Warren Seen

23 Responses to “A Freelance Programmer’s Manifesto”

1. George Kangas Says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 am

   A couple of definitions:

   –twit: (slang) an insufficiently thoughtful person.

   –t**t: (offensive slang) the female genitalia.

   Just thought you ought to know.

2. warren Says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 7:53 am

   Thanks for your comment, I’m well aware of other meanings of the word, but the intended meaning can also be found in the Oxford English Dictionary:

   -t**t: (slang) a stupid or obnoxious person.

   American dictionaries don’t seem to acknowledge this meaning, which is hardly unusual. Happily though, I’m not in America.

3. Will Haney Says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am

   “Happily though, I’m not in America.”

   as are we

4. Prakash Sankar Says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 10:57 pm

   what you are saying is;

   me, me,me

   remember its the customer,

   have you said?

   I can work hard to meet your business requirements. You will be completely satisfied with my work.

   Saying when you pay less you get less, is pure scare strategy.

   Look at what IBM,Micorosoft is doing in Russia,India,Romania etc.

   Its the Customer.

5. warren Says:
   February 23rd, 2007 at 11:37 pm

   “have you said? I can work hard to meet your business requirements. You will be completely satisfied with my work.”

   err, yes, I did. In particular I said:

   “I don’t hold back. When I’m on the clock for you, you deserve the best of me, and that’s what you’ll get. I’ve never “mailed it in” as a freelancer and I don’t intend to start. I am a professional, as such I strive to be professional in my dealings with you and my other clients. My business is largely built on my reputation and word of mouth, so to do otherwise would be an impressive form of career suicide.”

   As to your other comments:

   What companies IBM and Microsoft are doing in those countries is simply taking advantage of a perceived cost saving which comes about due to a lower cost of living and abundant labour force, and hence cheaper labour.

   Once upon a time, Japan was a source of cheap labour - but it’s not any more. These imbalances are rarely, if ever long term things, as money flows in, inflation takes effect and cost of living increases, therefore labour prices go up.

   Plenty of companies are experiencing the false economy of offshoring, and bringing the work back to their own shores. There are also plenty of smaller companies in the market for developers who have neither the capacity, nor the desire to engage cheap overseas labour.

   It’s not just the customer, it’s the relationship. If you bow down to every company that flashes a few dollars your way, you often will get a kick in the face for your troubles.

   Freelance developers need to stand up for themselves and deal with the companies that they work for on an equal level, which means being willing to say no to business transactions that you don’t believe are in your best interests.

6. Bob Grommes Says:
   February 24th, 2007 at 12:53 am

   Warren,

   I intend to expand my recent post on this topic to reference your most excellent and well thought-out manifesto.

   I don’t know that accepting the occasional strategic fixed-price contract is completely unwise, so long as you feel you can make your rate at it, but my official policy agrees with yours: no fixed price work; it’s usually a quagmire.

   Prakash’s comment above sheds interesting light on the rationalizations being fed to offshore workers and their pimps. The depiction of successful westerners in this business as arrogant self-centered greedy bastards vs. the humble, hard-working customer-centric offshore workers, is a masterstroke. In the West, it’s been my experience that pointy-haired bosses resent the success of tech workers and see offshoring in part as a strategy for revenge for the perceived excesses of the dot-boom era.

   Since that era I have made some of my money supervising offshore workers for those clients who won’t get a clue. My consistent experience has been that offshore chop shops know how to talk the talk but cannot actually deliver the goods. Four different offshore firms I’ve dealt with so far, have certainly claimed they’d “work hard” to meet our “business requirements” and that we would be completely satisfied. Then they proceeded to do one clueless thing after another, both technically, and in terms of customer service.

   The situation is so bad that I now no longer accept projects that involve direct contact with offshore teams; it is so contrary to the customer’s interest unless they want to open an office “over there” that it bothers my conscience too much, and besides, the inevitable inferior result from such a project only tarnishes my own reputation by association.

