|
I ended up working as a developer for a branch of the local government. I'm an extremely fast worker, and when I'm left alone I can build most major systems by myself in about 3 months. Unfortunately, my work environment suffered from a major lack of committment to deadlines by both sides of the fence and eventually you just learned that estimates were ignored, deadlines didn't matter, users wouldn't sign off on design documents and you worked on whatever made you happy that day. Since the government was paying you there was no sense of market urgency to have something done on time, and frequently we would finish projects on time only to learn that the users, who were in such dire need of said project, no longer wanted it, or didn't have the time to implement it.
When I started doing side jobs in the real world I discovered that people who don't have an IT background don't know the first thing about how to define a project. My initial quotes were 6-pages long detailing the pages/screens required and estimated time to create each section (with padding to handle possible problems). The clients didn't even bother to read or try to understand the quotes and were really only interested in the bottom line. They couldn't conceptualize the end result (or even what they wanted) until they saw something tangible. I stopped writing detailed quotes and just made best-guesses time-wise and dealt with scope creep as best I could.
In the beginning it worked great but as I got higher and higher in demand projects started colliding. A user would hire me and say "we need this in September, we'll talk to you in June to get the ball rolling". While I was waiting for June to come around I'd get picked up for a few small projects and life would be good, but I'd forget about the first guy and August would come and then I'd remember that the client hasn't even contacted me yet. So I'd contact them and they'd say "Oh yeah, we still need this for September 1st...I'll see if I can get that data you needed for you".
Then came a relationship and a couple of children. The babies came mid-project and suddenly all my "free" time had to be devoted to my partner and kids (personally I'd prefer programming). This has totally killed it for me and I can no longer take on additional projects despite needing the money. I have to double- and triple-dip just to stay on top of things. I will confess to being unprepared for how draining my time vampire family ended up being.
Despite all that, I still want to deliver a better product than what the client is expecting and I want them to be happy. They just have to know that unless they are hiring me full time they aren't going to get it tomorrow.
|