7 ms·

Thanks for reading! I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do th

• bathtub365 4y ago
  Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000? > you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope, This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for.
  • freedomben 4y ago
    OP, I hope you aren't rethinking it. You'd certainly be justified in doing so, but I think it would be a mistake. There are most definitely people out there that fit your description: > I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with different policies. I've worked with many of them. I myself try to live that way as well, often costing myself non-trivial time and money to ensure that my client gets what I sold them. Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it.
    • ratww 4y ago
      I have also worked with several honest people who were motivated to do their best, in the most effective way. Actually almost everyone I ever worked with was like that. All the exceptions were agency/consulting people. Their job is bleeding people dry. Period.
    • mtlynch 4y ago
      Thanks! Yeah, I agree. This experience hasn't affected how much I try to defend myself from dishonest employees/contractors. I think the prevalence of dishonest/malicious people is so low and screening is so costly/ineffective that it's not worth it. >Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it. Yes, 100% agree. When someone tells me, "I've put so many controls in place to make sure you can't do X," it's so adversarial that my first though is, "I'd really love to find a way to do X." But if they tell me, "I'm trusting you not to do X because that will cause Y negative consequence for me," then I'm inclined to honor that request because it doesn't feel like we're adversaries.
      • bawolff 4y ago
        I dont think anyone is suggesting you micromanage your consultants, that is obviously the wrong approach and defeats the purpose of hiring consultants. This is a bussiness arrangement. Normally this works by you saying some things you want over some timeframe, and letting them work on it. The part of this story where things go off the rails, is that by the middle of it, it was clear the agency wasn't delivering on their deliverables or really making progress. Most people would make some sort of change at that point, either terminate or set modified expectations - definitely not blindly give more money. Its really not about trust, its about whether or not they do the job. There could be many reasons why the job doesn't get done, many might not be malicious - but these people aren't your friends. You are buying something from them, if they dont have the goods, then they dont have the goods and its not a sign of lack of trust to move on.
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    >Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000? Honestly, no. I think I certainly made mistakes on this project, but I don't think trusting devs to use their time effectively was the problem. >>you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope, >This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for. The problem is that agencies know that, so if I approach competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost. They don't want to take a risk on some small client demanding the moon before they'll release payment. I'm sure there are desperate agencies who will agree to contracts that put them in a weak position, but I expect their work will be lower quality than the agencies that protect themselves.
    • whatinthef4747 4y ago
    • ncallaway 4y ago
      > so if I approach competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost Yep, exactly that. And, for a dev agency (I'm not as familiar with how design would want to structure this), you'd either need _very_ detailed and specific requirements before we consider quoting the project, or we're going to need an up-front discovery phase (that will run a few thousand dollars anyway) to produce those detailed requirements and specifications, before we can even give a quote. Fixed bid projects do feel like they create much more of an adversarial relationship than a collaborative one for working on a project, and when we make fixed bids we _definitely_ price a lot of the risk into the bid (and we're up front about that).
      • deaddodo 4y ago
        If a contractor told me to "get lost" over a $15k contract for a three-page rework + redesign; I'd just respond "gladly". That is a dead simple ask and something that could easily be handled by one front-end dev + one designer in 1-2 weeks of half-time work. That easily covers their salaries (in LA, at least) + 30-50% overhead. You would probably pad that out to a month for other jobs + unknowables; but I would be absolutely shocked if an agency quoted anyone any more time than that for such a basic and trivial task. For a first time contract, that's a pretty good deal to entice word of mouth referrals + potential future work. This isn't work that needs discovery or intricate scoping. It's basic work that anyone with web development experience can scope out and that a shop focused on that definitely has extensive experience on. Better than that, if you review his original scope guidelines, he makes it clear he specifically doesn't want any more work done than those three pages. All of the complicated work (logo redo + rebranding) he was talked into by the agency, along with random things like additional color palettes, extended page attributes, etc.
  • Consultant32452 4y ago
    I'm on a T&M contract right now where we are having the stupidest of disputes. T&M with a SOW full of deliverables. Client asks us to do a ton of work outside of scope. We inform the client it's out of scope, but that we are happy to perform the work as part of the T&M. Can't get anyone to push through a CR "because it's T&M so it doesn't matter." Client has been paying all along. Getting to the end, client doesn't want to sign off on completion of the project because we didn't do the SOW deliverables (per our previous alignment). They already paid so I don't actually care if they sign off on the work, but it's stupid for everyone involved.
