20 ms·
I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page
- qnsi 7y agoAmazing. It kind of sound unbelievable, but I don’t have that much experience working with big corporations. This should be read by everyone concerned about, how few people in a startup can beat big corporations
- noir_lord 7y agoBig corporations are batshit. One division will be counting paperclips and another dropping $50k on a machine no one needs to do their job. It entirely comes down to management in each place.
- merpnderp 7y agoThis is true of every BigCorp I've been at. An IT department will be carefully evaluating some extremely expensive class of enterprise software. A business department will randomly purchase one of those options at random, without consulting IT, just because a software vendor mentioned it in a passing.
- protomyth 7y agoBe on a project where you billed over a 100 hours for some aspect of it that they decide to cancel. It is amazing how group decisions can blow so much. Now, I do not mean experiments and throwing the artifacts of that experimenting. That makes perfect sense. Its when they have a need for something that is part of their current business and they just don't execute properly to the point of cancellation.
- irrational 7y agoI work for a Fortune 100 company. I've seen $5+ million spent on some software that was abandoned a year later, and nobody loses their job! It happens frequently enough that everyone is basically blase about it.
- nickpsecurity 7y agoIve heard $300 million was spent on a system at a comoany I worked at which didnt work at all. They bought it because a competitor did. The lower-level managers had to tell the higher-level ones that it was OK "despite some problems." They kept tying more things into it and recommending it to others. Media reports same thing. Funny that the supplier's entire business model seems to be to charge so much for a BS solution that each company is forced to recommend it to others to avoid reporting the loss.
- tetra_proxy 7y agoI work at a decent sized Engineering Firm, I billed 4 Months of time to a project they then outsourced. Then again I'm salaried, but that's still 4 months of wasted effort.
- mrguyorama 7y ago>Big corporations are batshit. Why do you think this is limited to big corporations? Plenty of smaller shops are doing the exact same thing
- joshvm 7y agoIt sounds believable to me. I've had some interactions with big companies and you have to readjust what you think is a reasonable price for something. I work with hardware and you'd be amazed how much people will spend without batting an eyelid (eg tens of thousands on a single instrument). In some cases they'll even remark at how inexpensive what you've offered is. For example, the thermal cameras I work with are now consumer available for $5k. A decade ago you'd easily spend an order of magnitude more for the same sort of performance. And companies would happily fork out for it. Bear in mind this company just lost a developer. The overheads for that member of staff alone, for two months, probably exceed $20k in the US.
- docker_up 7y agoDuring the early days of "intranets", I worked at a very large company akin to a government organization. I thought we could save paper by putting our reports on the intranet instead of printing it out. There was one particularly important report that had needed to be printed every week, and it seemed like a good candidate. I called the person who needed the report, but they said they didn't need it, and passed me to the person who requested it from them. I called the next person, and they passed me onto another person. I followed this about 5 people deep until I found one person who told me that they didn't need that report at all. I left that company within 2 months of joining.
- thrower123 7y ago$18000 is the kind of petty cash that a lot of departments have lying around in their budgets at the end of a quarter. Especially if the budgeting process is of the use-it-or-lose-it variety, there can be a push to buy things that are unnecessary at the end of quarters or fiscal years. I've been involved in more than one project where a company bought a largish subscription license for a product, and never got anybody lined up to actually deploy it before the licensing ran out - I assume whoever was in charge of that initiative got laid off or took a new job and it fell through the cracks.
- peshooo 7y agoI don't know how it is in big corporations in America. But working as a consultant in Western Europe, I have been more than once in a situation where I'm starting on a project and I have to wait more than 3-4 months for things like accounts, access/permissions, laptop. Its pretty pathetic at the dailies, to report every day that I'm still waiting for these things.
- qnsi 7y agomy friends in Poland (but working for international corps) have similar stories. Starting work and not doing anything for few months before they get everything they need
- ryanbrunner 7y agoEntertaining story - although as advice to anyone reading it, running up the clock without proactively notifying people that you're going way beyond your original estimate is a very good way to make getting paid incredibly difficult.
- _bxg1 7y agoIt was my impression that that's what he did. Of course the whole situation still could've made it difficult to get paid, but I don't think there's anything else he could've done.
- Semiapies 7y agoSpecifically telling them that they had kept him over his initial estimate (and so his estimate was increasing) when he neared or passed that point. He didn't sound terribly proactive about bringing this up while talking to people, either. Lunches with the manager where they didn't talk any business, etc.
- megaremote 7y agoNo, he clearly didn't. He only worked out the costs at the end.
- im_new_here 7y agoI don't disagree, but it's worth noting that at the end of it all, he billed them for $18k and they decided it was too little.
- Aeolun 7y agoI mean, if I’m not paying with my money. And I know the guy has just been there waiting for stuff to happen for weeks, I’d happily do the same thing.
- tomcam 7y agoAccording to the article he emailed them daily.
- jamesb93 7y agoSo much waste - I'm not saying he didn't earn his money but how is it possible for a company to run cash positive when it wastes like that?
- rocky1138 7y agoRIM would like to know your location
- pornel 7y agoLarge companies operate on a completely different scale of money. If this was a page for a product that's going to make a million dollars, this expense was still a rounding error.
- axlee 7y agoBut why are they so stingy with salaries, then?
- romainsestier 7y agoBecause they have to manage these costs at a much bigger scale.
- abraae 7y agoBecause they have thousands of employees and squeezing salaries is an obvious easy to move the bottom line significantly. In the short term anyway.
