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.

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…

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! :-^

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

“… 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.

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.

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,