videos in front of their boss and one guy came into work one day wearing his pajamas.
The least I got paid (inflation-adjusted) was a consultancy which had an extremely over-engineered software stack and daily deadlines... Every morning standup started with "What did you get DONE yesterday? What are you going to get DONE today?" If you couldn't point to a specific feature which was FULLY DONE end-to-end, there would be a long awkward pause or the boss would make a negative remark. Their definition of DONE was 100% polished, no iteration; had to be perfect the first time; the boss would sit with you through a very tense one-on-one meeting and go through the detailed requirements for each task word-by-word. The company environment was set up to make it difficult for you to ask question; like the author of this article described so this made it difficult to meet all requirements exactly on the first attempt, let alone given the short deadlines.
I struggled to make sense of the full horror of this industry until Christmas this year; I was at my parent's house and was using their microwave (a popular brand) and it was the most awful UX I had ever seen on a microwave. I literally could not imagine a worse UX if I tried. You couldn't just pin-in the seconds/minutes and press start, you could't extend the start time mid-way through the process and it was hard to start as you had to push a bunch of specific intermediate buttons whose labels made no sense and it would start a fan which kept running even after the microwave was done; I had to pull the plug to get it to shut up... Anyway, this made me think "Wow, my industry sucks... This is the worst software and UX I've ever seen and yet people are still buying this machine! The guy who designed the UX for this thing probably got a promotion too and now giving orders to others about how to do good UX..." This isn't just an outlier 'microwave industry' thing though; this dynamic is present everywhere in the whole tech industry; this was just a particularly striking example.
I found the more I got paid the better I was treated. I had one client I was doing work for under my previous employment. When I left I charged triple what my previous employer had been charging. Not only did they not bat an eyelid about the price but they started treating me better as well.
The worst customers were those working on slim margins, for a while I was doing a lot of work for component distributors. They were terrible to work for.
It's possible the guy in paragraph 4 who designed the UX didn't get a promotion and did their work in the same kind of environment you describe in paragraph 3.
I was just speculating in this case but my understanding of this industry is that if the product earns money then everyone gets promotions and bonuses. It's not about individual ability.
My point is that there is no correlation between the financial success of the product and the skill of the UX designer or developer; yet financial success is the main metric which is used to determine rank and pay for these specific roles.
I'm happy for sales-people that their pay fully correlates with their performance but as a software developer, it really sucks. My pay correlates much more with the performance of my colleagues in sales than with my own performance. If I'm unlucky, the correlation may in fact be inverted.
I've seen this over and over. I worked in blockchain space; the developers before me wrote TERRIBLE code, the thing was literal spaghetti code, full of vulnerabilities and it's a miracle it didn't get hacked. But the timing was right and many of those early developers earned big money as crypto prices soared in the early days... The people who joined only a few months later and pulled off a heroic redesign/refactoring effort and did an amazing job in record time got peanuts because the hype was dying down. So the fact that they improved the product 100x didn't matter at all. It's like there was 0 recognition.
Bad luck compounds. I could write an entire book about this effect... But that book probably wouldn't sell; ironically, a victim of the same effect it would be describing. People only care about success stories. With good luck; not only do you get to be successful but you get to sell books about it which makes you even more successful. Good luck compounds too.
The fixed price wariness tonyedgecombe mentions is real. Early in my career I'd quote hourly because it felt "fair" - but what I learned is that clients who want fixed pricing often have way more context than you do about the problem's difficulty.
Flipped it around now. If a client is eager for fixed pricing on something that seems simple, I dig deeper. Usually there's a reason three other contractors already passed on it.
The psychological bit about being embarrassed to invoice is spot on though. Took me years to stop treating invoices like I was asking for a favour. The framing shift that helped: you're not asking for money, you're confirming a transaction that was already agreed.
You have to understand that these large corpos move like whales, and the money you quoted is a rounding error. I´ve seen a company department burn cash it was asigned on purpose so it wouldn´t go back to finance (indicating that the department isnt using all their money and something is wrong).
Making the mental adjustment coming from a public college to a private company regarding money has been one of the most difficult transitions I've ever faced.
At the college I had a $250,000 annual budget for IT that had to be planned out to the best of my abilities nearly a year in advance of the actual physical year, get approval from 2-5 levels of management for the budget, and then be flexible on when the money became available to purchase depending on the states fiscal economic factors.
In a private company now, even when I volunteer to do something to save money, they say it's not worth my time and effort, pay someone to do it.
Purchases under $25,000 can be made without approval, over that I just have to ask my direct report for approval.
I'm still personal finance budget minded, so they don't have to worry about me buying gold plated toilet hinges or anything, but it's still financial whiplash even years later for how they do things.
Our combined careers of moving bits around where we have amassed trillions in developer pay for code that doesn't do anything previously built software could... or worse has made the world a horrible place... Is the bigger story.
'code that doesn't do anything previously built software could'
I have a hard time understanding what you mean here? Is it just hyperbole but surely the 'code' must do something that previously built software could do. Or do you mean to say it's rarely any better than what it replaced?