- Scramblejams 7y agoSalaries usually come out of a different budget, one that has visibility all the way up to the C-suites. The web page mentioned was probably paid for out of a marketing budget, which often doesn't get as much scrutiny because (1) it's handed out in a big chunk and it's up to the business unit to decide how to divvy that chunk up and (2) marketing spend is much easier to turn down in the event of a slowdown than salaries.
- 7y ago
- rocky1138 7y agoThis is how corporate works. They have budgets for things. The money doesn't come out of the pocket of the person who cuts the cheque. You send in an invoice and it gets paid. If it doesn't, the company is insolvent or they are at risk to lawsuits which will cost them more than your paltry $18000. But they don't even think about the lawsuit part. Bill comes in, cheque goes out.
- wjnc 7y agoCan you give my boss the 101? He has me methodically checking invoices against tenders. I would actually argue the other way. As our consultants rely on our return business, they would quickly solve any problem with the invoice even if not to the letter correct. We have bargaining power and they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
- bluGill 7y agoDepends on how burned your boss has been. For a while finance departments just paid invoices without question. It was a lot cheaper than what we have now. Then someone in finance did an audit of a routine invoice (a random thing to show a junior how it could be done if requested) and discovered the "services rendered" on the invoice was just sending an invoice - no other work was being done. Now the company spends a lot of money to carefully verify every invoice is for real work done. It might cost more money in the long run but it doesn't feed fraud. The above might be an urban legend, but it is still a good story.
- jerf 7y agoI'm sure there was plenty of this sort of fraud occurring in the 1950s and such, but technology has enabled this sort of thing a lot lately. Not quite the same but closely related, the "email from the 'CEO' explaining why you need to wire money to this numeric account" is a huge and very profitable scam right now. That stunt may have been possible 50 years ago, but modern scale, tools like LinkedIn making it easy to target the employees that might have that authority, etc. make it all way easier. Oblivious companies get burned quickly nowadays.
- 0898 7y agoPeople think government is wasteful, but in my experience big corporations are an order of magnitude worse.
- osrec 7y agoYou should try working in an investment bank as a contractor. You need to find the right team, but a lot of them are massive collections of people doing virtually nothing but getting paid great daily rates. The trick is to look busy and wrap your team/yourself in a perceived sense of enigma and complexity. If you play your cards right, you can end up in a situation where no one will ask questions as long as you fire off an email now and again. You can keep getting paid for doing almost nothing for years.
- linuxftw 7y agoThis describes >80% of engineering departments at past large firms where I've worked. Ironically, these people are 'architects' and get paid handsomely.
- maxxxxx 7y agoThe IT department in my company is full of “senior architects” and “principal architects” who are very pleasant talkers but don’t do anything from what I can tell. They have a ton of stories how they helped others but whenever I needed something from them nothing ever happened besides a lot of meetings.
- linuxftw 7y agoThis is precisely why corporations have so many meetings. Without them, there's whole divisions of people that would be doing nothing all day, every day. No code reviews, no specs, no code, no operational capacity, just taking the credit for other people's actual output.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bitcoinmoney 7y agoWhat is handsomely? Like Netflix handsomely or 140k?
- solotronics 7y ago
- jbob2000 7y agoPfft that's nothing. We just had a contractor charge us $50k to setup a simple HTTP proxy. I looked at the code; it's a .NET starter app with our endpoints in it that route to other endpoints. $50k and it probably took them 2 hours, which was probably mostly just packages downloading.
- BonesJustice 7y agoIndeed, $50k for a few hours of work is a lot better (for the contractor) than the $21k for 280 hours chronicled in the original post. Hell, considering probably he spent most of his time sitting around, bored out of his mind, and had to commute 50 miles each day, I would have passed on the contract.
- holler 7y agodid you pay it? that's crazy!
- irrational 7y agoHe didn't, but I'm sure his non-technical business boss did.
- danmaz74 7y agoIf that was the amount that was in the contract, of course they paid.
- jbob2000 7y agoIt’s really gross how big companies operate. Our VP was more than happy to pay it! I would even go so far as to say that our entire solution was structured in favour the contractor. A smarter solution didn’t need their proxy at all, but this was the direction we “had” to go with.
- vokep 7y agoReading stuff like this makes me wonder if I'm not missing out, having a salaried job. :/
- billybrown 7y agoLMAO should have went https://freepage.io https://freepage.io and did it for .... well free
- duxup 7y agoI know someone working as a contractor for a big company. 1 year contract. 6 months have gone by and they've done ... nothing. Their boss keeps saying "Don't worry we'll get to you, we're just swamped right now, you're good." They're already talking about extending the contract.
- tomduncalf 7y agoYeah this happens more than you’d expect! Never had it myself but I’ve worked st places where it’s happened to colleagues (usually assigned unimportant BAU work than actually doing nothing but I do know of people who’ve basically had nothing to do!)
- duxup 7y agoI sort of suspect all these people I've met that I've wondered why they like being a contractor .... are all on that system. I kinda want to be a contractor now.
- AchieveLife 7y agoThat's why I offer a retainer package. Get paid for just being available when needed and work a non-conflicting contract elsewhere.
- duxup 7y ago
- potta_coffee 7y agoMan I thought I was doing good at $1k.
- codegeek 7y agoThe adventures of enterprise/corporate payments. They can be annoying, slow, bureaucratic but boy when the time comes, invoice gets paid. One of our smaller business customers recently got acquired by a large corporate so the next $5000 "small enhancement" project had to go through their procurement who then apologized when we demanded the payment immediately. Why ? Because they thought they had not paid on time even though we literally had sent them the invoice a week ago (our smaller business clients will pay "due upon receipt"). This corporate client apologized profusely but when we finally realized it was not 30 days (they pay net 30), we backed off :). Still got a couple of apologies.