   Even so, I can’t entirely escape the offshoring phenomenon. A recent project I did for a U.S. aerospace firm accepted data generated by software created by an offshore team. The data was so full of errors that my project had to be shut down for a few months while they fix all the problems with the upstream application.

   Your manifesto, however, is not primarily about offshoring; these issues are universal and would exist whether or not offshoring were in play. I have been in this business since 1983 — long before offshoring was a significant issue — and I can tell you that your thoughs were just as valid then as they are now.

   Bravo!

   –Bob Grommes

7. warren Says:
   February 24th, 2007 at 1:24 am

   Thanks Bob, guess it goes to show that there’s nothing new under the sun.

   I’ll let you in on a little secret mind you, my approach has been developed over time with advice from some senior colleagues who’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have.

   The important thing to note however is that in many cases, my instincts were on the money anyway, a fact that has played out with clients over time. So while I’ve only been doing this for 5 years, there’s another 35 years of second-hand experience rolled into the manifesto.

   On the subject of fixed price contracts, I found that it was easier to just say “no” than to say “sometimes” - the projects I do are of a size that don’t lend themselves to fixed-price quoting and the clients are not sufficiently technical to spec the project in a way that I can easily give them a fixed quote - usually its quicker to do the work and tally up the hours later than to try and extract a detailed spec up front.

   Clients also seem to like the flexibility of adding things on the fly, basically doing fast iterations keeps them in the loop, and they can see progress and what they get for their money.

   As for offshoring, I have at least one international client on my books at the moment, at one stage that team had devs in US, Aus and NZ. Also I have a few interstate clients who are literally the other side of the country to me.

   Cheap is not my value proposition - given current exchange rates I’m probably a little cheaper than some US freelancers, whilst still having excellent written and spoken english, 4 year BS-equivalent Comp Sci degree, etc., but not so much as to justify sending the work half a world away.

8. Jamie M Says:
   February 24th, 2007 at 2:26 am

   I really like the thrust of the manifesto. I’ve worked in the industry for 11 years now, and seen the IT service providers play underdog rather than peer far too often with clients. (A recent extreme being a company continuing to do work and consult for a client despite an unpaid invoice of 400,000 GBP that has been outstanding for nearly a year and no reason offered for non-payment!!).

   One thing though, and I hate myself for having to point this out; The significance of English words across different countries can be different, but I wouldn’t personally use the word ‘T**t’ in a blog or any professional text. It immediately makes me think ‘AVOID’ when I have my business head on, whereas if we were in the pub I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Of course whether you’re prepared to live with that reaction from potential clients is entirely up to you.

9. Bobbie F Says:
   February 24th, 2007 at 6:26 am

   I gave up freelancing for full-time work because I could not manage to avoid the short end of the stick on these issues.

   In particular, I never was able to get the nerve to walk away for non-payment, and would continue to work even with 6 months of billing outstanding.

   Thanks for stating all these issues so clearly.

10. Marcelo Lopez Says:
    February 24th, 2007 at 10:22 am

    Prakash, Prakash, Prakash,

    My poor deluded friend. Having worked for more than ONE of the entities you spout off on your list, and having been in the industry longer perhaps you yourself have been alive, let me tell you a thing or two about “the customer”. Software isn’t like walking into a retail store and saying, “give me some of brand X”. No matter how many project managers, salesmen, marketers, or accountants ( who are the root of who most of Hyderabad, Chennai, and many parts of Eastern Europe TRULY owe their newly found technology revenue streams to ) may make people think that spending 100 million to save 120 million in initial costs is a wise investment, only to find that their expenditure is offset by rising inflation, unforseeable complications, or “scope changes”. Oops, there’s that saving disappearing.