    • ncallaway 4y ago
      My favorite protection for this kind of situation is having a Single Point of Contact clause, that basically says: "ultimately, we take direction from X person and only X person". This helps in a couple of different ways. Occasionally, you'll get conflicting requests or instructions from a client. When that happens, I usually just push it to the single point of contact and ask how they want to proceed. But it also helps in the scenario you outlined, because I make sure any approvals for "outside the scope of SOW work" gets approved to be worked by the single point of contact, along with any relevant disclaimers about total project budget and estimate. Then, when you come to time to evaluate the project progress the single point of contact has clear language that they've approved with whatever associated cost warnings.
• fourseventy 4y ago
  Ya but your philosophy cost you $47k for work that could have been done in 2 weeks by a competent developer...
  • dieselgate 4y ago
    Philosophy, costs, timelines, and justifications aside - I’m curious if, in your experience, many “competent” developers have this sort of design experience in their wheelhouse?
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    I'm sure there's a dev who could have done the same work faster and cheaper, but they're extremely hard to find. Everyone wants to hire a frontend dev who can design and code. They'd either be outside my budget or they'll only take jobs from people with a personal recommendation. There's also the problem that until you hire them, you can't distinguish between a talented developer and someone just pretending to be one. I might go through 10 expensive developers over a year before I find one who's actually capable of delivering the project in two weeks. Do you have a recommendation for where I'd find someone who can do this job in two weeks to the same level of quality?
    • soperj 4y ago
      At least then you'd have that person for the future.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• boesboes 4y ago
  You didnt hire people. You hired a company. That abused your good faith. Also, 'If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire', appearantly not? They clearly where not using their time, your money, effectively.
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    I don't think the problem here was in using their time effectively. Or, at least, it wasn't the high-order bit. Looking at their task breakdown, there weren't outrageous items like "10 hours - change a button color." The times were a little higher than I'd expect for devs who do this all the time, but not egregiously so. I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it more to poor communication and poor management than the devs working too slowly.
    • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      I think you're being very generous. "You don't fit our usual workflow so no further work will be done unless you pay us a retainer like the big guys do" is simply not a good faith position to take half way into a project. They gave you just enough extra attention to hook you in at the start, then kept stringing you along for more cash, with a few token deductions to make it seem like it was all just very unfortunate. (Note: They would not have made those deductions if you hadn't called them on it.) Then when it was clear there was no more money on the table they finally did the work - which, conveniently, left you with a positive impression. They did not do the job you originally asked them to do. They did a job they decided they wanted to do - and charge for - because... why? They're not organised and professional enough to deliver what they were asked to? It's a classic case of actions speaking louder than words. Some questions to consider: 1. Would you have hired them if you knew they were going to cost nearly seven times more than your budget? 2. How much would a website redesign have cost if you'd asked for that in the first place? 3. Do you think that work would have been done in budget, or would it have exploded far beyond it too? 4. Would a different agency have acted in the same way and presented the same problems?
      • O__________O 4y ago
• j4pe 4y ago
  As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business. Broadly speaking, it's not economically feasible for an agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that matter - I've written about this here https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/ https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/). So if they can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole website instead of just three pages - and if you're willing to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right? That's the difference between a business relationship and being a friend: you may keep your mouth shut when a friend is being imposing, taking too much for granted, because you value the relationship. You would never remain silent in a business context when somebody is spending your money. It's business. They understand. On my jobs, I'm explicit about what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I'm going to talk them through options for caching and horizontal & vertical scaling. But if my client seems to be dragging their feet on customer development and making poor business decisions about which features to prioritize, well, that's not my role in this relationship. That said, I would never lead a client into a project backwards the way this agency did. Because I do value the relationship! In that I want you to come back, and pay me more money later. Not because we're friends. That's business honesty. This situation is definitely your fault - but only because you and your agency had different assumptions about the rules or norms of your relationship. Your agency poorly communicated their intentions, and you allowed that to happen out of a misplaced sense of friendly obligation. But hey, the new site does look great.
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    > As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business. I don’t know. It’s a blurry line at best. If an agency dev team is really noticing that bug fixes are billable hours and that’s causing them to relax their code quality standards since they’ll be paid for bug fixes anyway, how is that not dishonest? Perhaps it’s possible for them to not be aware that what they’re doing is in bad faith, in which case you might argue that they’re “being dishonest with themselves” instead of “being dishonest with the client,” but it seems like a distinction without a difference.