- justaguyhere 7y agoCool story. Now, how can I find such jobs/companies, minus the commute? :P
- ErotemeObelus 7y agoPredatory.
- sctb 7y agoCould you please post thoughtfully and informatively? This is a conversation website not a drive-by snark site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jbverschoor 7y agoHe didn't charge 18K. He got lucky while he did not keep his promise of his quote. He kept his mouth shut, even though he knew he needed to have a difficult talk about assets and time reserved etc. Instead of that, he waited for weeks before he nervousy crafted an invoice full of mistakes because he was probably editting and re-editing because he knew he was doing something wrong, but had a conflicted mind because he felt entitled to get paid a daily rate instead of fixed price like he agreed. He then sent the email safely from home miles away.
- IkmoIkmo 7y agoI've got similar experiences working for corporate clients, but it was legal work, not tech stuff. It was a bit more complex than the equivalent of a static HTML, but something that anyone with an IQ of > 90 could learn in less than half a year. There were days when I'd charge clients $15k... for a day's work. This wouldn't have been possible if I worked on-site. But I was essentially completing $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in total. Corporations get kind of crazy, there's extreme focus on some areas (mainly, those with KPIs and KPI owners attached), and extreme nonchalance on others. They're so big that there's just lots of insane things like this that slip through.
- mettamage 7y agoI'd like to ask a couple of questions about this. My email is in my profile if you'd like to answer them.
- bduerst 7y agoThese types of gigs are more about who you know rather than the work that gets done. I'm guessing that you didn't just cold interview for this work, right?
- heartbreak 7y ago$15k per day billable for legal work sounds exactly like biglaw, and you don't cold interview for that.
- IkmoIkmo 7y agoIndeed. My story isn't entirely comparable as I didn't do it as an independent. This was indeed billed as an employee of a fin/legal company with offices in ~100 countries. For some background info for the person you're replying to... I can easily name a whole range of colleagues with whom I could easily complete $1m per person / annum of work (about $4k a day) in billable time. The problem is you don't get the work without the company name. Even having worked in this business, with clients trusting me on a personal level who'd love to grant me the work even if I worked as an independent contractor... my clients are other fortune 500 companies, sales goes through a process, which has all kinds of checks and balances in place. For example, if you have no certification for data security (i.e., audited on e.g. ISO2700-1/2), you don't stand a chance to say receive sensitive due diligence docs in order to perform legal work. Performing such an audit can easily cost hundreds of thousands a year, just to pay the auditor. Building an internal framework to comply with standards, regulations etc, costs way more. This makes it impossible for small firms or contractors to compete as they can't average out a $100k audit over $50m in revenues. Not all work has these requirements of course. But in some fields, and some clients do. Building an internal software tool for a national seller of paint products, fine as an independent contractor. Trying to win a government tender for a tool that handles personal data, extremely likely you won't be considered without working for an organisation that has 10 certifications in place that cost >$1m a year to renew. In my line of work, it'd be very tricky to sell my work to clients as an independent.
- testplzignore 7y agoAnyone else think $21k for this much time is too low? That's $156k a year assuming full-time hours which a contractor probably isn't going to get. Plus the guy lives in California. Plus health insurance. What's a typical rate for this length of contracting work in California?
- greggyb 7y agoKeep in mind the work being done. He emphasizes its simplicity. This is not a senior role requiring a huge amount of expertise. Of course, he's probably charging too little in general. Everyone is.
- busterarm 7y ago3x salary is the general advice given to contractors starting out.
- mrguyorama 7y ago$156k is 3x my salary from a few months ago and I'm building out business critical systems, not dreamweaver level websites
- vkou 7y agoConsider that the toilet in my office is a business critical system. If it doesn't work, nobody else does.
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y agoTime for a new job mate
- busterarm 7y agoHaving been severely underpaid myself in the past, please know that you are _severely underpaid_. You should definitely look for somewhere else that will pay you more money. If you'd like to discuss it offline, I'm happy to.
- tmaly 7y agoIcing on the cake would have been if he had made a little extra effort and got additional contracts from the same company
- monicageller018 7y agoThis is an impressive story! It's unbelievable to read about how some big companies function. The funniest part is that he didn't get paid $18,000 like the title says - but $21,000!
- jhallenworld 7y agoBut is this really want to do with your time, even if you are getting paid?
- zitterbewegung 7y agoI charged $500 for a single static HTML page in the early 2010s. I figured out free hosting using Google App Engine. Also I was on a Skype call the whole time and it had to be done by the end of the day with the client . I don’t think the author did anything wrong .
- Insanity 7y agothe money is good, but the working condition seems to be bad :D I'd hate having to work with soemone constantly 'peering over my shoulder' even if just virtually.
- zitterbewegung 7y agoI sent them pictures not a live video screen cast..
- sxp62000 7y agoHa! Imagine how much a Deloitte-like company would've charged them for making that html page.
- moron4hire 7y ago10x just to come up with the PowerPoints saying they could do it for another 50x. Then still fuck it up.
- atemerev 7y agoSome static HTML pages (e.g. ICO landings when it was still a thing) could well be worth $18k and more.
- readbeard 7y agoIndeed! Consider a simple brochure-style marketing page, which is often a good use case for static HTML. Such a page should be centered around content, and that content (photography, illustration, copy, animation, etc.) may need to be specially built for the page and may be expensive to produce. Everything has to fit together flawlessly, telling a compelling story while staying on-brand. Performance needs to be great. And if the page is generating much revenue, it is easy to justify spending even more money in optimizations if they are likely to improve conversion rates. I realize this has nothing to do with the ridiculous situation described in the article, but I do think it's worth pointing out that $18k is not at all an inherently ridiculous amount of money to charge for a static HTML page. In some cases, it may not be nearly enough.
