Why I Turned Down A $20,000/Year Client | Hacker News Reader

Why I Turned Down A $20,000/Year Client

creativeoverflow.net

82 pointsJacquesvh84 comments

I worked away as a (very) low earning freelancer for several years after the dot com bust so I'm only knowledgable in hindsight, but.. She complained about my fee – constantly is the #1 indicator that a client will ultimately be a huge pain in the ass you shouldn't have taken on, in my experience.

For a client to "negotiate" early on or from contract to contract is wise and can form the basis of a healthy client/vendor relationship, but complaints are indicative of someone who's happy to see and treat you like a cog in their machine.

> but complaints are indicative of someone who's happy to see and treat you like a cog in their machine.

... a cog in their slipshod, sand-in-the-gears, barely-operational machine in most cases.

A client that pays on time and, even better, via direct deposit, and doesn't complain or question you every month feels soooo much more professional. They give you a sense of great stability (financial and psychological). These are great partners, not just clients.

Yikes. I don't know if you are in the US or not, but in the US "direct deposit" means the depositor has both deposit and withdrawal rights (ostensibly to let them self-correct any deposit errors).

I would never permit a client that level of access to my bank account, not even for just a deposit-only account which automatically sweeps all funds to another account. To me, that level of interconnectedness says "employer" not "client."

In Europe, direct deposits are the norm (they're how you get money into people's accounts), and they have deposit-only rights.

There's a pretty significant different between EFT ( what you're referring to ) and ACH, which is the transfer of money directly into an account electronically.

It makes business sense to have all of your clients pay you via ACH if possible, however, you're correct that EFT is not a good idea.

In Canada withdraws and deposits are separate. Most employees are paid via direct deposit up here, and it's been that way since like the early 90's.

How your clients pay you? Do you get checks (pieces of paper in an envelope) mailed to you?

Article made a good point: $20K per year is a good client, but a low paying job. I have thankfully just had a few customers who expected me to always be available, and to turn things around on very short notice, all the time.

The issue is fairness to all customers and except for emergencies allocate large blocks of time, in advance, to each customer and don't interrupt thinking time for one customer by talking to another. In other words, if you are like me and like to work in intense 1 to 2 hour sprints without interruptions, customers who hire me should understand that it might take a few hours to get back to them for non-emergencies.

One sign of a good customer: when they know they are going to have a crunch and ask if they can pay extra for getting "always on" service for a while.

> I very rarely miss a family dinner, and I almost never work on the weekends. These are the perks of working for one’s self.

You don't have to work for yourself to do that; indeed I'd think it's a bigger risk when freelancing.

I have a conventional job; my boss and I both know what my hours are (they're written in my contract). I'd never miss an arranged dinner or work a weekend; I'd be amazed and somewhat insulted to even be asked. Is this really something normal over in the US?

It varies a bit by field. It's more common in software to have irregular working hours with periodic "crunch time". I suspect part of this is just down to tech companies not being all that well managed on average, so they often mispredict staffing needs. Some of it may also be a culture that considers that the norm, or at least acceptable, so it's self-reinforcing. It's particularly prevalent in videogame companies.

At large engineering firms outside of software it's less typical. If you're an engineer at Lockheed, Exxon, or Dupont, the expectation is that you'll work a regular 40-hour week, barring really unusual situations. Many people even carpool to & from work, so you have relatively little flexibility in staying late even if you were tempted to: if your carpool leaves at 4pm each day, you leave at 4pm.

I think there is a perception of working all the time in the US that isn't entirely true. For one thing people overstate that they're "working like a dog" because it implies some kind of importance.

But, as far as actual working hours, most people I know in IT work a pretty standard 40 hour week. Occasionally they might log in from home for an hour or two, here and there, if they need to catch up. Infrequently (like once or twice per year max) there may be a major release or update that required a week or two of working long hours. That can sometimes be due to slacking off at the beginning of the release phase, or just overly optimistic planning. Generally after a big push like that everybody will take a break and coast for a while or take a few days off.

That's my personal observation of my own team and about 5 or 10 others that I know.

When freelancing though, I felt like I never stopped working!