    And then there’s the whole equal playing field issue. If your favorite cricket team were playing a man down because it couldn’t afford him, you’d be pretty upset if they played against a team that could afford that extra man, now wouldn’t you ? Well that’s no different than the circumstances we’re talking about. Perhaps you can see the metaphor, perhaps not. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out.

    Continuing on about level playing fields, let’s assume for a moment that realign the standards of living. Let’s be generous, let’s say we’re going RAISE the standard of living for the common man in Hyderabad with the common man in say, Houston, Texas. Comparable sized cities I’d say. Now, if we did that, can you estimate what the level of income would have to be raised to supply that standard of living ? I’m glad you asked, approximately 220% ( and that’s just on average ). Well, taking that into account gives you an indication that things are not REALLY about the customer at all, all things taken into consideration.

    It’s not about saving the “customer” money, because quite frankly most everything is a function of consumer price indexes, and honestly I haven’t seen any consumer price indexes dropping anywhere, even in say mainland China, Moscow or even the streets of Dubai, one of the richest per capita countries in the world.

    Prakash, my friend, you’ve been seduced by the fact that all this wonderful business has poured like milk and honey into the areas where you work. Savor these times. Make them your own. All too soon, you may remember this moment and remember the “silly old programmer from the United States who told me that someday the even cheaper chinese programmer would take my job.” Change is inevitable. Don’t complain because someone like our good friend Warren here has actually DONE something about the change surrounding his reality. Don’t lock yourself into the fallacy that you are doing a service for “the customer” in subordening a shift jobs by selling yourself short.

    Oh, and don’t feel bad for any of your friends that have come over to the US on “Special Worker” visas because we don’t have enough qualified software engineers here. Once they realize that companies REALLY pay them about 25-35% less than they do an EQUALLY QUALIFIED U.S. citizen and still have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, even though they’ll be endentured for at least 7 years ( if this “war on terror” continues the way it is, anyway ) before they can get their real residency, with that “H1B”. Hey, maybe some of them will want to go back home. Or better yet, maybe some of those “really special worker” visa’s will become available for those cheaper chinese programmers here in the US. Nah, I kind of doubt it “work visa’s for chinese nationals” ? Kinda doubt that.

11. Opportunity Knocks Says:
    February 24th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    Rules For Self-Employed People

12. Bill Long Says:
    February 24th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    I’m seeing the offshoring limitations with which some of my current and prior clients have had to contend, and they are complicated and frustrating. I think offshoring has been a fad which will diminish and then reappear in cycles; India will become less attractive, domestic programmers will get more work, see their fortunes rebound, and then the cycle will continue, perhaps with China at the forefront.

    Regarding your manifesto, I would not recommend taking retainers. Most of your other tenets are well-considered, but somehow, with retainers, the client seems to think you’re on the payroll. I would recommend staying away from these.

13. warren Says:
    February 24th, 2007 at 2:48 pm

    @Jamie: You’re probably right regarding “that word”. Where I come from, the predominant usage is the meaning I intended, as it was a throwaway comment at the beginning of the post, I confess that I thought nothing of it at the time.

    Taking on board your reasonable comments (rather than snidely posting dictionary definitions), I’ve made the decision to go ahead and censor myself in this instance.

    This blog is more a personal site than business the tone and subject matter is no different than a discussion i might have at the coffee shop or pub with a few mates, but another rule of freelancing is that impressions do count, so it’s probably wise to go back and change it.

    To your other point, 400k pounds?! that’s crazy. as a supplier in that situation, I’d make sure that the contract didn’t prevent me from downing tools and waiting for payment.

    @Bobbie F: It’s a shame that you had to give it away - I really like the freedom of being a freelancer, rather than being chained to a desk for the same employer year after year. The work is interesting and varied, there’s scope for travel, if that floats your boat, and overall, you just seem to have a lot more control over your own destiny - it’s in your own hands to screw it up!