- qaq 7y agoHad a similar story was a subcontractor to a huge digital agency on an advertising related project for F50 company. Was a small webapp (40h of pure dev time) we were actually on a fixed price contract 15k. Had a bunch of meetings with up to 20 people on the call (copyrighter from digital agency present in every single meeting for an app that had a single button with a single word submit). Eventually we had a meeting with actual VP of the F50 who said he forgot to email that he no longer needed the project and to pay everyone. We got our 15k and digital agency got prob to the tune of 500K.
- Insanity 7y agoI read the title, expecting it to be kind of a 'scam', or at least that they overcharged and got away with it. Turns out he did spent that time at the company where they hired him and it only seems fair to me. Even though they probably just wasted too much of his time - and their money.
- spsrich2 7y agoHe's lucky to have got paid at all. But his experience is totally normal for how large companies operate.
- _bxg1 7y agoThe traditional wisdom is that as a technical employee, you don't want to work for a non-technical company. Sounds like as a contractor it's the opposite.
- dzhiurgis 7y agoI'm in midst of a contract that was supposed to take 2-3 weeks - my mate asked for help, they desperately need good developers. I think it's 6 months now ($60k++), while past 3 were "we are almost there now". It's all typical crap - trying to squish some crap into JIRA, molesting Slack in some weirdest ways, tester reporting bugs in less than 6 sentences... All I can think of is that I didn't ask for a high enough hourly rate and I want this over ASAP.
- davinic 7y agoIf you've signed a contact for a fixed period, demand that they raise your rate at each renewal. Don't give them the entire benefit of your flexibility without some concession on their end. If they want you month-to-month, your rate changes month-to-month.
- gk1 7y agoGreat illustration of why hourly billing makes no sense, for either side. In this case, as usual, the amount of hours "spent" on the project has little to do with actual value provided. From the contractor's side, he's excited about getting 12x the original quote, instead of realizing he's been severely undercharging for his work and could've been earning 10x or more all this time. I wonder if the author will start charging appropriately for the value he's providing, or if he'll consider this a fluke and continue with $75/hour. Phrased another way... How many times did you complete a project within the estimated time and get paid $1,500, when actually the company would have been glad to pay $18,000? Last week there was a thread about consulting tips. I couldn't believe how many people were arguing for hourly billing. One person was even proud of billing by the minute! I hope those people see this story and realize what they're leaving on the table. I have similar stories to this, where work got delayed due to issues on client's end. One time, I spent a month doing nothing while the client was dealing with something, which later turned out to be a big acquisition. If I billed by "hours worked" then I'd get nothing, but because I had a monthly retainer I still got paid. Edit: I'm not advocating "fixed price." I'm advocating monthly retainers.
- aplummer 7y agoHourly billing is how you protect yourself against a sloppy client like this, especially with unpredictability. I have seen fixed price blow up so much I would never ever do it personally - I would have to add so much it would be astonishing to be worth it.
- davinic 7y agoI would never bid a fixed amount with a client like this. The only way to do a fixed-bid is if a) the requirements are 100% defined, b) appropriate controls are in place to account for scope changes and roadblocks, and c) the price of the overage risk were priced into the bid.
- gk1 7y agoFirstly, I bet if you asked OP they would say $18k is "astonishing," and yet here we are. Secondly, you can avoid most issues by charging for a weekly or monthly retainer. It's much easier to estimate number of months than number of hours.
- kissgyorgy 7y agoSounds like real-life to me unfortunately :D
- koala_man 7y agoAs a teenager I once got paid a flat rate of $300 for what turned out to be a ten minute job with Excel vlookups. Funny that my hourly rate peaked at 17.
- lixtra 7y agoYou probably saved the company 1h of work per week for some years. Finding another expert would have taken them half a day of searching. So it made economic sense from their part as well. Did you learn to seek such situations to profit?
- koala_man 7y agoThey were very happy to pay me, and gave me that same spiel themselves. Turned out they had budgeted twice that amount for an external professional consultant to look into it, and just figured they'd let me have a whack at it first because why not.
- the_cat_kittles 7y agothis kind of the reason i got out of contract software, or really software as a career. its gross like this. the rewards are so capricious and generally outsized. all i could think about was just "this is wrong". my own opinion of course.
- S_A_P 7y agoI don't find this to be beyond belief, but there are a few things the author should have done differently. 1) Notify when hours were exceeded 2) Get written notification that he was still required to come in to the office while waiting for assets or otherwise at a blocker 3) Ask questions to further cement the requirements 4) pick up a phone? I think that ethically this was not a great move on this persons part, but we live and learn, and hopefully they did learn from the experience. Large companies have budgets that usually are "use it or lose it", so the ROI doesnt really matter most of the time. Secondly, large companies are less likely have "gate keeper" folks ensuring that there are not wasting hours when the timescale is less than one month. As costs escalate and budgets get blown, that is when they thin out the contractors.
- analogmemory 7y agoI mean they were pretty clear they didn't care about the money. Emailing daily to check in on progress is good enough. I've been in a similar situation. The manager isn't really concerned about the money. They just need someone to justify their expenses. > We need your full undivided attention to complete this project. For the duration of the contract, you will work exclusively with us to deliver result in a timely manner. We plan to compensate you for the trouble.
- S_A_P 7y agoIn my experience as a contractor, the client doesn't care about the money until they do. The contractors that I have seen thrive and the times that I have thrived as a contractor is when I showed that I was there to provide value and not just "coast". Most businesses don't have time to deal with coasters until they need to cut their burn rate. If you are providing more than what you're asked you can usually stay or be first in line to return when help is required.
