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Comment by trevmckendrick | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about "plain stupidity." :)

To be clear, this project is a 100% rewrite of my current app. It has a ton of additional functionality, is built much better, includes a store for IAP's of additional reading content, etc.

It's my bread and butter.

While I could have gone back to him with another project in the future, I wanted to make sure this project went great. It's a "bet the company" project and in the overall scheme of things $2,000 isn't that much.

Can you imagine how great you'd feel to get an email from someone saying they decided to increase your pay by 50%? Wouldn't you do your best work for them?

That's the message I was going for.

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To be honest this would turn me off and cheapen our relationship.

Its almost like you rubbed it in my face I could have charged more.

Better to throw in a bonus at the end like "if you complete by x then you get y".

> Its almost like you rubbed it in my face I could have charged more.

Yeah, I've been on the receiving end of this. It made me feel like a chump (even though I knew I was charging right about market rate for it.)

"Hey man, something has come up and I could actually use this 3 days earlier than we agreed. If you meet the deadline, I'd like to offer a $2K bonus" would neatly sidestep this and should still fulfill the author's desire to get quality work.

I've seen this before as well, where doing someone "a solid" actually results in higher expectations for all future interactions, and a feeling that they were cheated in all past interactions.

As the saying goes... sometimes less is more.

I understand the philosophy behind your deed.

Plain stupidity might be an exaggeration but it's kind of like paying $6 for a bag of apples to assure they're good enough for you even though the price is only $4.

Bottom line, it was unnecessary. It eliminated some of the risk but with the 'top notch developer', as you call him, it's unnecessary.

As I said, people tend to get very comfortable and I've seen people put in much less effort when they're paid more.

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