- Every client of mine during my contracting days. It took me way too long to reply with, "Oh that's great news! I wasn't sure of my availability, and was certain I was going to be way too expensive. Glad you got it figured out."
Once, when fed up with this during a discussion on a small moonlighting job I said "Yeah, kids are pretty good with this stuff these days, Tell you what - have him get started and I'll be available to give him any help he needs at 2x my rate".
I responded that he was the one who had reached out to me, and if he feels like his son can do it then he shouldn't have wasted his time trying to find a contractor since that will be more expensive.
The client didn't like the attitude and I didn't get the job, but I was kind of glad because it was pretty clear to me that he would have tried to weasel out of paying me regardless.
$40/hour is an extremely low rate for a software engineer, even at the time. I'm not sure what the guy was expecting, and I'm quite confident that he would have tried to weasel out of paying the second I delivered a product by claiming it didn't match his spec. Honestly I don't really think I'm ever going to contracts for small clients again regardless; a lot of them can get away with a SquareSpace site, and the ones that can't should probably spend their money buying a few courses on using Claude Code or ChatGPT.
There's also the fun scam of wannabe Steve Jobs characters. I had a person try to recruit me for a job where I worked for 2% equity in their business, where I was expected to write the entire codebase myself. Of course the remaining 98% went to them, and as far as I can tell they felt that their "idea" was just that valuable and didn't plan on contributing anything else. Fortunately, I didn't really fall for that one.