- AceJohnny2 7y ago> I think that ethically this was not a great move on this persons part, but we live and learn, and hopefully they did learn from the experience. Sounds like the author reluctantly learned the opposite lesson, that ethics are silly and big companies will happily overpay you. He mentions multiple times his qualms about the whole situation.
- aplummer 7y agoI'm shocked at how much this person undercharged, for a contract like this to a large company $1K P/D AUD time and materials is not even particularly high. A consulting firm would be 2.5-3.5 so it's a bargain.
- llamataboot 7y agoHa ha cute! Meanwhile that's about half of what we pay teachers for a full year of work tending to the emotional and intellectual well-being of children.
- fishstick2000 7y agou mad
- himynameisdom 7y agoThis is misguided anger at best, and trolling at worst. What were you hoping to achieve with this?
- jnaddef 7y agoWell, about half the comments are saying "Only 18k$ for 7 weeks, that is so little", I think it is nice to be reminded that some of the most important jobs are paid a misery compared to what we earn as programmers.
- llamataboot 7y agoOh, it was perhaps some cathartic snark that doesn't add much to the overall discussion, but considering that the majority of comments on articles like these tend to be made up of people glorifying such income, talking about why such income isn't enough, hoping to someday have such an income, or otherwise somehow on the hedonic treadmill that makes programmers some of the wealthiest workers that have ever existed on earth, yet always looking at the coder that got better stock options and/or explaining how capitalism is simultaneously the best socioeconomic system yet ha! of course every BigCorp doing little of value in the world has such money to waste... Well, I think it's a measured dose of realism and maybe /every single article/ posted on HN about compensation, IPOs, exits, salary negotiations, etc should have a reminder that much of the world is doing far more important things for far less money than whatever ad-tech startup got some VC money from their fellow Stanford grads this week.
- dimnsionofsound 7y ago
- ycombonator 7y agoThis is how your tax payer money is wasted in State & Federal Gov IT agencies. I spent an entire year doing nothing in a Gov agency and in the end I was so bored that I quit. Fannie & Freddie hires tons of non citizen constractors with usually no work. It’s a big carnival.
- WaxProlix 7y agoIt's all big orgs, everywhere. Seen a lot of it even at hip modern BigCorps. Leave your axe and grinder at home :)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- davinic 7y agoAfter the hours in the initial estimate were used, I would have renegotiated and charged a nonrefundable retainer in order to be on call to deliver the project as soon as the assets were ready. This retainer would be my normal rate, and the hours would not carry over to another billing period. I would not be driving to their office every day.
- rhacker 7y agoSometimes I do kinda wish to get back into consulting because of situations like these. In almost all cases the work is never used, but instead of bailing the company out, it's really just bailing some situation out. It's all internal politics. Back when I was in my 20s during my walks from the light rail to the office I would have constant thoughts about how idiotic programming and office work is. The ONLY reason it all exists is because people can't trust each other. And that maybe trust isn't really necessary in a society that lessens personal ownership and has more of a share-all-but-do-your-part approach. It's literally so unfair the way we've segmented people into knowledge zones. Bankers know how easy it is to double money without taking risk. Programmers know how to pretend something will take 3 weeks when it will only take 2 days. Recently I've learned how easy it is to set up solar. I cry every time I hear someone get trapped in some solar contract when they sell their house. It's literally mind warping how fucked up every aspect of this economy is.
- cmcginty 7y agoTaking a left turn here, but how is it "easy" to setup solar? At the minimum you'll need a master electrician to sign-off on your install and might be hard to find after-the-fact.
- imtringued 7y agoParent is probably talking about some sort of solar lease where you get paid/receive electricity for providing roof space to install the panels on but you don't actually own them.
- piptastic 7y agoThe author basically just had a job for a while. They aren't charging 18K for a web page, they're charging 18K to commute/be there for 7 weeks. A lot of big companies aren't paying for output, they're paying for butts in seats. Why they do this has been discussed somewhat already in these comments.
- biztos 7y ago> they're paying for butts in seats There's also the case, which IMO is the standard case, that the company is trying to pay for output but it's a long and winding road from the butt in the seat to the output to the sale. Within that, if you're say a dev manager, and it's really hard to get head count allocated, then it can be totally rational to keep an idle butt in a paid-for seat so you don't lose the seat. Even if the Mr Idlebutt is terrible at his job you have at least some possibility of replacing him later on, when you have a need for some work to be done and probably wouldn't easily get a new seat allocated for it. Not only is it nearly impossible to establish a direct relationship between any particular butt-in-seat and your budget, in principle it's probably a good thing to operate with a little excess capacity. Until the dream of the Fully Fungible Knowledge Worker is achieved, which it won't be, this is a lot more rational than the implied waste would lead you to believe. Of course this doesn't factor in morale impact...
- titanomachy 7y agoYeah this doesn't seem like such a great deal when you consider that plenty of companies will pay that much, plus full benefits, for a full-time employee. And two months with only one small deliverable isn't that strange at a large company.
- ausbah 7y agowho says that businesses are any guarantee to be any more than large government bureaucracies?
- davinic 7y agoIt's okay to be a value-based consultant or contractor. There is no ethical requirement that your work be priced by the hour. You've potentially spent thousands of hours (25k in my case) honing your skills, and those skills could help your client make a lot of money. If a static site can make a company millions (they can!) then it's not unreasonable, nor unwelcome from the client, to charge a couple hundred thousand dollars, regardless of the time spent!