When software was paid for at a wage that was like a construction worker back in the day. Sure there could be "some" improvements, but we went a bit nuts making a millions of React developers.
Agencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks Boostrap!!).
I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time they don’t even know how being actively involved in the process will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate them?
TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.
On the flip side I’ve seen many projects go way over budget when a client is actively involved and introduces scope creep that turns into launch blockers. You learn quick to have strong contracts if doing fixed price bids.
Problem seems to be clients don’t know what they want early on and when they start to see progress they understand more what they were actually expecting. Obviously you’d try to get this out of them during project planning.
I feel like this is where LLM's/agents could actually help a lot. I don't like all the hype, and think that long-term projects would be better off without heavily written LLM code in any form, but stitching together stuff for a client seems like the perfect use-case, as long as they understand it's not the final product.
I have a similar, but in one way even more insane story, although I was paid more of an employee than a consultant hourly rate. I worked at a big critical infrastructure type company for a good two months and I was supposed to work on-site on intranet-only software. The thing was, the rest of the people in the department were working from home three days a week, I couldn't be "unsupervised" in the building, and it took them almost a whole months to set me up with a VPN. Since my app had to integrate with half a dozen different internal systems, none of which had API specs let alone mock servers, the only thing I could really do from home was was write CSS on mock HTML files. That, combined with waiting like two weeks to get a Visual Studio license approved, meant I spent more than half of my time there at home, doing absolutely no work. The manager fully knew that and I still got paid tho.
I used to do a lot of fixed price contract work. I used to rationalize that I owned the IP and I was my own boss.
These days I just charge an hourly rate. It's so much easier. Just turn up, do the work, go home. If the requirements change or I have to wait for an asset, no problem, I'm getting paid.
I used to work as a freelancer back in the days. I worked a lot for a customer became a good friend. At first I'd work on his projects, but this ultimately shifted to a model where I'd work on projects for his clients, I would bill him, and he would add his margin and bill the end-customer. It worked out great this way.
One day I got a call from him saying that our 'mutual' customer had an urgency job. They were supposed to do a national roll-out of a new payment system, but seemed to have forgotten about a bunch of legacy PoS systems that were still operational and couldn't easily be replaced. Because I was seemingly the only one that was still familiar with this particular system (I worked on it once in the past), the end-customer approached my friend whether I would be available to do this quick. This was in late November, and the rollout was planned for Januari. Because this end-customer is a government org, I realised we'd be guaranteed they wouldn't be working during the holidays (which, in my country is typically 2 weeks for Christmas and new-year's), so really we had only 10 days or so to get it done in time for their team to test it before they holiday shutdown.
I didn't feel like doing such a complex job on such tight deadline. So, I quoted a much higher rate than normal. I also quoted for a multitude of hours that I thought was required, due to the typical overhead that this large end-customer would surely incur. Finally I also added a retainer fee, because I knew that if problems would occur (likely on the last day before the rollout), I'd have to drop anything I was doing and work for them.
I got the job.
I worked feverishly to meet the deadline. I cancelled commitments on other projects, paid an extortionate amount for testing hardware and overnight delivered to my office, bought very expensive testing gear, signed all the NDA's required to work on PoS card payment interfaces, etc. I then worked basically round the clock for 10 days straight to get it done. I did get it done in time, submitted the code to the repository and fired an email to the team-manager that it was in fact done a day early. ...I was greeted with an auto-reply the manager would be on holiday till mid-January, which was the week that entire new payment system had to be rolled out nation-wide.
I wasn't feeling great about it, but my friend urged me to send the invoice for the work I had done, and also the retainer for the rest of December and January. This would allow the customer to write of the expenses in the current calendar-year. I sent the invoice, it was the most amount of money I'd ever invoiced, and I'd normally invoiced per month, this was for a mere 10 days.
December passed, no response from the supposed review team. I stayed on stand-by, declined any other work, stayed sober during the various new-year's office parties, always brought my laptop along, etc.
January came and went. Still no response from the code review team. The new payment system was due to be rolled out mid-january, but nothing had happened. The company had done extensive ad-campaigns beforehand announcing the new payment convenience for their end-users, so the only 'feedback' I saw were frustrated users on Twitter. I still felt bad about charging for the retainer.
This kept going. At some point I did stop sending invoices for the retainer. My friend always paid me in advance (the end-customer was notoriously slow to pay, though did always pay in the end), and I didn't want to cause him too much exposure.
To my knowledge, the software I wrote was never used in the end. To the public it was stated that the PoS systems were simply too old to be upgraded (not true, obv) and that they'd replace them 'soon'. It is now 4 or 5 years laters, the old PoS terminals are still there, sans the functionality I added.
By pure coincidence, years after the job I found out that an old friend of mine, who was also a freelancer at the time, was tasked around that same time by the same customer to do a code-review of a supposed PoS system upgrade. Without realising, he reviewed my code! He was under the same time pressure, and did the code review during Christmas to deliver the results on time before the national rollout in mid-January. He also charged a huge amount of money for it, was also paid, and also never heard about it again. At least he said he remembered being impressed by the quality of the code, and didn't find any defects. So that's about the best outcome of the project I guess.
