Contract Bit The Dust

Every site has two parts to it. One is the EUE (End User Experience), sometimes referred to as the UI. The other is the Admin part of the site where administrators go into adjust things.

On one client I had, which paid pretty good for awhile, I at least completed the EUE, but not the Admin part. I only had one week left in the project timeline to complete the admin piece, and one week for testing. But I had some things going against me even with the tight timeframe.

1. The client didn't even know how a critical piece of the site was going to be worked out. They assigned a senior dev to figure that out and get back to me.
2. The client was frustrated already on time but by their own fault. Early on in the project, they had no XHTML templates for me to hang things on, no serious functional spec exept a two-pager requirements list, no time for me to rework their existing functional spec, no clear direction on how some key aspects of the work were going to be ironed out, and they had me first start with Zend Framework and then abandon that in favor of my own design.
3. They had a senior dev who was pesky. He kept out of the design for the most part, but he'd have some biting questions for me here or there as I went forward through the thing. And when I tried to get more information from him, it was like pulling teeth -- he would delay frequently unless I called him on his phone.
4. The top guys didn't know a thing about programming or building projects of this size. The existing site they had was built over time by several developers over a series of months. Their knowledge was immature of this industry.

My lessons learned here are:

• to really get a grasp of my client early on.
• to see if they have a pesky senior dev who's going to get in my way.
• to never again join a project where they do work in MVC format.
• if locked into a corner, know when to get out.
• if told to stop work, don't fight it -- just get out and move on.

Well, anyway, this might seem like a dose of bad news, but actually it is not. I don't have to do that pesky project anymore. I can work with two other really good clients right now. One is flexible and sort of pays semi-okay. The other is flexible/inflexible (fair is what I'm trying to say) but pays better and understands my worth.

One thing I did on the end of the project, however, was a trick. I had already been paid several paychecks on this project already. But in the end here, I asked for $1500 which is half of two weeks worth of work. By doing that, I knew they would not pay that sum. What this does is get me off the hook for a lawsuit. Imagine if I had not done that and had just said I want out -- they might come back to me and ask me for some of their cash back, or hit me with a lawsuit. The next thing I did was act professionally through the whole closure. I explained my predicament and then left the facts as the facts without pointing fingers. I fudged things a little and said that I'd like to work with them in the future. Of course I know that the client wanted to return with a nastygram, and they did. But I did not return one back to them. This makes the client seem victorious and me as the failure, which is exactly where I wanted to leave things. This keeps them out of the mood of suing me.

So anyway, here's a toast to the future on my next contracts!