I should add, these are mostly stable companies - not startups fighting for their survival. Generally the larger the company the more stable the hours is my observation.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. With the exception of the one job I had in the games industry, the mid sized startups I've worked for gave me the best work/life balance and stable hours. The crazy hours of a young, small startup are well documented, but I also have a friend who works for IBM who has survived several layoffs over the last decade. He managed that because as they downsize his group, he picks up the slack. That often means working 80-100 hour weeks. He does this for years at a time, until he moves departments. Then he repeats the process all over again.

Maybe the sweet spot is mid-sized startups before they grow out of control and large companies who never seem to downsize? Those two situations never seem to last for more than a few years.

Yes, it seems pretty normal here; at least in the consultancies and businesses I've worked in, I've never seen hours or weekdays listed anywhere in an employment contract, and I can't imagine any of the employers I've gone through agreeing that sort of commitment.

Yes.

I run the IT ops of a startup. Pay is good, no equity though. Nights? If necessary. Weekends? If necessary. I was working on a federal holiday (July 4th) for no additional pay because we rolled our app out the night before.

The US has a long way to go with regards to labor rights.

What country do you work in?

UK (London). I have some friends (particularly financial industry) who work lots of overtime, but it doesn't feel like it's a "normal" thing, at least IME.

I don't see it as a big problem to change plans somewhat at the start of a project, this is certainly better than doing it half way through. As long as it's not a strategy to get a contractor to do extra work for free.

If you are charging a higher rate, part of the value associated with that is a certain degree of flexibility.

Also don't see the problem with the client wanting a cell number, if you don't want calls on your personal phone just get a cheap second phone + SIM for business. Make it clear which hours you will be available, put the phone on silent during family time and check voicemail periodically. I would be sceptical of giving somebody $20K who won't give me a "real" phone number.

I always find that speaking to somebody on the phone or in person regularly leads to a much better long term working relationship than simply email or IM. It's much easier to trust someone when you can associate them with a face or voice.

It is not the universal expectation of clients that they be able to reach consultants on the telephone if they have $20k invested in that relationship.

n.b. For many consultancies that is near or below the effective floor number to get them in the door, rather than being a huge anchor account.

I guess those are cases with larger or more established consultancies where there is already a reputation and probably at least a switchboard number.

If you're just hiring random freelancers who advertise on job boards there are quite a few fly-by-nights.

  > If you're just hiring random freelancers who advertise 
  > on job boards there are quite a few fly-by-nights.

Please stop making up a scenario that is different from the one outlined in the article. It's causing you to come across as argumentative.

Actually the article seems very close to that. The person mentions having only their cell phone and Google Voice. I doubt they work for a large consultancy. You tend to have office managers/assistants/schedulers/etc. after the first 5 people or so if not sooner. It doesn't make sense to waste high paid consultant time on things they can do and calls they can take.

The specifics are not made very clear in the article, so there are many possible scenarios.

A higher rate is commensurate with a higher end product. It does not give the client license to change the scope of the project every other day.

Cell phones are for emergency access (the site is down, etc) and only given in specific situations for specific rates. That does not sound like the case here. The client was given a phone number that would go to his cell at specific times which was more than sufficient.

Having regular phone contact is perfectly fine and can be scheduled for regular meetings. Weekly status meetings on ongoing work. Pre and post-launch meetings for specific milestones. Things like that. A client that wants license to call your cell whenever they think of a random bit of information instead of sending it in an email or saving it for a scheduled phone meeting (or scheduling one specifically for it) is not a client you want to have. They clearly don't value your time or the fact that you have other clients and responsibilities.

A higher end product will be something that fits requirements well, and sometimes those requirements will change; better to get those changes out of the way to the extent possible before you have written any code.

I agree that giving a personal number and letting people call you at any time should not be necessary but having a business number and email are fairly standard if you are a full time contractor.

I am also in favor of getting requirements change in the start but the client should be willing to renegotiate if they change the scope too much.

A higher rate is commensurate with a higher end product.

This is definitely not axiomatic. I've encountered plenty of high-rate consultants and consultancies that consistently deliver sub-par work; for various reasons (often favoritism and excellent marketing), this ends up working well despite low-quality deliverables.

Also, I've found that there is very little similarity between what a client thinks is a large change and what actually is.

That is, when a large client I work with called me with one-off requests, I usually just fulfilled them. It made me look helpful and not standoffish, helped our relationship, and the changes rarely took more than a few minutes to implement even though the client thought the changes were a huge deal.