My takeaway from this: If you are a freelancer, and a large customer wants something done in a hurry, charge more than you ever dared, don't feel bad about it. You'll find that suddenly there isn't as much of a deadline anymore. If the customer declines due to the price, you should be happy for dodging a bullet.
The critical phrase is "that sponsored page"; almost certainly the hiring company was doing the page cost plus, so the more they paid, the more they got.
the longest case I know is a guy in big crypto who after a fallout was taking care of a zombie company for about a year and half, full pay, practically 1 or 2 hours of work some of the weeks
As a former contractor and current hirer of contractors, I wish I understood this more when I was on the other side.
This story is an outlier (10x!) and probably should have involved more communication, but the ultimate lesson checks out.
I used to be so embarrassed to send my invoice or charge more as scope increased. If something went unpaid, I'd rather eat the cost than reach out with a reminder. Turns out it's more likely someone didn't think about it or forgot than any sort of malice.
As a contractor, you think of money in terms of actual dollars – rent, food, etc. When you're paying the invoice, you think of it as a resource used to get either get results or get your own time back.
It's not that companies don't care about money (they do, a lot), but the math is much different on their end. Money can feel like an equalizer (it's how we serialize time, resources, etc into a common way to transact), but if you're a contractor, you can make way more if you understand the perspective of the person paying you.
For example, proactive communication and hitting deadlines is much more important than saving costs.
I've had few contracts where I've made very nice money like $20K for what in average was 3 days. They were all urgent jobs from some very big companies whose managers knew about me (In their particular environment I was famous for doing "impossible" tasks in very short time). When they asked me to do the job I knew that they're big and can pay handsomely so instead of giving them my hourly rate I would just simply tell that I would take up to let's say 5 days and would charge them this total sum disregarding of how long it would take in reality. They were totally fine with it.
I've had one job like this where they were desperate for a solution and after months of searching couldn't find anybody to do the work. I just happened to have the intersection of several skills they needed and be available. It also helped that they were losing a lot of money every day they didn't have a solution.
On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price. They are usually doing that because they know something that you don't.
> On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price.
fixed price projects are like handling dynamite. A sophisticated client can use a fixed price contract to extract a huge amount of work/value from an ingorant consultant and a sophisticated consultant can use it to extract a huge amount of cash from an ignorant client.
My advice to both sides of the fence is clearly, _very_ clearly, define the scope, schedule, and a rock solid change order process for changes.
I second this. I see inexperienced business folks (including CEOs) think they are going to take advantage of an IT vendor by signing a fixed price contract and then demand constant additions to scope couched as something else. What ends up being delivered is a hot steaming pile that is dead on arrival. Act like shit; be treated like shit.
I've found that it's generally SMEs that tend to be stingy when they ask for a fixed price. Large corps ask for a fixed price just so that they can internally talk about money and budget the thing once and be done.
SMEs in my experience generally are able to handle change in scope and billing easier than larger ones.
When you have enough experience and the project fits, this is the way to go. They don't pay for your time. They pay for your output and you can bill them on the output.
I'm interested in working as an independent contractor when I finish college. Do you have any advice for how to become known as "that guy you call in when you need the impossble done tomorrow"?
Weekly rates > Day rates > Hourly rates
Input < Product Value < Output.
This is the equation. When you quote on the input - that's the time you need to do the job, you multiply your rate for the weeks/days/hours, plus maybe some other expenses. This is the so-called "Hours and materials".
When you quote on the output, you take in consideration the overall value/gains you client will make by your work. This is called "value-based" pricing.
This equation is unbreakable, if your input is grater than the client output (ROI), something is very wrong, or completely illegal.
Some says value-based pricing is the holy grail for pricing anything, but if you're smart enough, you already understood that, based on circumstances, sometimes it makes more sense to quote on the input, other times on the output. Just do the math.
This may be a classic example of "value-based" pricing. It doesn't matter how long you take to make a static HTML page (input), the client overall project budget is probably over $100K (as stated by op), it's totally ok for them to invest ~20% of it to make sure it delivers on time and by specs.
You are describing leverage.
As a contractor hourly work is often relationship suicide every 2-3 years when your value is questioned no matter how great the baseline.
To move towards value based pricing, and not splitting hairs on time and hours, by billing minimum half or full days with the understanding not much gets done less.
Of course value based pricing, at a weekly or monthly retainer is the next step.
I’ve done all of the above.
The client doesn’t care if it’s an html page it’s the value it creates or enables.
Rarely do most businesses wake up wanting to buy more tech and software dev, they have business problems or outcomes to solve.
If the solution was a single html page I wouldn’t even talk to the client in terms of an html page or not.
Depending on your confidence in yourself and your ability to execute sometimes also: Total Project Cost > Weekly rates > Day rates > Hourly rates.