    @Marcelo: Wow. That is a massive response, to which I’m not sure I can do justice now. You’ve outlined far better than I ever could the false economy of outsourcing to 3rd world economies. Realignment of living standards happens, that’s why Japan became an economic powerhouse through the 80’s. There’s no reason to expect it won’t happen again. China has fought it by fixing the exchange rate, but eventually something will have to give there, and the yuan will find a more appropriate level.

    India, in a few years will probably end up outsourcing their work to the Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.

    You mentioned H1Bs. I’m not sure you’ve heard, but there is also an E3 visa, which is an exclusive arrangement between the US and Aus. I could get a job in the US and come over to work on an E3, functionally my employer would find this no different than if I were a guest worker from Canada, eg it’s actually easier on the employers than H1Bs.

    Here’s the kicker: there’s 10,000 E3 visas available per year… and from what I hear they’re not all being used… Why? I don’t know, but I have a strong suspicion that Australian professionals are not as willing to be taken advantage of as our subcontinental H1B friends. You would *never* get away with paying an Aussie anything other than 100% of the similarly qualified US worker. If you tried that on as a manager, you’d get a resignation letter, and possibly a punch in the face to go with it.

    @Bill: Don’t worry about the retainer issue, I make it very clear to clients that it’s no more than them pre-paying for a certain number of hours. If they have more work for me than can fit in that time, they either end up having to wait until my next opening, or go somewhere else.

    Think of it in networking terms as a QoS bandwidth reservation I’m guaranteeing I can work for at least that many hours per month, but if they don’t use them, they lose them and I get a few hours off to go to the pub instead.

14. Atul Abraham Says:
    February 25th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

    unless the parent in the west is patient enough to live through the gestation in asia they should drop the idea of developing an offshore presence,

    unless the project buyer has definite framework to ensure that he knows what he is getting into when he buys custom software from an offshore team he is better of not, and its not even offshore teams one must be wary off when one buys software, you can buy an application written next door and it could throw errors

    prakash has kinda mixed it up by bringing IBM and Microsoft into the same basket as companies that offshore projects,

    offshoring projects has two advantages

    1. you can squeeze 180, 000 man years into 4 calendar years for the cost of 90,000 man years in the west (yeah with all the pepto bismol needed to live through local holiday induced delays and programmers that cant understand english and the therapy later, yes profits ARE eroded)

    2. you can squeeze 180, 000 man years into 4 calendar years for the cost of 90,000 man years in the west (yeah with all the pepto bismol needed to live through local holiday induced delays and programmers that cant understand english and the therapy later, yes profits ARE eroded)

    setting up your own ops in asia is the above PLUS a long - term cost cutting initiative (how did toyota get to where it is in the US today ?, build in japan, assemble in the US) so one is a one -night stand that my or may not pan out, the other is a definite relationship NOT with the country, or the people, or the customer, or even the product line BUT the stock market.

    and it called ah yes ! G L O B A L I Z A T I ON - the act or the process of reducing op costs by (like henry ford did back in the 1800s) moving what manufacturing you can to some god-forsaken boondock, staffed my people with just enough professional skill to press keys and gloat over the larger paycheck that before and then bringing this product back home for qualtiy testing and finding that well - the whole thing is KAPUT !

    so its kinda catch 22-ey cant go back to where you left and cant stay where you are now

    i have bought pcs made in germany and those made in china - both run just fine cos this isnt about german engineering vs chinese engineering its about the manufacturers cutting producion costs

    those in the west who lose jobs and want to rave and rant about the offshore workers and their pimps like bob gromes does (im not saying bob lost his to a man in east, im saying he hasnt been too complimentary :-)) and those in the east that want to go on, like prakash, about the advantage to the customer need only read bobs post on what he thinks about paypal or ebay,

    to me it sounds like - people like prakash KNOW that they are paid a fraction of what a corresponding employee in the west (with the local cultural and language skills), they feel like crap and want to stop feeling bad by borrowing that famous line from MK Gandhi

