Comment by ryanbrunner
7 years ago
Entertaining 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.
I 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.
I 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.
It 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.
Specifically 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.
No, he clearly didn't. He only worked out the costs at the end.
Just to clarify, he got paid $21k for 7 weeks of time. He just so happened to only deliver a static HTML page, but was on prem as requested during the engagement.
Still, it's a quick way to get a reputation for running up the clock.
In fact, it's actually only about $50/hr.
Alternatively (or in addition): sending invoices periodically.
I thought no that's the reason why right answer. He could be as much in the right as possible, and but he still took significant risk that they might argue, delay and force him to go to court or negotiate to get them to pay.
Sometimes it might be worth it - maybe the plug would have been pulled sooner if he had invoiced regularly. But it's still a risk.
Precisely the oposite. People are usually willing to pay far more, if they are to blame for you beeing slow. If they only get the slightest hint of a feeling that you might be kicking the can down the road, they will blame it on you entirely.
This is, why you leave a paper/email trail.
According to the article he emailed them daily.
Yeah but not to let them know his estimate was off.
It sounds like he gave them an hourly rate, not a project rate, and emailed every day to let them know how many hours he'd worked and what he still needed, both before and after the estimated time frame was blown. It doesn't sound like he did anything irresponsible.
Yeah. Maybe it's just an omission in the story, but once the original scope was exceeded, an "I wanted to let you know that we've reached the number of hours I estimated for the task; let me know if I should continue on this project on an hourly/daily basis of $x" email was probably warranted.
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