Charging someone £10k for a solution can be better if you know you can do it quickly and changes the math for the buisness. They are more likely to pay a higher amount for a solution rather than an hourly rate.
Yup outcome based pricing is best.
I save my clients 20-30% across the board on their digital transformation projects, the solution price or rate doesn’t matter compared to the 6-7-8 figures I lace in their pocket.
Solution pricing can be further extended into contingency based pricing. Have the clients gather pricing for you and then hammer home a better deal and have a cheque cut for the portion of the savings.
Hey I wrote that :)
I still remember how I felt when I sent that first invoice. I was beating myself for not sending the invoice every week in the process, yet there I was with what I thought was a giant bill.
For context, the company that commissioned the work paid over $100k for that single page (I was in the email chain). It was part of a wider campaign that involved a whole lot of work, interviews, filming, celebrity appearances, etc. I just checked and the page is still up!
Ps: it involves that reliable car company, news paper, and mothers.
That was my first reaction reading your story -- "outside partner probably paid 5 to 10x for it" -- if you'd gotten up to 50k, you would have had a problem. :)
Does the URL end in "women-in-the-world.html"?
That's a very good question.
How did you guys find the site?
ChatGPT xD
mine seems too dumb to be able to find it
Fyi: NixOS would shine everytime a client handed you a laptop for the gig. Your working environment reproducible and declarative. Setup in minutes, not hours.
Having to figure out how to make whatever random god-awful corporate software they got sold work on nixos -- on a deadline -- sounds like seven circles of hell.
NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you may be in for some unexpected tinkering.
I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set up your environment just as well and is very portable, while still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's choice.
+1 for Home Manager, as someone who uses Nix extensively (NixOS for server, Nix devshells, Home Manager on my dev machine) it's by far the most versatile tool the Nix ecosystem has to offer!
What do you do if they hand you a Windows machine? Demand WSL? What if they don't give it to you?
Agreed. Vanta does not support Linux.
nix-darwin and home-manager however, support macOS.
Absolutely not, the company laptop will be locked down and you won't be able to install your own OS.
yeah i was a little confused by the suggestion. If a client hands you a laptop to use for a project then there's corp. policy reasons why you have to use it as a contractor. (some companies have serious teeth in these policies)
It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall and listen in when infosec calls you and asks why your laptop disappeared from their monitoring tools and you told them you installed nixos (assuming that would even be possible) because that's what you prefer.
Exactly. They don’t want you to just use their hardware. They want you to use all of it.
You don’t even need full on NixOS. I do the same with nix-Darwin and home manager. It’s not the perfect reproducible purists machine due to homebrew and Mac designs but it doesn’t really need to be, just mostly so
Purity here is a difficult ask without the whole "erase your darlings" impermanence. In general, there is something regardless which handles stateful interactions.
Often this is activation scripts, e.g. home-manager will complain at you if you are attempting to overwrite an existing file not managed with home-manager unless you tell it to forcibly overwrite the file.
You can get yourself into situations where even in NixOS land, switch-to-configuration will refuse to switch due to some kind of violation, e.g. a systemd mount service wholly failing. I've had an experience like that recently.
The Nix store is not a perfect get out of jail free card for this, everything impure must be wrangled by something eventually.
What I'm really trying to say is, the world is messy and full of impurity, it's unavoidable. The thing that manages Brew, casks and app store applications for you within nix-darwin is no different than home-manager managing home.files or switch-to-configuration acting upon systemd.
2015 me didn't know that. But chances are, I wouldn't have been able to install it with their company software policy tools.
Knowing how to work with builtin tools would shine in that environment. I first learned this style in a Spolsky blogpost were they talked about Wasabi, a language that compiled to either PHP or Visual Basic I think it was, the idea being that those languages were preinstalled in most servers of the era.
In a similar sense, knowing how to work with the builtin tools of major OS is a huge advantage. If you can write your code in vim or nano or notepad without breaking a sweat over your favourite hotkeys not working, that's a lot of hours saved.
Ansible and vagrant is easier and battle tested.
I get this error, iOS safari
> Unable to load feed, Incorrect path or invalid feed
;)
Thanks for reporting this. I'm assuming you are referring to the RSS feed? The actual feed is https://idiallo.com/feed.rss in the meanwhile until I figure out the issue
No, they're referring to an error that pops up when you visit a page whose url ends in 'women-in-the-world.html'; you can click okay and still browse the page though :-)
Haha thank you. That went over my head. I dismissed that box without reading the error. But... I can neither confirm nor deny I understand what you are referring to ;)
glomar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response
When is your book coming out? (I'd love to read it)
Life got in the way (marriage, kids, covid, publisher backed out, etc.) But 2026 is my year, stay tuned.
IIUC, if that company had just let him be remote, and not demanded exclusivity, they could've gotten the same output, delivered at the same time, for less than 1/10th the cost.
One of the 'mistakes' (conscious at the time) I made when doing technical consulting remotely was only billing for productive, focused hours when I'd be actively typing and mousing on the problem.