    ” the customer is the reason for our existence, we are here because of him , he is not a hindrance to our business but the reason for it ” (loosely paraphrased)

    and the people who are paid multiples of what people in the east earn cant decide if they want to be condescending, arrogant, friendly, balanced, kind or business - like, i mean it IS tough to look down on a offshore provider when you step out of his office and find people dying of leprosy on the sidewalk, eh ?

    why does microsoft have thousands of programmers and mangers in redmond ? so that discrete teams working on the same idea have the creative freedom to mess up or succeed, that creative freedom is what i hope similar companies can teach ” offshore workers and their pimps ” to wake up to, if they dont, well we all lose in the long run

    turning this into an us vs them war is sad and is a way of thinking and life neither the east nor the west are innocent of but it has to stop,

15. Marcelo Lopez Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 1:03 am

    Atul, Atul, Atul,

    Let’s start from back to front. Microsoft have thousands of programmers, true, but a great many of them are contractors and not full-timers. Having worked with some of the “old guard” Microsofters ( who incidentally, have already moved on from M$ to other ventures ), I can safely say it’s not the same culture. Microsoft is not in a corporate growth cycle. As a company it is all about maintaining itself with a modicum of growth to accomodate outside pressures. Microsoft itself has done this by being one of the leading proponents of H1B visas ( and their ilk ). Once upon a time, the scuttlebutt was that Bill actually threatened to move things lock, stock and two smoking barrels across the border into Canada unless the U.S. gave him some concessions in the anti-trust case against them. Guess what, all the government had to say was “Open Source” and well, we can see they’re still safely in Washington State. Enough of “behind the scenes” story of how marvelous Microsoft is in contributing the the North American economy.

    The living conditions on the street in India and elsewhere may be dire at best, and downright unacceptable, but then you have to ask yourself. IF that is indeed the case, with all that newly introduced wealth coming into the country, how come the large outsourcers like Tata and company haven’t pressed the government to actually DO something about it. Speaking frankly, this isn’t coming from someone without a heart, but the fact is that they are in much better a position affect change there, than I or Warren could be. Even you, Atul, sound like you have a grasp on this, you should be asking yourself, why if the goal of bringing in all this enterprise ( Yes, I’m a Yank I spell it with an ’s’ ) into areas where there is a depressed standard of living, hasn’t it been addressed at a larger scale. I have friends who are from Chennai, and other places, and from what I hear, things are much the same in that respect. So, what’s the free market there waiting for ? Isn’t the government social democratic ? Then shouldn’t they be pressing for this, an more equitable spreading of the good fortune the influx of work has brought India ? I think that’s more of a question people there should be asking of their elected officials, asking them for accountability.

    Of course Prakash must know he’s being paid a fraction of what a, and I’ll loosely use the phrase “Equivalently equipped”, programmer is paid elsewhere in the west. That, as I understand it, doesn’t stop the better programmers from jumping ship from shop to shop as necessary to raise their income and so their own standard of living. It seems that the intelligent notion of knowing what you’re worth survives no matter what shore it lands on. So applying the same logic, Atul, you can’t expect a programmer, designer, or architect in the West to somehow accept from someone elsewhere the notion that THEY might somehow not be worth the salary they are asking for. If “equivalently equipped” engineers in the East subscribe to the same notion that they should be paid as best they can, you must ( it doesn’t really matter whether you agree with me here or not, quite frankly ) submit that no one in the West who speaks out about their pay scales and or employability can neither be faulted, but rather should be given their due redress of the issue. After all, no one would fault a programmer in the East for bemoaning the same happening if somehow a project were outsourced say to Romania, or Singapore.