- cosmodisk 7y agoI used to live with this guy when we were studying. He got himself a job with the largest DIY retailer in the country.It was an office job with a relatively good salary. Eventually I moved out nad only saw him again after half a year or so. I asked how's the job to whoch he replied thst he quit after 3 month.I asked why..He said he used come to the office every day and ask around if he could help with anything.. Everyone was nice but kept saying no help is required.He got bored after 3 month of doing nothing and quit. He now runs his own business...
- notahacker 7y agoThe early winners of the UK Apprentice were awarded £100k jobs as a prize, which didn't actually entail doing anything, because the only reason they had been created was as a prize for winning a TV competition. One of them sued for 'constructive dismissal' on the basis she felt that not creating any work for her was an attempt to force her to quit. She lost, presumably on the basis that most people given nothing to do on 3x average salary would either find something to do or consider themselves extremely lucky...
- whamlastxmas 7y agoTo be fair it can hurt your long term prospects to have a do nothing job, especially if it's public knowledge it's a do nothing job. It's an understandable thing to be unhappy about if you were told otherwise.
- notahacker 7y agoHurts your long term prospects a lot more if you sue your employer for not giving you the sort of work or access to the celebrity boss you wanted... (nobody else said anything about the roles they'd been given being a non-job, although everybody else found something better to do elsewhere after a couple of years. Looking like a smart businessperson on TV is actually incredibly good for career prospects)
- mixmastamyk 7y agoWould love to see the finely-crafted, artisanal HTML and heirloom CSS.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago^ organic Javascript, ;)
- oceanghost 7y agoI love this article. I had a similar thing once. I worked for this deeply, deeply dysfunctional company (salary). My project ended. I asked my boss for something to do, and he said something to the effect--"we're kicking off a new project at the end of the week until then look into XYZ because we'll be using those technologies." So for political reasons, this new project was delayed and delayed again. I asked my boss for a project, he said, he'd get back to me. This ends up going on for a year. I stopped asking for new projects because I've done my duty frankly by asking several times, and at this time, I'm just reminding him to fire me. It might sound like fun to get paid to do nothing, but, it's pretty demoralizing. There's a certain amount of paranoia associated with it as well. Eventually, I started taking long lunch breaks and going to the gym. This went on for a year, then one day... We started a big new project, and I had something to do again. Very weird year, though.
- adamqureshi 7y agoWe did some agency work Ad agency / sub contract) in NYC. I said to the agency we will deliver HTML/CSS/JS and its $12,500 for the site / pages. They came back with NO our budget is $25k and we will pay that. Im like ok wire be the bread, here is my ACH ( They did) I delivered the HTML/CSS/JS. They came back with but who is gonna do the API work with our back end guy. Seems they could not make a distinction connecting the front end to the back end. I can only do HTML/CSS i can't do the API stuff and i told them in writing very clearly. they had a back end guy we delivered the work to. I got played too many times NOT to get my money upfront and send a bill when I use up the time. They said sorry for the confusion , ok so how much for the api and will cut you a check from accounting. Accounting has no clue what marketing is buying.
- LocalPCGuy 7y agoIn my experience, where the Front End stops and the Back End starts is always a fuzzy line for non-technical clients (even if that have devs on staff). Especially when you're talking to the marketing department and devs work in IT or another similarly separated department. It pays to have the discussion and get it in writing up front (plus, if you CAN do API work, it may provide additional revenue that you didn't necessarily know was available).
- vkou 7y ago20 coins for the horse? Done, and done, Sir. Now, how much will you pay me for the tack and saddle?
- grecy 7y agoI worked for a large company who wanted their public website re done to be "mobile friendly" (in 2015). It's Drupal, with a custom theme. Everything that was actually "tricky" was de-scoped, so it wound up being something my university buddies and I would have charged $5k for back in the day, probably would have charged $30k these days. That project cost well over $1mil. For a Drupal site with a custom "Mobile friendly" theme.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y agoWhen I worked for a non-profit they paid like a quarter million dollars for a Drupal site with some slight modifications that never even got completed. I had to trudge through months of debugging and solving problems, and ultimately I couldn't be bothered with Drupal Core so we brought in some contractors to solve the biggest issues while I worked on rebuilding the whole stack. Drupal knowledge seems to pay well, they were able to charge us $150 an hour at their non-profit discount.
- jnaddef 7y agoSpoilers : he did not actually get paid $18,000
- tamersalama 7y agoTangentially: I liked listening to the article, with the background soothing music, in the author's voice.
- geophertz 7y agoIf only we could change the speed.
- Nanocurrency 7y agoGot it, so I need to start working as a contractor for various big corporations.
- ErikAugust 7y agoFor those trying to understand the behavior of big companies, Marc Andreessen has The Moby Dick theory: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html Which is: "The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside."
- Causality1 7y agoFederal government is the only place I've worked that had a reasonable work/pay ratio. Every private company has either been eye-bleeding amounts of work and weekly hours for unsatisfying compensation or doing almost nothing and then getting a check that made me feel guilty.
- jondubois 7y agoThat's the problem with corporations; it's not the manager's own money, they don't know where it comes from, who the shareholders are, what the real goal of the company is, what high quality work looks like, etc... So if you're friends with the right people, you can get whatever amount you want and nobody cares. The company is like a giant communal wallet. It sucks money out of lord-knows-where and dispenses it back to you. You just have to physically sit at your desk and waste time for 8 hours a day.