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  You're getting a little beat up here...I'm not piling on, I am actually interested, because I need to reinforce my skill in this area, do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting? I do appreciate your honest assessment of your project. One of my investors is pushing me to build a team of outsourced workers; it seems suboptimal to me to say the least. I find the clues you share in retrospect to be helpful. Thanks.
  • mgav 4y ago
    I think outsourced success depends heavily on choosing capable & honest people and your ability to carefully manage them (give a little rope, see how they do, and then decide whether or not to continue).
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    Thanks for reading! >do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting? I don't try to assess character because I don't think you can effectively. And I know others disagree with me here, but I don't think the agency I hired was lacking in character or behaving dishonestly. At the end of the day, if I'm hiring someone for $100/hr, they need to produce output that's worth >$100/hr to me. I'm a developer, and I have a sense of how long things would take me. I hire other freelance developers, so I see how long tasks take them relative to their rate. So if someone is charging a high rate but delivering work very slowly, I'd let them go, regardless of whether that's their real speed or if they're padding their numbers. My typical strategy is to just hire and fire quickly. I don't do interviews, and I just hire someone for a small job (5-10 hours) and see how they do. If they do well, I give them a larger task and then keep going up after a few weeks. I wrote a bit more about my hiring process a different post: https://mtlynch.io/freelancer-guidelines/ https://mtlynch.io/freelancer-guidelines/
    • CodeWriter23 4y ago
      Thank you
    • clairity 4y ago
• matt321 4y ago
  >> motivated to do their jobs well. Doing their jobs well for their own boss means getting as much cash from you as possible.
• shepardrtc 4y ago
  The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack up billable hours. If that involves building an amazing piece of work, then that's fine. But if it can be done by blowing off the client and feeding them bullshit, then that's fine too. I watched consulting companies bilk literally millions of dollars out of a household name company by simply lying to people that didn't know any better. I really respect your philosophy of assuming people are honest. I used to be that way, too. But after working with contractors and consultants and people overall, I think most people will do what they're told, while others will actively game the system. I've found that if you're tough in the beginning and let them know that you're not to be gamed, then you won't have any issues. Business is business. In any case, "Isaac" was completely full of shit. He knew exactly what was up. He approved all those hours - especially the dev hours that were spent on nonsense bugs. I know I sound harsh, but I believe everyone can excel if you get past their bullshit and accept only their best.
  • sgtnoodle 4y ago
    In my last year of college, a couple friends and I ended up working on implementing a vehicle-to-infrastructure communications demo for the department of transportation. We were doing it for a grade in a special projects class, but we were working with a consulting company that was being paid by the DOT to implement the demo. Toward the beginning of the project, the consulting company folk were very concerned about giving college students any non-trivial amount of scope, and were talking about how they would hedge all their bets by implementing everything themselves and only use our stuff if it panned out. The demo itself consisted of about a dozen different scenarios. The scenarios were all basically some form or another of geofencing, and it made sense to make a simple framework to get 90% of the way, then specialize for each scenario. The consulting company didn't see it that way, and instead wanted to treat each scenario as a separate unit of work. Fast forward to the end of the semester, and my friends and I demoed our framework for the professor, and a Motorola radio rep. It all worked and we got A's. It was like 400 lines of python. A couple weeks before the DOT demo, we started seriously trying to integrate with the consulting company's stuff, and it was laughably bad. The consulting company knew they dropped the ball, but figured the three of us could just scramble to finish it all on top of our framework. The Motorola rep chimed in and pointed out that we already got our A's, and that the consulting company was getting paid $500k. They ended up paying us something like $20K, and it only took us a few hours to implement all the scenarios on top of our framework. The demo went well, and we ended up directly helping the DOT demo it a few more times over that summer.
• belter 4y ago
  Have two TinyPilot's...Great product, well supported :-) Sorry to hear about the Website redesign issues. Taking into account the initial budget you were targeting for, it looks like a scenario that required Gerry Weinberg, "Orange Juice Test" before anything else. https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-orange-juice-test/ https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-orange-juice-test/
• treis 4y ago
  Has anyone approached you about an acquisition? At 50k+ MRR and those margins on hardware you really shouldn't be losing money. Imagine there's a small (or big) hardware company with in house employees to do what you're outsourcing at a much lower cost.
• jrumbut 4y ago
  I agree with you. I have written plenty of contracts and statements of work, and it's so important to get those right and make sure there's a true meeting of the minds and that they strike the right prject-specific balance between detail and flexibility, but there's no substitute for both sides being a little bit reasonable. It's just not a business where a project can succeed despite an adversarial partner. Both sides need to grow together.