Ask HN: Why do we let people take advantage of us? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do we let people take advantage of us?

4 pointsge964 comments

I keep stressing "it's not about the money..." and as days drag on, I keep spending several hours a day on building a site for a "client" without pay.

I work at a restaurant washing plates, prep cook, fryer. But I'm also a freelance full stack developer. But I'm also not using things like Laravel, Angular, Heroku, being proficient, competent developer.

So I'm in the process of building this cloud-based photo-oriented web application and I keep doing more and more work on it. I agreed to deliver part of the page for $100.00, and I've been working on this since beginning of December. I've often spent days where I almost put in 12 hours of work.

"I feel bad" but also I've been paid $75.00 for doing CSS media-query corrections on a site.

Now I feel like I'm the bad guy for expressing my concerns. I am the bad guy because I agreed to deliver this site for $100.00 and I'm complaining about how much time I'm spending but the features keep adding on, like "Oh now we've got to optimize this."

Now that I've spoken my mind it's awkward. Jesus it's pathetic. My other client on the other hand who's paid me over $600.00 for modifying their CMS building PHP scrapers, and modifying their layout, etc... They too have slowed down in paying me. I just do things. I feel bad to ask to get paid.

The cloud client is based in a "third world country" where their currency conversion to mine is 50:1 so I am expensive to them despite me being worth $15.00/hr ha. It's pathetic. I don't think I can be a business man with this mindset.

Deliver what you agreed to; this is not coextensive with "anything the client wants." Do not do work again for this client. If it gets truly untenable, give the client their money and the code then write this off. [+]

Focus in the future on optimizing your business so that you are not exposed to terrible situations which are within your power to avoid. You should radically raise prices; no one who can spell "CSS media-query" has a market clearing price of $15. Find businesses which can turn PHP into money (you may have to explain how); sell them an offering where one day of your time costs at least about $1,000; do not do work for any business at which that is not a screamingly good deal.

But I'm also not using things like Laravel, Angular, Heroku, being proficient, competent developer.

Tools do not make you a competent developer. Reliably shipping business value makes you a competent developer. The culture of the development community consistently makes developers devalue their own expertise relative to that of a for-profit business; this is a knock on our community and against our interests generally and your interests specifically. Stop talking yourself down, to third parties, to yourself, and (most especially) to clients.

[ + ] You'd generally be allowed to do this by a clause in your contract. I predict with a fair degree of confidence that you don't have an explicit contract for this engagement. That is a problem; you should fix it for every engagement after this one. "Kill clauses" are a useful feature to have in your contracts; they're described in more detail in this video (which I recommend to you in its entirety):

https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1

Sorry for the late response. If it wasn't for user dkyc below, I wouldn't have figured out how to find this post. I just presumed no one responded as people in general don't like to talk to whining people haha. Which I understand you'd rather see success stories where people are then like "Oh good job man!" or "How can I do what you did?" I understand that, no one wants to be around depressing people.

Anyway I find it hard to value myself. What I like about building this current project is the things I'm learning and freedom to build it as I please.

Anyway I appreciate your response. I haven't used a contract before. I in general do milestone-based pricing although I'm finding that this doesn't make sense. Yesterday I worked on a scraper that rebuilt the dom of a page and it's like that kind of work compared to CSS or something how are those two equal in price?

I was given another $100.00 thanks to my complaining but I felt bad receiving the money. It's kind of funny because this one client I spent a month working on this scroll-triggered animation for their product and I was having problems with asyncrhonous processes eg. things ending before something else begins and the thing I built was problematic. I ended up refunding them their money which was $100.00 that feeling sucks.

Yes I am an idiot to continue building this site. But it is impressive in its own regard. To put that under my profile.

I will also set this guy up with a VPS LAMP server to run the site with OVH.

Your post gives me hope but I have to work on the business aspect. I feel that I just rambled and didn't really respond to your comment. Thanks for your time and the link.

edit: I watched that video before on the "F* you pay me" it's recommended by a lot of people.

Hi there. Is there a way to contact you in some way other than your UpWork-profile (linked in your HN profile)? It's a good idea to include your e-mail address there.

I was in a similar situation a while ago, but can't share all info publicly.

I dont. The question is why do you?

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