Begging for Your Pay
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Don't be so sure. In the last fifteen months, I've gone from being completely broke to having no debt and about a year's salary in the bank. In my experience, it's much easier to make dispassionate and rational decisions when you're not in imminent danger of losing everything.
This is based on your current "safe" mindset. I can assure you that if you were in a very different financial situation that your thinking would most likely change.
No it's based on me knowing myself very well through critical analysis of myself. I am an all chips in guy. I have been up and down but through it all, I have always been consistent on my principals, when I was starting out I walked out of a really bad position with nary a weeks pay in the bank. I barely landed something new and made the rent in time. Never the less, I stuck to my principals. I made it really big on an exit, bet it all on investments and start-ups, lost it all, went another round after working some jobs, had two good exits and started playing it safer by switching to consulting, irregardless of all of that my core values and principals never wavered. So I am pretty sure, if my financial situation was different, I would still feel the same.
You'd be surprised how one's self can change under unsafe circumstances, despite all the "critical analysis" he had done...
I would put that effort into finding a different job. Tell me that isn't a better use of time.
It is always easy in hindsight to say it should never have happened but that does not make it anyone's fault other than the people who agreed to pay them and didn't.
I have this really bad habit of trying to trim my post to get them down to more digestible bits. In saying that, I did not make it clear that I was talking about clients in which the worker has a new arrangements with no or little payment history, or worse yet one that has a chronic track record of short or late payment. I have good clients that have the typical red tape issues with money. But I have a long term history with them and I know it is coming. In that case sure, I have let them go well past 30, but their was a proven track record of paying.
Also, a reputation for destroying clients' web sites isn't going to help. You won't get far enough to explain "Yes, but…"
"Why not just remove your code from the site until they pay you?"
I thought about that, but one has to be very careful about that, or one stumbles into illegal territory.
Also, it is complicated, there were several programmers working on the site, and none of us owned any portion of the code, by which I mean: each programmer was free to edit any portion of the code (which is an awful idea - the code quality was terrible because no one had any sense of ownership over the code).
I signed an agreement with MyBailiwick (Miles Spencer and Todd Carter) which said I owed the copyright on my work until I was paid, so in theory I still own some partial copyright, but my code is mixed in with the code of every other programmer, so it would be tough to enforce my copyright without tripping over someone else's code, which might in fact have been paid for.
More so, I was paid for the first 2 months of work I did for them, it was only the last 6 weeks that I was never paid for. So even among my code, it would tough to say which parts I was paid for and which parts I was not paid for.
In saying that upon payment it is a good idea to have a routine that kills the check to your server as an authorization check that fails in production could shoulder you with a good deal of liability.
In my contracts, it states you will not use the work until we've received payment, and we will unhappily file DMCA takedowns against infringing users who've not paid for work done which isn't theirs yet but they aren't paying yet continue to use. (As we only transfer rights to the work upon final payment).
After a certain (long) period of no payments, we have a forfeiture clause, which removes all right of them to ever use the work without removing the debt for items already performed. This works considerably better than interest.
A TRO is a much cheaper thing to get than a small claims judgement.
For most clients, we additionally do not provide the source code for them until they've paid in full.
Instead there's weeks, and then months of putting off, half-truths, lies, and the like. Most people new to freelancing trust that it's just some bureaucratic hold up, and the worst offenders develop entire personalities that are based on exploiting people's natural tendencies to trust other human beings. It usually takes getting burned a few times to learn that "the check is in the mail" translates to "I'm never going to pay you because the amount is small enough that involving a lawyer doesn't make financial sense".
I've been doing the freelance dance for 10 years and for some reason in the last 4 months I've now fallen into the trap of non-paying clients on huge projects, twice. Its incredibly degrading, especially when I thought that at this stage in my career I had solved this problem.
I'm really over this, if employers could simply deny wages to FT employees there'd be hell to pay. Some clients deliberately use NET-90+ for freelancers as a way of managing debt, they pay off any debt with hefty finance charges first, and any vendor that doesn't have the teeth to collect or balls to charge and enforce 20% interest gets perpetually shuffled to the bottom of the pile.
I hope in a future where freelance is considered a more socially acceptable method of employment we can establish some more protective legal frameworks for the self-employed. The system as it stands is completely flawed
Selling debt to a collector is giving up. You do it when you decide that the probability of getting paid is too small for you to spend further time on it.
My company is constantly scratching and clawing for invoices to be paid. We're a small company that works with several much larger companies. While we offer a great product that our accounts need, we have little leverage when it comes to 'extracting' payment.
http://www.dump.com/2010/12/13/the-vendor-client-relationshi...
"Want to be paid." I hear that a lot now. Want. As if they're asking for a hand-out, begging for something they don't necessarily deserve. They want to be paid. I sense a similar attitude here.