Hacker News Reader

Comment by Iftheshoefits | Hacker News Reader

Once the author "learns to do it [him]self," maybe he'll appreciate how complicated even "simple" iOS apps are to develop, and maybe he'll realize his expectations were a bit unreasonable.

Also, this author's post is exactly why I will never ever work on Elance again. The clients have expectations far out of line with what they're willing to pay.

View on HN

I feel like that's the case with doing consultant work in general.

it's more pronounced with clients that are less sophisticated, smaller, more mom-and-pop, "I had this great idea!!!! but a very small budget" types. avoid them, and you'll do better

Agreed. Consulting and working with individuals to develop their 'baby' is extremely difficult. Majority of the time their expectation is that coding is fancy typing and changes take seconds not hours.

As a developer I would suggest building in a reasonable monthly fee for X months for support. It's unrealistic to assume apps are going to meet customers expectations 100% of the time. Discussing this and setting a budget for after 'completion' helps a ton.

The poster and most individuals expect to pay a one time fee and start making tons of money on their idea without reinvestment.

As developers we need to help educate clients. But, individuals are hard, we never do it unless they are well funded. Not just for their app but for their marketing and overall initiatives.

> Majority of the time their expectation is that coding is fancy typing and changes take seconds not hours.

THIS. spoken like from direct experience. that's a definite pattern I've seen with some kinds of clients. "How long will it take for you to type up these features?" They have no clue as to how complex software is, all the moving parts, the interactions, the hidden bugs and quirks, lurking complications, constraints, trade-offs, under-documented or mis-documented behaviors, etc.

Having dealt with small and large clients I find that mom and pop shops don't have the budget and they have unreasonable expectations. Larger clients are still unreasonable but they have the budget so it's easier to deal with their stupidity.

Yes, I think most of us probably have the experience of the friend (sometimes a friend of a friend) who has a "fantastic idea... just write the app and we'll split BILLIONS OF DOLLARS".

It's amazing how many of those fantastic ideas don't survive the counteroffer of them paying me my normal rate and then keeping all the money themselves.

THIS

the test of... if they truly thought it was a billion dollar idea, surely it would be smarter of them to retain all that equity for themselves, not a single drop for the developer.

but gee, perhaps there's a chance, just a chance, it won't be worth a billion dollars, and perhaps... nothing. So in that scenario, the brave entrepreneur wants to minimize his cash spend down the hole. but where there's a chance of great reward there's a chance of loss (whether of dollars or time.)

Also a certain percentage of entrepreneur types seem to correlate with the psychopath/sociopath type. And it's hard to identify those folks early on sometimes. And it's early on in your relationship with them where there's the most pressure to take on an equity relationship. Which gets back to a "dating before marriage" and "work for cash, only" and "observed actual performance and iterative reciprocity" policy as being the safer, more conservative best practice. For all parties, I suspect.

My startup ( codedoor.com ) is based around freelancers' open source contributions.

For now, even clients have to log in using GitHub, as the freelancers I have talked to prefer technical clients.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com