Someone suggested that, if I wanted to go for a walk to think about a problem (which is something I did), I should bill that. I decided that was a slippery slope.
Had I been working on-site, which consumed all my time without flexibility, then I'd bill for every hour on-site, and maybe for travel time.
But since we were doing remote (this was before Covid), with hours that I set -- and my clients were serious people, working on serious stuff -- I wanted to be serious too.
Thinking back to my time as a contractor, this makes me wary.
In the UK at least, you would need to be careful that by allowing people to waste your time (and them paying for it) you would be breaking the dreaded IR35 tax rules by appearing as a “disguised employee”.
HMRC won’t tell you the exact rules but one of big tests is do you retain control of your time or not.
You need to be upfront with clients about what they are paying for or you could both be in for a nasty surprise.
The IR35 rules seemed relatively easy for me to find when I was contracting.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/off-payroll-worki...
Along with a handy tool at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-employment-status-for-tax
There's also a forum, where they actually answer questions and advise (even if detailed).
It is a constant source of confusion. I see it constantly discussed in various freelancer whats-app and freelance groups.
I used to get contracts checked to see if they were Outside IR-35 and I knew I wasn't the only one. So it isn't straight-forward as you suggest.
It can also scare companies off, I have personally experienced this. As a result there are far less Outside IR-35 work. Almost every contractor I know has had to go back perm.
I understand there were many Contractors that basically milked forever contracts, but it kinda screwed over loads of freelancers.
I personally hate being perm. I used to work about 6-9 months a year and I found it relatively easy to find another contract. I had plenty of free time. Now I get the standard 1 month and bank holidays. Really pissed off about the rule changes.
The IRS in the USA has similar critera on the difference between a contractor and an employee, and it also boils down to who is dictating the time, place, and methods of the work.
Just the fact that they issued him a laptop and specific software would tend to indicate that he's an employee not a contractor.
The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.
My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.
Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.
>My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day.
That is really common for contractors, I've had it numerous times and my peers have said the same.
True. Remember that as well. I think I worked remotely for another client while I was waiting 3 weeks (paid) for my login, so had 3 weeks of double pay.
My record is about 9 weeks to get onboarded enough to do work, where "onboarded" was getting my Laptop to work and login and access to a few critical systems.
These kinds of costs are baked into every level of the company. This is a place where they calculate it costs about $30,000 to add a period to the end of a sentence in a static website.
Over the summer, the "friend of a friend" the bosses hired to run the website had up and fscked off (and not answering calls), and the rented VPSes had expired. Since I was the only person there (of a dozen or so in an e-waste recycling company) who did websites once upon a time, they said that if I could get a website for the company up, they'd give me $200. I threw a plain HTML page together in 15 minutes (mostly copy-pasted from the old site on Internet Archive), then spent about 45 minutes to figure out how Github Pages works with custom domains. I don't think I've ever gone from nothing to deployed website in an hour before!
I’m willing to bet this person was paid a one-time fee (just like you) and the bosses expected him to provide free maintenance and tech support for life. And if you’re not careful this will be your fate as well. I’ve been in this position myself, and after a point you are forced to say “sorry, I’ve done my part, you are on your own now”. People aren’t willing to accept that even a simple website can have a recurring cost of a few engineering hours a month. And those hours aren’t free.
No clue. A week later, they hired a reputable local firm to get the old site back up in entirety, and design a whole new site. I'll have to ask tomorrow how that's going.
As a freelancer I regularly got 5-figure checks without any hassle, it was the $600, $700, $800 checks that I had to fight people about.
I never had any issue asking for a 5 figure sum. It was always the small payments I had to chase. I won't do small work as a result because it is barely worth the effort.
Same here.
As long as you're organized and quantify every line item and have proof of sign off on things that increase scope and have emails to back them up, you can usually established your ethos as someone that is honest and doesn't try to fleece them, then companies are fairly reasonable.... that is, unless they are in a bad situation where they probably can't pay their vendors or contractors.
And that is something that is a burden on the contractor. Don't agree to work for a company if there are red flags present from the get go. Even if the promise of pay looks good.
The best are boring large to mid size companies.
I tended to avoid start ups that just needed a specialist for a few days. The issue of money was always a sticking point. Let's just say if they could barely pay their own or themselves then how would that bode well for you?
> As long as you're organized and quantify every line item and have proof of sign off on things that increase scope and have emails to back them up
if you're doing this then you likely will never have a problem no matter how much the invoice is. Organization and authorization (sign-off) is the key, if there are no surprises then they'll pay every time.
> The best are boring large to mid size companies.
I agree, Accounts payable doesn't have any emotional attachment to any amount at these companies. If the invoice has the right approvals/criteria then a check is cut no matter what the amount is.
Are people still getting paid five figures for web development? Was through upwork?
Yes of course. You can get paid anything from $5 to $1000 per hour depending on how good/lucky you are at sales and connections. Not through upwork. My current contract is a full time for over a year now so five figures is expected per month
What kind of work do you do?