Obviously this can vary. In the cases where the changes were more involved, I simply told him so and told him that I would need to create a quote for the work. This never caused any problems.

I agree with you, but I've learned that most programmers don't. Many times I've taken over a client from someone else who warned me they were horrible to work with, and I found they just wanted fast turnaround (i.e. within a couple days) for very small changes (15 minutes to 2 hours), maybe 2-3 such changes a week. I did the work, billed them, and they paid. If it was a bigger change I'd tell them that up front, and they'd okay the work and accept a later delivery, or work with me to change the scope. It makes the client happy and wins you all kinds of good will. With a good relationship, these "unreasonable" clients were all quite reasonable if I occasionally had to tell them I was booked and needed an extra week or so to get to something. I've really only had one true problem client, and with him it was more because he wanted to change the project scope repeatedly without changing the cost. I think a lot of programmers in client-facing roles would benefit themselves (or their agencies) if they prioritized client satisfaction as highly as technical excellence.

Exactly. Treating every interaction as a business transaction is off-putting and can have negative effects with the only positive being that you might make a bit more cash for some small changes.

The bonuses to agreeing to make smallish changes on the fly (for free or pay depending on your style) without acting like it's a pain in your ass are goodwill and a strong working relationship which results in a happy client which results in more work from that client as well as probable referrals to people that client knows.

As the saying goes, you can sheer a sheep many times but skin it only once.

> That is, when a large client I work with called me with one-off requests, I usually just fulfilled them. It made me look helpful and not standoffish, helped our relationship

Until it becomes a pain when your client stops recognizing it as favors and perceives it as your obligation. Being the nice guy can come back to bite you in the ass.

Maybe, but I've never experienced it myself, which is why I still do it.

It's worth pointing out that the work isn't really free. I still include the changes in future quotes and mark them as no charge to remind him what I did. This gives me leverage in negotiating fees on larger changes.

He do give his Google Voice number, it's literally a phone number. He said that he is more comfortable with that because he can turn off the number whenever he want. This is exactly what another cellphone would do.

A google voice number would feel less "concrete" to me, since it's tied to a google account rather than a physical sim card/phone.

Do you routinely exercise purchasing authority on $20k consulting engagements? If you do, your preferences are anecdotal evidence of the business practices of one client firm. If you don't...

Not personally, but I have worked with people who do. There is always some measure of due diligence performed where "this guy only has a google voice number" would be unlikely to pass.

How do they perform this due diligence? Is there a way to tell if a number is a Google Voice number?

This seems like an insane way to vet potential developers, by the way. Someone who bases a hiring decision on what brand of phone service your employee/contractor has chosen is probably not looking at the right metrics.

I haven't used google voice, but since the article mentioned that the client was not satisfied with a google voice number I assumed they must have had some way of knowing.

You can take all sorts of little clues from these kinds of things. For example if a website is phrased and designed to look corporate but the only number published is a mobile and the email address ends in @hotmail.com then you know you might be dealing with a single freelancer.

How would you know?

And furthermore, since numbers can be ported around to different providers, how would you continue to know?

I have a Google Voice number that used to belong to a real actual cell phone.

  > I don't see it as a big problem to change plans 
  > somewhat at the start of a project, this is certainly 
  > better than doing it half way through.

There's a lot hiding behind that word "somewhat".

In his book Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art [1] Steve McConnell says that most project schedules can tolerate around a 20% change in delivery time without too much distress. So if the "somewhat" is within the manageable +/-20%, then the project can move forward. If the change is bigger than that, it almost certainly means that the project deliverables, schedule and fees need to be renegotiated. And if a client is constantly causing a project to be renegotiated, are they really a client?

[1] http://www.stevemcconnell.com/est.htm

Hardly even feels like a real story, but I'm not unsympathetic to the client absent more details (how much of a premium does the author's charge, scope of the project in question, nature/timing of phone calls).

EDIT: has anyone noticed, "About the Author: Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint and Facebook." That trips some alarms for me, it doesn't sound like a freelancer's CV. It sounds like a social marketer's.

Yep , the story is vague but specific enough that a real client would know that it was written about them and probably find it quite unprofessional.

The submitter is the founder of the site hosting the post, so I don't think any of this passes the smell test.

The core problem I see this consultant facing is that they're doing business with an individual person and not with a business. Take people out to dinner. But do business with their companies.