    It doesn’t matter whether it’s a one-off or so-called long term venture Atul, the “tide rolls back” theory of globalization where somehow the “wealth washes back” like a levelling mechanism because somehow the growing standard of wealth on the other end PUSHES BACK the market to grow where it was rolled from in the first place, is in a word, RUBBISH. The theory of General Dynamics has been skewed with no set of controls on how this “roll back” mechanism is supposed to work. Without controls, there is no such thing as a levelling action in the whole “Globalization” farce. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that somehow the corporations who have heavy handed all this somehow have the masses” welfare in mind. Frankly, I’m a capitalist, so I know fully well how the wealth cycle is supposed to work. The fact is that every so often, the big corps get a little big for their britches ( that’s an Americanism, I suggest you look it up ), and they end up doing serious long-term damage to the economies which truly sustain them. This is just one manifestation of it.

    And seriously Atul, repeating your same reason twice isn’t going to make more of an impact than the first time. Nevermind that no one today in their right mind believes in the fallacy that is the “Man-month”, “Man-Year”, “Man-minute”. That makes just ask much sense as the old logic question of “If you gave a million monkeys, a million typewriters, how long would it take for them to randomly, yet collectively, write War and Peace ?” Before anyone reads anything into that last statement, understand that it is a rhetorical question. All the application of the IEEE definition for Software Engineer and Software Architecture in the world cannot make up for the human element that is the variable in all software projects. Any software project of sufficient size to require any sizeable deliverable will include exponentially more complex interactions to complete the original requirements of the project.

    It’s a very simple statement that anyone who’s worked a project even remotely sounding like that would recognize to be true. It’s one those, if you haven’t experienced it, you don’t know how to recognize it. That’s the problem most bean-counters running the show for most outsourced projects fail to recognize. The funny part is, it doesn’t seem as though they’re learning the lessons taught by it. So be it.

16. Atul Abraham Says:
    May 1st, 2007 at 4:37 am

    if globalization is a farce why do circumstances that cause this statement arise ?

    “… you can’t expect a programmer, designer, or architect in the West to somehow accept from someone elsewhere the notion that THEY might somehow not be worth the salary they are asking for.”

    your post is misinformed, skewed and ultimately inconclusive bcos rather than rebutt what i said you have tried to talk at me and not to me, i went to UT A, and i run a software dev co. in Austria — long term projects do have a very different set of rules than a short term committment - i dont need to be from the microsoft ” old guard ” to figure this out,

    – neither have i said that corporate america has the third worlds interests at heart

    – and to say that wealth created in the third world will not change the first world source of capital, management and even know-how, is contradicted (soundly) by your implication that programmers in the US today may not - note i said may not - not cant - be able to demand the salaries they could before all this ” globalization farce ” started, so im not going to repeat myself here

    - i sugegst u read up on the financial sections of the newspapers you patronise more companies in the west have been bought up by dollar rich asian companies in the last 10 years that in all recorded history, india has 80 million + dollar millionaires - thats the population of germany

    im sorry, but your post just sounds condescending, combative, bitter and angry,

    if you were one of those that lost jobs to those in the east, well, live with it, cos very soon your country is going to be mostly brown - yes hispanic, indian, etc and your own media is telling you that they are not only hard working but very damned smart too, can you spell O B A M A ?

    microsoft has an unwritten law not to allow indians to own more than a certain % of stock / EPU or rise above a definite level in management - paranoia ? harldy -

    the root of the problem is america rubbed its hands in glee when the first peanut-earning monkey from india signed up to write code, then the code turned out to be trash, so you had to train the monkey and some of them even graduated from MIT, now that they can write code as good as any ” old guard champion ” they want to be paid what the ” american ” is — i dare you to challenge corporate american to deny them.

17. Atul Abraham Says:
    May 1st, 2007 at 4:53 am

    PS : the ” fallacy of the man month ” hmmmm … are you implying that project managers, or solution architects that write specs are stupid ? so that a programmer with a spec to follow is just a monkey aiming to get lucky ? or do u think ur an ” artist ” ala picasso ? AND Tata - TCS rather - and its like ARE doing a lot to improve living standards in India - really Marcelo rather than talk through your hat about being a capitalist and then fault Microsoft for being what they are, go out for a walk, get some fresh air and when u get back home, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself how you can still pretend to be relevant when you say that you spell ” enterprise ” with an “S” cos ur a yank when thats the ONLY way it is spelt.

