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 : Sat Aug 13 2005 06:30 pm > From: "Phlip" > I think Robert has successfully pissed off every head-hunter in town. Are you talking about after I patiently waited more than ten years for even one of them to find me an interview, and finally after more than ten years of their total incompetance, finally I start speaking out in public and they don't like me telling the world how incompetant they are? Frankly I don't care if I piss them off at this point. Or are you saying that somehow I pissed them off way back in 1991 when I first started the current sequence of asking them if they can find me a job because I have just recently (1991.Sep.01) become unemployed after being steadily employed for ten years? If you're making that claim, please present evidence of something I said or did way back in 1991 to piss off all appx. hundred of them such that that's the reason they haven't gotten me even one interview in all the time from 1991.Sep until the more recent time when my patience was exhausted and I started my public complaining about their incompetance. > If Robert's interactions with this newsgroup are similar to his > interactions with them... My interactions with them during the first several years since I became unemployed was totally different. I was totally polite and patient. I never contacted them unless there was a job ad that I wanted to respond to, except for some cases where I used the Yellow Pages to call them at random to ask whether they knew of any openings in my area and might be able to help me find a job. Never a complaint about them for quite a number of years. I was the total nice guy who is ignored by everyone in favor of the squeeky wheel that is irritating enough gets noticed. Even now my interactions with them are non-complaining, merely sending my tailored resume in response to their job ad, and waiting patiently for them to respond, and occasionally when I have a new general resume I FAX it to a whole bunch of them to alert them that I'm still looking for employment and to get back onto their "hot list" of resumes at the top of their attention spam, and only one responded in any way, to complain that they're accepting resumes *only* via MicroSoft word attachment to e-mail, which I have no way to send from my Unix shell account, so it took several months before I could find a way to get a resume to that agency, and then it just went into a black hole. (Does anybody want the name of that MS-Word-only agency?) > I have started charging per line-item in the feature request list. > That means if I estimate X to take 30 minutes, and it does, I win. I would really like to bill that way, but I've never found anyone willing to contract or otherwise pay for my services on that basis. By the way, how much money (US$ please) would you charge for a feature that took you only a half hour to implement and debug and test and integrate with the overall program and fully document as addendum to the regular program documentation? I especially like that idea during the initial stages of working with a given client/employer, when I am not sure I'll ever get paid, and they aren't sure I can really do the work, so we incrementally build trust by my delivering and their paying for a little bit at a time. But nobody has any money to pay for any custom software, only packaged software from the big vendors. I can't even find somebody to let me implement something for free as a demo of my ability to do the particular kind of software work. For example, there's a guy with offices near here who has written a desktop C++ application that he would like to interface to CGI. I explained how I like to write CGI applications, and it'd be easy for me to write a CGI front-end to his C++ application if he just tells me which two or three use cases to start with as my demo and then after I get a toy version of the interface running he tells me the actual C++ function/method calls into his program so I can convert my toy interface into a real interface into his real program. But he hasn't been able to get any new buyers for his program, CGI or otherwise, and he's spending all his time looking for buyers, so he doesn't even have time to spend ten minutes writing me an e-mail listing the use cases he'd like to see in my first free demo, and as far as I know he hasn't even had time to try the CGI/C++ demo I already have online as part of my how-to-HelloPlus tutorial project, wherein my demo calls a routine to decode the URL-encoded.form contents, then fetches the various fields by name to demonstrate that it really does have them decoded individually. That guy is the closest I've come to finding anyone interested in contracting/hiring my services in the past several years. > And it shows my confidence in my estimates. Actually I interpret it oppositely to you: If I bill on the basis of half-hour tasks, then it means I need at the end of a half hour to get feedback whether my estimate was correct or not before I proceed to the next half hour, that I don't trust my own estimates longer than a half hour into the future. This is great for me just starting at contract work like this, where if I make a horrible mistake in estimation, it takes me five hours instead of the half hour I estimated, off by a full order of magnitude, still it's only 4.5 hours of unpaid work for my mistake, no big deal, less time than I spend responding to newsgroup posts in the average day. It's not like if I contract for a job on the basis it'll take me a half year and it actually takes me five years of which I get paid only for the first half year, and I don't get paid one penny until after the product is finally delivered 4.5 years after promised, if the buyer hasn't found a way to back out of the contract already by then. .