Good point, but even when the client is a company you're usually only interfacing with one or two people, either of whom can be high maintenance.

Bottom line is customers suck. You're either a people person who enjoys the challenge of turning customer frowns into smiles, or arrange your business to minimize direct contact with customers.

The key difference between working for an annoying employee of a company and working for an annoying person is that the annoying employee isn't spending their own money. Both the spend and the return on spending are (usually) abstractions to employees. They're all too vivid to sole proprietors.

"She complained about my fee – constantly"

This is generally a sign that the person you're working with is paying directly from their own pocket, or the business is so small it feels like the equivalent of paying out of their own pocket, even if it's not technically.

I've had some mid sized clients that were still concerned about fee size - and they were family-owned/run. I'm not suggesting people shouldn't be concerned about a fee at all - they want to know they're getting more value than they're shelling out. It's a valid concern, but should be just one of many factors, and judging by hourly rate alone is a poor measuring stick (but one which few people can get past).

#1 I had someone call me up frantic because their site was broken. I didn't have the time to fix it right then, but emailed back instructions on how to fix it. I said "give this to your web team" (they had at least 2 JS developers on staff who had created the bug in the first place), but 7 hours later I got an even more frantic call to 'just fix it'.

I fixed it, sent an invoice for $200, and got back to my work in 15 minutes. I got a check in the mail the next week. They didn't particularly care what the price was. If I'd sent an invoice for $2k, possibly, but I probably could have said $500 and it still would have been paid. It wasn't that person's money - it was just a problem that needed to be solved, and there was money in the budget to do it.

#2 - had a prospective client complain about their current dev/tech guy, who kept fighting/arguing that some of the requested features couldn't be done, because they're not possible or they'd be too slow. I did a demo in an hour outlining exactly how to do it, what tech to use, how to set it up, and what the code would look like. And still got pushback on my fee, because hourly I'm about 6x what they're paying the other guy, but they only feel comfortable paying 2-3x the current rate. And I'm trying to get across to them that while I have an hourly (and daily, and weekly) rate, the bigger measure is - how fast is stuff getting done. I've been tempted to offer a project quote, but I've watched the project from afar for several months and it's felt like too many pivots to be stable enough to provide a flat rate quote.

#1 didn't complain at all - provided value, they saved face with their client, and I made $200 in 15 minutes.

#2 spending effectively their own money (or borrowed money) and are cautious about every penny. Again, not that they shouldn't be, but it's much harder dealing with this sort of client.

The second and third issues are serious. I read the first issue, being indecisive, as a cry for help from client to professional. After the first scope change on the first day, I'd do my professional duty and inquire if they might want to engage me to determine what they really needed, at 10% or whatever of the estimated project cost. In fact, wouldn't this have been obvious from discussions with the client before the freelancer's bid was accepted? If we abdicate our responsibility to guide the customer to make good choices using our skills and experience, then we often get indecisive clients. Otherwise we are reduced to glorified order takers. For example, if we got the RFP specs and are chatting with the client as we prepared our response, it is perfectly valid to ask them how they arrived at these requirements. If they tell us that they had engaged a brand consultant who laid out a multistep plan that they were now executing on, that is one thing. If they tell us that they decided to issue the RFP on the drive into work this morning, that's another. Is it that hard to detect that major scope changes are in the offing before submitting a proposal?

I would love to read what happened next: his resignation letter and her response. Did she try to change the rules? Did he give her a reasonable list of "why"? Did she ever get nasty with him. What happened next??

Good points, but seemed a bit misogynistic. Maybe it was the pictures.

Completely agree. The imagery was passive aggressive and didn't really add anything to the write up.

How did the pictures betray a contempt for women?

The whole article used the pronoun "she". Several pictures of women complaining or generally in a bad mood. I removed the pictures and ads first thing when visiting that site. Talk about a "client" not a "gender". When you use the word "she" you are referring to a person's gender, not that person. Since we had no idea who "she" was, other than "some client" it may have been more appropriate to call her "Penny" or some other such name (to protect the identity of said person).

We can also butcher the english language even more! For example, why betray the fact that the client was human? He could just use "it", or "a living organism". I mean sticking to the actual facts? The nerve of some people!

In other news "she" will be replaced by "Penny", anywhere, ever. And the world will be a better place.

> The whole article used the pronoun "she".