- crispyambulance 7y agoMy parents had been running their own tailor shop in the 80's, barely making ends meet, pulling in less than $20K a year. It wasn't for lack of business, father was a master tailor trained in Italy and capable of elite bespoke craftsmanship. They had as much business as they could handle. The problem was that they were charging what they thought the work was worth rather than what their customers were willing to pay. At some point, during the Reagan years, my mother had an epiphany and jacked up the prices massively, far beyond what my father thought was remotely reasonable. The result? Even more business, more pressure, more return customers. That put me and my brother through an expensive college. There's something about high rates that makes customers feel more important, it's a status-thing and it also propels them to take you more seriously even if they have you do low-value stuff.
- prof1le 7y agoThere were mentioned studies in the book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" that mirrored what your parents experienced. Long story short, a jeweler was trying to move some turquoise and told an assistant to sell them at half price while she was gone. The assistant accidentally doubled the price, but the stones still sold immediately. Turns out there's a phenomenon where humans automatically associate price to quality. So getting charged more means we think we're getting better quality, regardless of the actual quality
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoSame for brown diamonds.
- martin-adams 7y agoThis might be one of those cases where they want to keep spending money so they get a budget renewal for the next quarter.
- IronWolve 7y agoBack in the 90's, I got a buddy hired at my work, and typically all co-workers come through a contracting agency. Work hired him as a direct contractor without the agency BUT at agency rates. He did his 90 day contractor probation period and then hired directly. After he left the company years later, he told us the story of the 175 hourly rate they gave him for 3 months, instead of 25 for a junior admin. Good times.
- eej71 7y agoSell value not cost.
- tigroferoce 7y agoAt this point it is mandatory to remind us all the story of the forgotten employee. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
- csunbird 7y agoIs this real ?
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y agoLast I heard it was a story someone wrote and not real. It's completely believable though and not even that radical.
- nefitty 7y agoWell, this one sure is: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35557725 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35557725 Spanish civil servant off work unnoticed for six years
- aequitas 7y agoA valuable lesson I learned at a young age from one of my first 'customers' when doing computer repair jobs for friends and neighbours was is that you don't get paid for what you can or do but for the value you add or time (money) you save someone. Most of the time the problems I had to solve where easy ones. Install printer, update software, remove toolbars, email settings, etc. All 5 minute work jobs, seldom totalling to more than an hour or 2 an evening. Not even worth asking money for in my opinion, because it was so easy en quick for me to do. But my neighbour always insisted I accept his money. Because for him, having to solve these issues himself would cost him multiple evenings. So the money he was giving me, which felt like too much to me, was stil a bargain for him. Also in his words it was easy for me because I had spend years in training to acquire this knowledge, or as others might call it: wasting your time behind that computer playing video games.
- nostalgk 7y agoNot sure I quite understand the mechanics behind it as well, but I've been through a similar training program and it appears to be effective.
- wallace_f 7y agoThat's lucky. When I sas 19, around the height of IE and 'every Windows box with malware,' I tried to start a similar business. Probably my most wealthy client, with an oversized SUV in the driveway, had a home computer rendered unusable by malware--something I had fixed before. But she ended up asking me to leave. She decided she wanted "real professionals" working on her computer. She told me I didn't know what I was doing, saying 'are you really going to fix it for this much or do you actually need to just start searching the web for what you are doing? (she saw that I had performed a google search...).' It took me way, way too long in life to learn most of it is just perception and learning how to manage dealing with less-than-ideal people.
- shawnz 7y agoRight, you should have charged her more. If you pick a rate that seems reasonable for the amount of work involved then she'll wonder why she couldn't just do it herself. You also need to price in all the learning and experience you needed up to that point, otherwise the client will think you're doing a cheap/half-assed job.
- anonytrary 7y agoThis sounds like an awful experience. You were brought in to write a single, trivial HTML page and thought the job would take you about 2 days, give or take (which, it would have). Then, it ended up taking 7 weeks because the company's communication was incredibly poor. The error here is so large, I'd be pretty upset. At least they paid you for your two months of service, though. How are companies this inefficient? They completely wasted about $20k for no reason.
- eljimmy 7y agoTitle should read “I charged $18,000 for many hours of my time”
- shams93 7y agoThe larger your company is the more costly it is to do something even as simple as a static html page. That's because everything that goes out to the public has to be subject to a heavy review process. You're not being paid to write an html page you're being paid to shepherd new information to the public. That's why you can never just estimate cost only on how hard you think it would be to do the task you need to get enough information about the customer's process to understand how much work its going to take not just to complete the task but to shepherd it through their review process and the larger the company the more layers of review and process they are likely to have.
- whiddershins 7y agoI would have billed incrementally.
- Moru 7y agoAt a company a few years ago, we paid about $25k for a website layout delivered in .psd, a coloursheet as a .pdf and a recommendation on a typeface. The boss was not happy and the defence was sort of "It was very hard work to select just the right colors and font, we have used many hours!" (Not exact words but something in that direction) So yeah, they beat you :-)
- endtime 7y agoI've had a couple experiences getting paid to do nothing for a couple months, one during a summer research project in undergrad and one at a big tech company. I found it far more stressful and less valuable than if I'd had actual work to do.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- otakucode 7y agoCompanies don't seem to realize that the bad practices they engage in are actively harmful to themselves financially. Maintaining that office that doesn't produce as much value as it destroys in expense. Not investing in IT infrastructure (whether real or virtual). Not actively working on making communication efficient and valuable. These things don't just get on peoples nerves, they cost money.
- aqibgatoo 7y agolmao
- DaveInTucson 7y ago* Your time is worth something, even if your employer isn't making the best use of it * I'm surprised he waited 7 weeks before submitting a bill (especially given the hurry up and wait circumstances).