The title is kind of misleading, no? The author charged $18k for a "7 weeks adventure where I enjoyed free lunches, drove 50 miles everyday, and dug through emails." Which seems like a pretty appropriate price to buy two months of life.
The static HTML page is ancillary.
The only thing the company paying him got for it was a HTML page. Title makes perfect sense.
The company probably would not have paid $18k if he did not put in the 7 weeks of work...
I think the point of the post is that he _didn't_ do 7 weeks of work; he did 7 weeks of mostly not work.
But look, they occupied his time for 7 weeks full-time. He could have taken another project (opportunity cost) if not for this project. I mean, the inefficiencies of their business processes are not his point of concern - they occupied his time and they should pay for it.
i think most developers would be surprised how small a part writing code actually plays in making money in software development. If you look at a piechart of the effort/time involved in making contact with a client, contracting, delivery, and close out writing the actual code is maybe 15% of that pie.
Exactly
Company I worked for wanted a new public website. In the end they paid over 3 million for a Drupal theme. Impressive waste of time and money.
Absolutely impressive, any idea how did your company find agency to build out the website and cashed out three million dollars?
I've been on similar projects where the client is paying through the nose to a consultancy. I was being paid about £500 a day for my time, but I am sure they were charging the client much more.
I got flown out and put up at a hotel for a week for a PR emergency (it was the 5th anniversary of a merger no one cared about but the new CEO wanted to do something about it) ultimately to make a wordpress site. Everything on my expense report got marked up some percent and passed off to the hiring company. I maybe got a little bonus for the whole thing, so not terrible? Not great. I read Bullshit Jobs a little bit later and it hit a little close to home.
To be fair, most of us developers are out there building what amounts to over-engineered Drupal themes.
That's got to be some kind of guines record. I'd like to see that theme.
Www.nwtel.ca
hello fellow yukoner, that is insane
[dead]
Not even close, let me tell you...
Hertz says "hold my beer": https://www.henricodolfing.ch/case-study-8-how-hertz-paid-ac...
Sometimes the money is mindboggling.
I was invited to a meeting with a group of investors to provide feedback on a tech project.
Afterwards, two of them and I went to a nearby hotel for a sandwich and a soft drink to discuss the project. The bill for three sandwiches and some drinks was £125. They didn't even blink.
For me, that was the price of a month of groceries at the time.
For them the price of the 125 GBP tab is nothing compared to 6-7 figure investment they're about to make based on your advice.
During the dot com boom I bought my first car by doing a weekend of overtime at my day job, on an emergency project. They asked me how much it would take for me to work the weekend, I said the number that was the price of a car, my boss said OK.
(it was a classic 1972 FIAT 500L, it was ~£3200 at the time IIRC)
Heh I had a similar freelance story.
I was told flat out by freelance clients I was (too) cheap. But one time I quoted a much larger project than I was used to, and the client (who was also a relative of someone close to me) insisted on a higher number.
It ended up roughly being the down payment on my first house.
That is amazing
I've come to believe that the software industry is the least meritocratic industry in the history of mankind. I've also experienced similar situations as the author. It's all 100% about company selection. You've got to choose the right company. The rest does not matter AT ALL.
The most I ever got paid working for a company was for a basic project where everyone was moving super slow and people felt comfortable enough to watch YouTube videos in front of their boss and one guy came into work one day wearing his pajamas.
The least I got paid (inflation-adjusted) was a consultancy which had an extremely over-engineered software stack and daily deadlines... Every morning standup started with "What did you get DONE yesterday? What are you going to get DONE today?" If you couldn't point to a specific feature which was FULLY DONE end-to-end, there would be a long awkward pause or the boss would make a negative remark. Their definition of DONE was 100% polished, no iteration; had to be perfect the first time; the boss would sit with you through a very tense one-on-one meeting and go through the detailed requirements for each task word-by-word. The company environment was set up to make it difficult for you to ask question; like the author of this article described so this made it difficult to meet all requirements exactly on the first attempt, let alone given the short deadlines.
I struggled to make sense of the full horror of this industry until Christmas this year; I was at my parent's house and was using their microwave (a popular brand) and it was the most awful UX I had ever seen on a microwave. I literally could not imagine a worse UX if I tried. You couldn't just pin-in the seconds/minutes and press start, you could't extend the start time mid-way through the process and it was hard to start as you had to push a bunch of specific intermediate buttons whose labels made no sense and it would start a fan which kept running even after the microwave was done; I had to pull the plug to get it to shut up... Anyway, this made me think "Wow, my industry sucks... This is the worst software and UX I've ever seen and yet people are still buying this machine! The guy who designed the UX for this thing probably got a promotion too and now giving orders to others about how to do good UX..." This isn't just an outlier 'microwave industry' thing though; this dynamic is present everywhere in the whole tech industry; this was just a particularly striking example.
>It's all 100% about company selection.
I found the more I got paid the better I was treated. I had one client I was doing work for under my previous employment. When I left I charged triple what my previous employer had been charging. Not only did they not bat an eyelid about the price but they started treating me better as well.