It was obviously a female client, so why not? When did using personal pronouns to refer to a person become offensive, not to mention invoke a suspicion of an underlying hatred of women?

The only time I've seen people have problems with the use of personal pronouns is when they use "he" to indicate a generic person, even though that person might as well be female (an annoying limitation of the English language).

> Several pictures of women complaining or generally in a bad mood.

How does that raise a suspicion that the author hates women? I'm honestly at a loss here.

100% Kudos. Refusing to take on an adverse relationship is a sign of maturity in business. If you manage your own finances well - saving, and not taking on unnecessarily large recurring expenses - your life will be happier one overall because you'll be able to say "no" when you should.

Why not just make it non-gender specific? The female pronouns and imagery really distracts.

How? By using 'he' instead of 'she'?

It's only acceptable to use "she" if the character in question is positive. Using "she" or stock photos depicting females to refer to a negative character is sexist.

I hope that you're speaking tongue in cheek. I mean, I am almost sure you are, but in the past few years the Internet has made my eyes rolling with all the silly code of conducts and special rules.

We seriously have jumped the shark as a species with this stuff. I'm hoping it's just the latest fad of the politically correct "party".

Maybe the client was female?

Totally tangential: I'm curious as to why the author included Shutterstock attribution links on all of the images.

Is the author getting some deal where they get images for free if they supply an attribution link?

Shutterstock has a blogger program wherein blogs and news websites get free use of their catalog of stock photography in exchange for attribution.

Almost unrelated -- the iframes that contain ads on the right side of your page need to either be made a little bigger to avoid the scrollbars that are popping up, or you need to do some CSS tweaks.

I guess my attitude here would depend on my pipeline. $20k of freelance work doesn't sound like chicken feed. I'd probably put up with a certain amount of bullshit if they pay in time.

Site looks like a content farm to me, complete with lousy advertising.

Smart move in my opinion I've faced some of the same decisions .

I don't understand why you call it $20K/year. Isn't it $20K/project?

$20K/year is lower than what most programmer interns/entry make these days.

No, it's 20k/yr. When you run a consulting business, you value clients by the revenue they'll generate every year. Obviously, you have lots of clients.

So how does that work? They hire you for a year, pay you 20K, and how many hours/week do they expect to get (is that in the contract)?

I do consulting myself, and I've never heard of such a strange arrangement.

I think you're overthinking.

To us, a 20k/yr client is someone we can forecast 20k worth of work with. You can forecast work from any client that does multiple projects with you.

But it's also worrisome that you see a formalized 20k/yr client as an oddity, because that arrangement is basically a retainer, and consultants should know how to structure retainers.

It may be $20k for one project in a year, or two $10k projects, or one $15k project and $5k in residuals (e.g. support). It really doesn't matter. Either way, they're a customer that you estimate will bring in about $20k of revenue to you over the course of the year.

In a consultancy, your costs are pretty well fixed, modulo hiring/firing staff, and mostly consists of payroll. There are relatively few marginal expenses (some travel expenses, perhaps?), which means that adding new work increases your revenue but only marginally affects your costs.

So a customer's value to the business is how much that customer adds to your revenue, because that's easy to measure individually and is almost the same thing as how much they add to your profit.

Often it will be for work that is estimated to be delivered in one year, which may be full time or not. Or the project might be delivered in under 1 year the contract includes support for a longer period.

You just described a per project contract that's supposed to be delivered in under a year. There's nothing in your description that says you're supposed to work for the whole year. You can finish it in one day.

Nobody said anything about delivery constraints. 20k/yr is a sales figure.

An ongoing support contract for x many man-days a month is pretty typical.

Ok, so that's not $20K per year. That's $20K per certain number of man-days.

You're getting a little bit of tunnel vision over deal structure here, which has nothing to do with the point the article is making.

No, that's $20k per certain number of man-days a month, with those man-day/months ending after a year.

If I agree to 8hr/month of support for a year, that doesn't mean if you don't contact me for a year I will give you 96 hr at the end of the year.

This is incidental, anyway. There are many ways to structure a job to end after a time frame. 20k/year is just referring to a job that brings in 20k, that you know will be over in one year.

They note in the article they would have several such clients which would generally be true for a freelancer (rather than a full-time "contractor.")

I can't see how anyone who read the article could possibly make the comment you just made.

Did anyone else notice sexism?

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