I heard about a big software project that took a couple of dozen developers a few years to build. The project had difficult security requirements that ended up having a login take over an hour to accomplish due to all of the verification between systems that had to occur.
The team went into a client review cycle knowing this was a big problem. The client sat through the entire presentation and demonstration without a question. Always a bad sign.
As the meeting was closing and everyone was gathering up their things one of the developers asked if the login time was a high priority or not. (Duh!)
The client lead, while still gathering their things and not even looking up, said, “No. We have a contract. We will pay you for the software. But, we are going to use something else anyway.”
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Business Practice, Clients
I usually have one or two side projects running at any time. Most are pretty small, so just pay me the few hundred when done.
Once in a while a bigger project comes along in the 5-10K range. In these cases I ask for 1/3 upfront, 1/3 on code complete and 1/3 on acceptance. I think this is pretty reasonable. This avoids dreamers who have no money and a**h****s that don’t plan on paying.
Why is this a surprise to the project sponsors? Could someone get a carpenter to come to their house for nothing? Some people appear to get really upset and walk from the project and I don’t think they fit into the cases I was trying to exclude above.
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Clients
We have a client that asks for changes to a portal regularly. They pay so we do pretty much whatever they want. Once in a while we can offer a better way of solving the problem.
Lately there have been a couple of changes that sounded difficult to pursue. Upon further investigation we realized: our software can do this now, we have the data needed to provide the solution and (this is the best part) we had originally developed the feature that way and the customer told us to shut off that part n months ago.
Of course, we turn the feature back on for them.
It just must be nice to have so many resources (time, money, us) available to you that whimsical changes are acceptable. And I thought you had to win the lottery to do that.
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Clients
I got into what should have been a very small programming adjustment to a fairly large site to just expose an Excel sheet. Very common type of stuff. Agent got me FTP access and sample file. Grabbed what appeared to be the creatives on other pages and put the page together. Tested on my server no problem.
Push code onto the FTP given and I can’t find the file I just uploaded by hitting the web site?
Upon further checking found that none of the directories or filenames that I see from FTP correspond to any of the url directories or file names from hitting the website with a browser. As part of FTP exploration find cold fusion references, some archaic authentication server reference, lots of jumbled up code going back to the mid 1990’s.
I have the agent ask if there is some other FTP access to the site (mentioning what I found above). His comment “We’re paying you, figure it out!”
How do you qualify clients?
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Clients