The worst customers were those working on slim margins, for a while I was doing a lot of work for component distributors. They were terrible to work for.
It's possible the guy in paragraph 4 who designed the UX didn't get a promotion and did their work in the same kind of environment you describe in paragraph 3.
(Also maybe the fan was wired to a thermostat?)
I was just speculating in this case but my understanding of this industry is that if the product earns money then everyone gets promotions and bonuses. It's not about individual ability.
My point is that there is no correlation between the financial success of the product and the skill of the UX designer or developer; yet financial success is the main metric which is used to determine rank and pay for these specific roles.
I'm happy for sales-people that their pay fully correlates with their performance but as a software developer, it really sucks. My pay correlates much more with the performance of my colleagues in sales than with my own performance. If I'm unlucky, the correlation may in fact be inverted.
I've seen this over and over. I worked in blockchain space; the developers before me wrote TERRIBLE code, the thing was literal spaghetti code, full of vulnerabilities and it's a miracle it didn't get hacked. But the timing was right and many of those early developers earned big money as crypto prices soared in the early days... The people who joined only a few months later and pulled off a heroic redesign/refactoring effort and did an amazing job in record time got peanuts because the hype was dying down. So the fact that they improved the product 100x didn't matter at all. It's like there was 0 recognition.
Bad luck compounds. I could write an entire book about this effect... But that book probably wouldn't sell; ironically, a victim of the same effect it would be describing. People only care about success stories. With good luck; not only do you get to be successful but you get to sell books about it which makes you even more successful. Good luck compounds too.
The fixed price wariness tonyedgecombe mentions is real. Early in my career I'd quote hourly because it felt "fair" - but what I learned is that clients who want fixed pricing often have way more context than you do about the problem's difficulty.
Flipped it around now. If a client is eager for fixed pricing on something that seems simple, I dig deeper. Usually there's a reason three other contractors already passed on it.
The psychological bit about being embarrassed to invoice is spot on though. Took me years to stop treating invoices like I was asking for a favour. The framing shift that helped: you're not asking for money, you're confirming a transaction that was already agreed.
You have to understand that these large corpos move like whales, and the money you quoted is a rounding error. I´ve seen a company department burn cash it was asigned on purpose so it wouldn´t go back to finance (indicating that the department isnt using all their money and something is wrong).
It's literally a different economy. It plays by different rules and has different expectations.
Making the mental adjustment coming from a public college to a private company regarding money has been one of the most difficult transitions I've ever faced.
At the college I had a $250,000 annual budget for IT that had to be planned out to the best of my abilities nearly a year in advance of the actual physical year, get approval from 2-5 levels of management for the budget, and then be flexible on when the money became available to purchase depending on the states fiscal economic factors.
In a private company now, even when I volunteer to do something to save money, they say it's not worth my time and effort, pay someone to do it.
Purchases under $25,000 can be made without approval, over that I just have to ask my direct report for approval.
I'm still personal finance budget minded, so they don't have to worry about me buying gold plated toilet hinges or anything, but it's still financial whiplash even years later for how they do things.
Our combined careers of moving bits around where we have amassed trillions in developer pay for code that doesn't do anything previously built software could... or worse has made the world a horrible place... Is the bigger story.
'code that doesn't do anything previously built software could' I have a hard time understanding what you mean here? Is it just hyperbole but surely the 'code' must do something that previously built software could do. Or do you mean to say it's rarely any better than what it replaced?
When software was paid for at a wage that was like a construction worker back in the day. Sure there could be "some" improvements, but we went a bit nuts making a millions of React developers.
Agencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks Boostrap!!).
I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time they don’t even know how being actively involved in the process will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate them?
TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.
On the flip side I’ve seen many projects go way over budget when a client is actively involved and introduces scope creep that turns into launch blockers. You learn quick to have strong contracts if doing fixed price bids.
Problem seems to be clients don’t know what they want early on and when they start to see progress they understand more what they were actually expecting. Obviously you’d try to get this out of them during project planning.
This is so true, scope creep is real when the client actively gets involved
And when that happens it’s better to move the contract to hourly rather having it fixed price
But you are also right about having a strong contract
“Scope creep is real when the client gets actively involved”
Or when there are multiple stakeholders involved. It’s a never ending stream of making the logo bigger, then reducing the size.
I feel like this is where LLM's/agents could actually help a lot. I don't like all the hype, and think that long-term projects would be better off without heavily written LLM code in any form, but stitching together stuff for a client seems like the perfect use-case, as long as they understand it's not the final product.
I have a similar, but in one way even more insane story, although I was paid more of an employee than a consultant hourly rate. I worked at a big critical infrastructure type company for a good two months and I was supposed to work on-site on intranet-only software. The thing was, the rest of the people in the department were working from home three days a week, I couldn't be "unsupervised" in the building, and it took them almost a whole months to set me up with a VPN. Since my app had to integrate with half a dozen different internal systems, none of which had API specs let alone mock servers, the only thing I could really do from home was was write CSS on mock HTML files. That, combined with waiting like two weeks to get a Visual Studio license approved, meant I spent more than half of my time there at home, doing absolutely no work. The manager fully knew that and I still got paid tho.