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoRandomly enough, the writer of this previously achieved HN fame when he was unstoppably fired by a machine: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
- snazz 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
- dcl 7y agoI had worked for a big bank doing financial modelling, reporting, random ad-hoc stuff for about 3.5 years before getting fairly bored. I quit and went to work for a small AI/ML* consulting firm whose biggest client turned out to be the same bank I used to work for. Before I left, I gave my boss an opportunity to beat the new salary that was offered to me. He said he couldn't. My annual pay was ~170k at the bank, but now they pay $2500 a DAY for me to be there, and, as a consultant, I work FAR less hard and far fewer hours (albeit in a completely different division). I've been here for 10 months now and it seems like it will continue indefinitely... This article has strongly reminded me to start doing my own thing and charge even more. *In reality, all I do is data engineering/munging because their data models and systems are so poor.
- bitcoinmoney 7y ago2500$/day before tax that’s nice. Teach me your ways master... 1. Are you phd from a top school or boot camp grad? 2. Phd related to AI?
- amatecha 7y agoSaving you a click: He charged $75/hr for a job that included a ton of waiting around and idling on-location at the client's office. :)
- _davebennett 7y agoLegit the definition of corporate
- mensetmanusman 7y agoWhy has no one mentioned the American Dream: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
- sureaboutthis 7y agoI charge $30,000 and did absolutely nothing. I was hired by a publishing company to take their 1990s web site into the modern age, a couple of years ago. I reported directly to the owner of this small but well known company in their industry. On day one, he sat with me for 10 minutes and outlined what he wanted done and then promptly left for a publishing conference for two weeks. He gave me nothing to access the web server or any of the source. So, I spent two weeks putting together a few potential designs and showed them around to influential persons inside the company. They loved it! But when the CEO returned, he immediately pushed back against the hamburger icon for a menu selection among other things he thought his customers would find difficult to use. I said I would work on that, made some changes I thought he would like, but when it came time to present them, he was gone again on another sales meeting out of town for a few days. When he came back, he asked me to work with his graphic designer to create some animations for an iPad program they sold. I had never done that but quickly learned. He then went to France. He called me twice to ask about the progress and some additions he wanted but, when he returned, he was too busy to meet with me about that project. I continued to ask for access to the server but never received a response. Then, he presented me with an iPad app they had some company in India develop. He said it had some minor issues but he wanted me to work on it. It was written in ObjectiveC but I knew nothing about it and had never developed anything for Apple products before. He gave me access to his Lynda account but he needed the app fixed in two weeks. I told him it was impossible. So, he hired a college kid who was fluent in all that. He gave the kid two months to solve the problem but he hit a road block and last I heard it past the three month mark trying to get that to work. For me, since he didn't have time to work with me on the company web site, he said his mother had an event coming up for a charity she ran and she needed a web site right away. I knew nothing of the charity or the event. I had no pictures, no text, no idea what she would want beyond a general outline the CEO gave me but he wanted the whole thing up and running...in two weeks. I said I can't do that. So he fired me. I had accomplished absolute nothing. I asked him why he thought I could write iPad apps. He said it was because I said in the interview I once wrote an app for the iPhone. I said, no, I wrote a little test program--a "Hello World"--using Cordova but that was it.
- b123400 7y agoYears ago a company similarly contacted me for some "emergency" tasks. I flied all the way to Japan and realise they haven't got the tasks ready, more than half of the time I wasn't doing anything. I honestly (stupidly?) charged them with my actual working hours, they seems surprised. A lesson learnt and the next time it'll be a different story.
- fullhelp 7y agoReading the article and the comments here makes me consider raising the price of a self-hosted help desk software I recently released. Or at least, adding a new premium price package.
- smashah 7y agoWow. I listened to the post and felt like I was in the developer equivalent of the twilight zone. Love it!
- mcv 7y agoThe moment you do the work on-site with the client, with their resources, their equipment, on their laptop that you first need to configure and install, with their environment and everything, dealing with their bureaucracy, work time goes way up. Had you done this from home on your own machine after they quickly mailed you the necessary resources, you'd have been done within those 20 hours, but frankly, large corporations don't really care. $18,000 is still pocket money for them, and they apparently prefer if you do everything their way instead of your own. You didn't just deliver a static html page, you delivered a static html page as part of their process. Let them pay. You earned it. They wasted your time, you didn't waste theirs. It's not the most fulfilling way of working, but it pays the bills. I do almost entirely projects for large clients like that, and it's not unusual that just getting started takes a week. I used to get frustrated about that, but it's their choice, and now I just go along with it. It does underscore how unbelievably inefficient large companies really are.
- morenoh149 7y agoThis isn’t that crazy of a story. The static page part is the hook but he was on site for a month. I’ve been on projects clearing 40k in 2 months for onsite work. Doesn’t matter if it’s static or api work.
- justanegg 7y agoyou didn't "get away with" anything. you charge for your time. what they do with your time is on them.
- craftoman 7y agoLook at Apple. People are buying their over priced products years now. If you compared them equally based on the actual hardware and leave their software out, you'll clearly see that market is offering you the same products at half price. If Apple release a laptop at 5K$ with a 4K screen and a (hypothetical) screen keyboard or something fancy, people will go crazy and start buying it.
- jmkni 7y agoCool article, one thing: > The designer had sent me some Adobe Illustrator files, and I couldn't open it on the MacBook. Can't you just change the file extension to pdf to open an Adobe Illustrator file?
- mygo 7y agoI like the story, as my experiences resonate with it, but I dislike the title. The pay was fair for the time spent -- especially since it was exclusive and included travel. He effectively became a full-time employee during that time span. No benefits, and his profits will be taxed by the IRS.