Subj : Re: How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract?
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp
From : rem642b
Date : Tue Jul 12 2005 01:49 am

> From: michael@bcect.com (Michael Sullivan)
> Programmers can't ask for minimum wage, because professional
> programmers *don't* *get* *paid* *minimum* *wage*.

Your comment is irrelevant because I don't ask for money from anyone,
not minimum wage, not any amount whatsoever. It makes no sense to ask
money from somebody who has never indicated any willingness to pay me
whatsoever. If and when anybody expresses an interest in paying me to
do work for them, *then* the amount they offer or the amount I ask or
the amount we agree upon would become relevant. Right now what I need
most of all is simply interviews. I haven't even one employment
interview since 1994. (Somebody at a job faire who is standing in a
booth and has everyone who walks up show their resume and he spends 10
seconds looking at my resume to declare they don't have any openings
that I'd qualify for, doesn't count as an interview.) That last
interview was on Miranda street in Palo Alto just off Foothill
Expressway. I remember that street because that's my daughter's name
(named after a character in the StarTrek-TOS series). The next-to-last
interview was about four hours long, 45 minutes with each of five
interviewers, for a company on Middlefield near 237, in 1993.Dec. When
I got back home from that totally exhausting interview, my wife accused
me of being out with another woman the whole time, and refused to let
me call the company on the phone to have her talk to them to convince
her it was a job interview that took so long. That company strung me
along more than two months before they finally told me they hadn't
decided to hire me. The third-from-last job interview I can't remember
whether it was for RSA data security or the company in Concord or what.
That second-to-last-interview was so horribly exhausting it tended to
erase my memory of the sequence leading up to it.

> If you walk into my company and claim you are a software developer
> and expect me to pay $7 an hour for your labor, and I don't know you,
> and I can't watch you do real programming work in front of me -- I'm
> going to assume you are a *crank*, and not a developer.

And that whole diatribe of yours is a strawman, because I *never* walk
into any company *expecting* them to hire me, at any price, whatsoever.
I hope they'll hire me, but I would never *expect* you to hire me.

Also, I've offered to do trial work for free just to prove I can do
something useful very quickly, get it up and running in a few hours one
day, but nobody has been willing to let me demonstrate. So your remark
about "can't watch me do real programming..." is bullshit. Come here
right now (well not now at midnight, but tomorrow when it's legal
visiting hours in this subsidized housing complex) and I'll work for
you right in front of your eyes, and then I still won't *expect* you to
proceed to hire me, but I *will* expect to post to the net that I did
what I said I could do. So I've made the offer to contest your
bullshit. The ball is in your court. Put up or shut up. I can
demonstrate either Lisp (CMUCL) or Java (J2SE 1.3.1), your choice.

> Competent *secretaries* make at least $30K a year,

Competant *employed* secretaries only. Unemployed secretaries don't
make $30K/yr or anything even close.

> Do you think software development is easier than that?

For me, yes. I have no idea how to do, or I'm incapable of doing, the
kinds of tasks that secretaries usually do: schedule meetings, deal
with office politics, schedule airline flights, type 125 WPM (I can
type about 60 WPM, after deducting 5*errors, during a short test, but
then I'm exhausted for an hour or so), understanding strange foreign
accents over the phone, hearing five people talk at the same time
without spacing out, understanding somebody in high-background-noise
environment, switch back and forth between multiple tasks every 2-3
minutes without getting confused, read or type or think at the same
time as listening to somebody talk to me, make coffee, remember names
and faces of new people I've just seen for the first time.

Designing and implementing computer software to solve specific problems
that are well-defined, in a quiet environment with nobody interrupting
me or talking in the same room, is a lot easier for me than what a
secretary does.

> Do you think the pool of competent programmers is bigger relative to
> the demand?

If you're referring to people capable of designing and implementing new
software, yes, there are hardly any jobs available, but lots of
unemployed people begging for such jobs.

If you mean people with exactly the skill sets required according to
typical job ads, no, there's probably not one person in the world with
all those skills simultaneously in one person.

> If you think your skills are worthless ...

From a false premise like that, anything you say next is worthless.
(If you don't believe that "a implies b" has the same truth-table as
"not-a or b", you have some urgent homework to do.)

> They care about what your program *does*.

No they don't. They *should* care that I have produced lots of good
working software and I can make more even now, but nobody ever cares
what I can do. Not one person (other than myself) has expressed any
interest in any software I've written in the past 15 years. I've been
begging people to look at my software I've already done, but they say
they don't have the time or interest. The closest I ever came to
somebody showing an interest was when I drove around to *all* the
employment agencies/recruiters in Mountain View trying to show them my
CGI/CMUCL demo, and only one would look at, a guy at Volt, and he said
he liked it, but he recruit only for MicroSoft and they haven't been
hiring since the recession started in early 2001 and show no prospect
of hiring any time soon. When I called back another year he said they
still weren't hiring, haven't been hiring the whole time from 2001.Jan
to last time I asked. But after I left his office, as far as I know he
never again looked at my program, so I don't count him as showing
interest in it, and he didn't want to see any other of my software
whatsoever.

> They care about how much money or time it saves them, or how much
> profit they will make on new business it allows them to get. If you
> can't come up with a way to estimate those numbers and it is not
> self-evident to the potential customer, then they will not pay you a
> dime for any amount of code.

I have not the foggiest idea how much money some company will make in
the upcoming years. Even their Chief Financial Officer can't say that,
although at least he is privy to inside information that would give him
a Sahara-snowball's chance of making a halfway decent guess. Me, I have
*no* inside information, I'm not privy to their confidential business
plan or internal projects etc. so how do you expect me to do better
than their CFO at predicting their upcoming profit with and without my
new software?

> if you are not charging an amount that will equate to at *least* $30
> per billable hour, nobody will take you seriously.

What, you expect me to send a bill to somebody who has never given me
any reason whatsoever to expect them to ever hire me or pay me
anything?? Wake up, idiot! I can't charge somebody until and unless
that person agrees to hire me.

Should I start charging you $60/hr for the time it takes me to rebut
your stupid newsgroup postings?? Can I quote your remarks as evidence
that you offered to enter into a binding contract with me for more than
$30/hr for my services, and now you owe me for my time, at my stated
rate of $60/hr which is the going rate for consultants who have 22+
years experience as I do, whereupon if you don't pay I can send your
account to a collection agency and expect to collect on it?

P.S. I'm still pissed that RSA Data Security didn't hire me even though
I was fully qualified for the opening they had. That's the one job
where I got interviewed and they were impressed with me and I really was
fully qualified and I should have gotten the job.

.