I used to do a lot of fixed price contract work. I used to rationalize that I owned the IP and I was my own boss.
These days I just charge an hourly rate. It's so much easier. Just turn up, do the work, go home. If the requirements change or I have to wait for an asset, no problem, I'm getting paid.
I used to work as a freelancer back in the days. I worked a lot for a customer became a good friend. At first I'd work on his projects, but this ultimately shifted to a model where I'd work on projects for his clients, I would bill him, and he would add his margin and bill the end-customer. It worked out great this way.
One day I got a call from him saying that our 'mutual' customer had an urgency job. They were supposed to do a national roll-out of a new payment system, but seemed to have forgotten about a bunch of legacy PoS systems that were still operational and couldn't easily be replaced. Because I was seemingly the only one that was still familiar with this particular system (I worked on it once in the past), the end-customer approached my friend whether I would be available to do this quick. This was in late November, and the rollout was planned for Januari. Because this end-customer is a government org, I realised we'd be guaranteed they wouldn't be working during the holidays (which, in my country is typically 2 weeks for Christmas and new-year's), so really we had only 10 days or so to get it done in time for their team to test it before they holiday shutdown.
I didn't feel like doing such a complex job on such tight deadline. So, I quoted a much higher rate than normal. I also quoted for a multitude of hours that I thought was required, due to the typical overhead that this large end-customer would surely incur. Finally I also added a retainer fee, because I knew that if problems would occur (likely on the last day before the rollout), I'd have to drop anything I was doing and work for them.
I got the job.
I worked feverishly to meet the deadline. I cancelled commitments on other projects, paid an extortionate amount for testing hardware and overnight delivered to my office, bought very expensive testing gear, signed all the NDA's required to work on PoS card payment interfaces, etc. I then worked basically round the clock for 10 days straight to get it done. I did get it done in time, submitted the code to the repository and fired an email to the team-manager that it was in fact done a day early. ...I was greeted with an auto-reply the manager would be on holiday till mid-January, which was the week that entire new payment system had to be rolled out nation-wide.
I wasn't feeling great about it, but my friend urged me to send the invoice for the work I had done, and also the retainer for the rest of December and January. This would allow the customer to write of the expenses in the current calendar-year. I sent the invoice, it was the most amount of money I'd ever invoiced, and I'd normally invoiced per month, this was for a mere 10 days.
December passed, no response from the supposed review team. I stayed on stand-by, declined any other work, stayed sober during the various new-year's office parties, always brought my laptop along, etc.
January came and went. Still no response from the code review team. The new payment system was due to be rolled out mid-january, but nothing had happened. The company had done extensive ad-campaigns beforehand announcing the new payment convenience for their end-users, so the only 'feedback' I saw were frustrated users on Twitter. I still felt bad about charging for the retainer.
This kept going. At some point I did stop sending invoices for the retainer. My friend always paid me in advance (the end-customer was notoriously slow to pay, though did always pay in the end), and I didn't want to cause him too much exposure.
To my knowledge, the software I wrote was never used in the end. To the public it was stated that the PoS systems were simply too old to be upgraded (not true, obv) and that they'd replace them 'soon'. It is now 4 or 5 years laters, the old PoS terminals are still there, sans the functionality I added.
By pure coincidence, years after the job I found out that an old friend of mine, who was also a freelancer at the time, was tasked around that same time by the same customer to do a code-review of a supposed PoS system upgrade. Without realising, he reviewed my code! He was under the same time pressure, and did the code review during Christmas to deliver the results on time before the national rollout in mid-January. He also charged a huge amount of money for it, was also paid, and also never heard about it again. At least he said he remembered being impressed by the quality of the code, and didn't find any defects. So that's about the best outcome of the project I guess.
My takeaway from this: If you are a freelancer, and a large customer wants something done in a hurry, charge more than you ever dared, don't feel bad about it. You'll find that suddenly there isn't as much of a deadline anymore. If the customer declines due to the price, you should be happy for dodging a bullet.
That's nothing compared to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
The critical phrase is "that sponsored page"; almost certainly the hiring company was doing the page cost plus, so the more they paid, the more they got.
Value your time, or others won't.
Stories like this are only happening to "one guy I know", it's not something that will every happen to any of us
Although not as drastic, I had a similar experience when I was consulting. The inefficiency is staggering!
Nice work! Where is your law degree from?
Thanks, just DMed you
the longest case I know is a guy in big crypto who after a fallout was taking care of a zombie company for about a year and half, full pay, practically 1 or 2 hours of work some of the weeks
(2019)
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386
I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386 - May 2019 (441 comments)
More contributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19921386
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I hate humblebrag posts and hide them, but this was a good read. It's funny and I can relate.
It's interesting that Claude could do this in about 10 minutes.