Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

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It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency. They ripped you off =/ No two ways about it.

> I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match. I was used to working with individual freelancers, and WebAgency was accustomed to larger clients.

...I think that is a very forgiving, but utterly self-doormatting, perspective on the issue. This was an incompetently managed agency who kept bullying you because you let them. At $175/hr, even as their smallest client, you deserved waaaaaaaaay more professionalism. IMHO the biggest lesson to be learned here, that you didn't really talk about in the blog post, is not to let someone -- agency or employer or freelancer or otherwise -- fleece you over like this. Isaac kept stalling and not delivering and mis-spending your contracted funds. You should've demanded a partial refund or threatened to sue. Their behavior wasn't acceptable, but you just kept saying "it'll get better...". It never does.

Sorry to be so harsh, but you kept trying to defend their "best intentions". No, they just didn't take you seriously, and then they failed your project and dragged you down with them. Nobody should be paying for an agency like that, especially for $175/hr. What a rip-off :(

You did mention that you probably would've seen better results from a freelancer, and that's probably true -- especially from a place with some bare accountability, like Upwork where there's reviews.

> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me.

From the article: > They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.

The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.

I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it might not have been directed by a manager!

At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful things like PowerToys and GraphingCalculator.

It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying for billable hours. If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.

There's also a pretty big difference between spending a LITTLE extra time on a side project vs not even finishing the actual project because your side project became the main focus. This is probably OK: "Hey, here's that finished logo you asked for. By the way, we had plenty of extra hours left, so I spent an hour on this new design mockup... doesn't it fit in much better with the new logo? What do you think, should we consider expanding the project scope to pursue this, or drop it if you don't like this direction?"

That's not what this agency did. They were more like "Ohhhhh yeah we still haven't had time to finish your logo. We need a few more months while we figure stuff out internally. Sorry, you're just not a high priority for us. But hey, one of our designers took half your hours and made this, check it out! Yeah, I know it's not what you wanted, but the logo person is busy. But check it out anyway! C'mon! By the way, if you paid us more, maybe we'd take you more seriously." What bullshit, lol... =/

Honestly you hit the nail on the head here:

> If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.

Additionally, if he was “such a small % of their total revenue” it should have been nothing at all to eat the inappropriately high costs on this project.

Exactly. There are 'billable hours' and 'non-billable hours'.

Work outside of a contract scope is not billable.

> Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told

I don't believe this is true for adhoc work. There's often pressure to get a job done under time under budget to maximize profit. It's one reason I much prefer working for a service based company as there IS room to do what you want and push boundries.

I did it plenty when I was working as part of a contracting house where “every hour is billed to a client”. There’s plenty of room to spend time making crazy tools to automate your work or provide internal/external/personal value.

Sometimes these rogue gambits pay off and return multiples of value…sometimes they just waste massive time.

But I can say that I was absolutely a rogue project-doer in an engineering body shop.

Good point, if youre billing every hour you can just squeeze the client. I've never worked in a place like that so I can't comment on what it's like.

And "I've got a lot of my plate but let me see if I can squeeze you in" is one of the most obvious ploy of salespeople.

They're trying to make themselves look popular? Faking social proof, as if everyone wants to buy their stuff?

> It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency.

I've learned to keep things vague. I'm even careful about writing complimentary stuff; usually, if I have had a hand in it, I generally try to avoid directly naming.

I am very careful about writing non-complimentary stuff; even if I have documented proof. In these cases, I may keep it to direct personal experience, and avoid directly naming the guilty parties. I've found that people don't heed warnings, so I'm not actually doing anyone a favor.

Lawyers in the US can get awful indiscriminate, when it comes to dragging people into court, and I have found that most organizations have many teams; not all of which may be bad/good.

This is a very good point, sadly :( A lot of mediocre companies will abuse the legal system to cover up their ineptitude.

They're meant to be serving him. Instead, he was serving them, propping up their sizeable enterprise at the expense of his own (solo with meagre profits ~$20k/y).

The boost in sales since could've been achieved with a modest revamp or be entirely unrelated.

I don't think anyone at his scale should be paying $175/hr for custom illustrations especially when they look like the placeholder illustrations used in every startup template these days. For something specific like illustration, don't trust a random hire from the agency - go via UpWork or similar and find a freelancer whose portfolio you can vet in advance.

He should've used a well-designed Shopify theme for $300 and instead put money towards product photography. That'd get it 90% of the way comfortably and he'd have $40k+ still in his account. (I say this as a 20+ year web designer whose career has been eaten by platforms and templates.)

1000% agree. A lot of web dev is insanely overpriced. Find a good cheap template and save tens of thousands. I guarantee you an agency will not be 100x better than for the 100x price difference. Web is one of those "make once, use often" industries that we don't really know how to price yet, but $175/hr is definitely not right.

Agencies aren't selling you superior talent. They're preying on your ignorance. Most of the best web stuff is free, made by people who are either passionate about their craft and want to give it away, or else have to prove the value of their labor because they were born in a poorer country and merit is all they have to prove themselves with. When you work with an agency, all it means is that you're too scared (or don't know how) to vet design and dev work accurately, so you're paying extra for the illusion of quality. Trust me, you're not going to get that. You're just ripping yourself off.

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