    And stop pretending to care when all you really want is not be ignored.

18. Derek Says:
    May 10th, 2007 at 8:15 am

    Atul, I think you need to learn to spell yourself, before you begin attacking the spelling and grammar of others. When you use sms abbreviations such as “u” and “ur”, you portray yourself as someone coming to a battle of wits unarmed.

19. atul abraham Says:
    May 12th, 2007 at 3:30 am

    derek,
    ur nt implying i cnt spll, r u now ?

20. Web Design India Says:
    May 28th, 2007 at 4:47 pm

    Hey guys just focuses on main issue of this articles..and give your valuable comment..

21. Evan Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    While I wouldn’t put things quite so bluntly, I agree with the principles extolled in your manifesto. Exceptions to the rule sometimes crop up, but by and large it holds.

    OTOH, I suspect that like myself, Warren has never had to hunt too hard to find work. Not having to worry too much about if you will be able to afford school fees for your kids next month gives you the ability to say, “Life’s too short” when it comes to painful clients.

    With regard to outsourcing offshore, I’ve been involved in situations a couple of times which required managing developers in a particular country. While I can see that for large companies the economies of scale or the long term commitments could make it worthwhile, for the smaller business trying to get something done cheaply you have to factor in the sheer amount of extra overhead it entails: from extra project management, to your own testing, to having to get things reworked because they are just going to break when you throw more than two concurrent users at it, to haggling over the rework because they’ll insist it is a change of scope, to endless conversations that go something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, that was my fault. I should have told you to lift the toilet seat up first…”

    If course, if you offshore to Australia you’ll have none of these problems whatsoever! :-^

22. Terry Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    Interesting manifesto. Basically you’ve said all the things, directly to your clients, that most freelancers only complain too each other about.

    A couple of years back, I simply got tired of ‘eating my hours.’ And so for the first time as a freelancer, I finally became bold enough to enforce the clause in my terms that says “excessive revisions will be billed additionally at $XX/hour.” The client did balk about it, and we renegotiated a new fee instead, to cover some of the extra work. Hey, compromise was better than not getting paid at all for those extra hours…so I felt good.

    But in my profession–graphic design–attempting to charge hourly doesn’t go over too well with clients. Depending on your market, you’re pretty much expected to be able to quote a flat fee for the job. For a newbie, that means a lot of trial-and-error and eaten hours, for your first few jobs–at least until you get a real sense of how fast you can deliver product.

    Clients don’t want to trust freelance designers–they’re always looking to get stiffed. Likewise, designers can have the same animosity and distrust of their clients. This all just makes for bad working relationships; when what’s really needed is honest, open, straightforward communication at the start. And I will say this about your manifesto–it certainly opens up that door…

23. bcg Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    Disclaimer: I have worked with Warren in the past.

    I would add the following:

    “I will say no. If what you ask is ridiculous, illegal, unethical or just plain dumb - I will refuse to take part in it.” The amount of times I have been asked by a client to get advice on spamming or spyware is surprisingly large. My surprise is only exceeded by theirs when I refuse to take part in what they want to do - even after being offered more money.

    “Its your stupid idea not mine. I am not to blame when software that meets the agreed specification does not attract millions of satisfied paying customers.” Several times in my career thus far I have been questioned for the work, especially in the web area, I have done because it did not meet their sales or usage projections. My explaining afterwards, often politely, that its not my business to tell them that I don’t think it will work - even after having told them previously that its been tried before in better ways and failed during early negotiations. The corollary to this rule is to make sure your final payments are really close to the launch date. Nothing like the last payment being held off because they only got 7 signups in the first month but “we spent $100k”.

    Cheers.

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