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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Be careful what you wish for.

This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased.

I wonder how applicable this phenomenon is here. You could easily become known as the "ie6 web design experts" who corporate drones turn to first. Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?

[EDIT: Lots of us are constantly dealing with the trade-off between whoring ourselves out for high paying shit work and doing what we really want. Just sayin'.]

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Q:"sure you'll make a ton of money, but is that what you want?"

A: "yes, that will be fine."

Thats what i can't life with.

I like to enjoy doing things i want to. Mostly.

But money will never get me to do things that are awful to me.

It's just not feeling right and money really isn't worth it.

Try to enjoy your life without a lot of money, i think it's really possible and even better in the end.

I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times.

The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't provide you with the "fuck you"-money needed to never have to do it again.

Do people really go into web design to get "fuck you" money?

Not smart people.

Just keep turning up the dial every time you don't want to do the job. You'll make even more money, and have less jobs. The sky is the limit.

I think that at some point your pricing will just seem completely erratic and would perhaps scare people off who don't even care about IE6.

If the high price is only for the ie6 work, you won't scare them off.

$125/hour for regular work - $350/hour for ie6 work.

People will get the message.

If it matters that much to you, just say "no" when they ask if you support IE6. However, I agree with the article: it's a good strategy which seems to have worked for at least one person.

Subcontract the IE6 compatibility work to someone who doesn't know how much you're charging for it.

And if the subcontractor does crappy work, the client will think you did a crappy job.

I would think that if the subcontractor was good enough not to do bad work, he/she would also not want to do IE6 compatibility work.

> And if the subcontractor does crappy work, the client will think you did a crappy job.

If you passed through your subcontractors work without reviewing it, you did do a crappy job.

> I would think that if the subcontractor was good enough not to do bad work, he/she would also not want to do IE6 compatibility work.

That's assuming a lot about other peoples priorities. You'll be surprised how many perfectly qualified people who does not place the same premium on creative freedom you do.

If you find yourself with a lot of well-paid IE6 work, spending some time on elance finding someone good to offload it to and putting him on a handsome retainer could turn out to be a very good investment.

If you're jacking up prices in an attempt to drive away business, I think you can afford to buy pretty good work. But if we go by your logic, no good IE6 compatibility work ever gets done, so expectations will be low anyway.

"[Your favorite economically impoverished country here], home of IE6 compatibility."

> Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?

Well sure, that's why you've been agreeing to do it for that price. If doing it so much makes it not worth it, increase the price even more, eventually demand has to decrease.

In this case, what's more likely is that some customers will see the extra cost for IE6 as an unfair charge and just not use your services at all. I don't agree with them necessarily but put yourself in their place: They are not responsible for the state of Internet browsers and for Microsoft's low browser quality.

So if you apply this otherwise good practice, make sure you communicate it well and price it very transparently. After selling someone of the wonderful benefit of a beautiful web application or site, it's always hard to backtrack and say that standard web applications like browsers actually can get very clunky and that some will cost a lot to support.

Take the limit of this scenario and you get a single job that pays more money than you'll ever need, thus leaving time to do whatever you want.

The thing is I don't see the business case for paying extra money for IE6 compatibility, at least not any serious amount. After all, Windows Update is free.

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