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My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

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Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#81

Post by [deleted] »

nnq wrote: post #66
Devilboy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the client is 'not worth it' you're just not charging enough. Just work out what your price is and send them a new quote. Don't ever fire a client, that's just silly. Make the client say no.

Just curious: If the client asks you to also plumb hist toilet, you'd say "yes, but I'll bill you at $5k/hr for the toilet project"? You really want to be the "do anything for enough money" guy? ...cause this is how you're labeling yourself by going this route more than one time. Imho, taking some pride and saying "no, fuck of, I don't do this, find someone else" makes you feel 1000x better as you realize you don't d…

[deleted]

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#82

Post by yogo »

ZoFreX wrote: post #32

Something I dealt with a lot in oil & gas engineering, and have never personally witnessed in software engineering, is a "change order". The contract is signed. At this point, if you deliver on your end of the deal, they have to deliver on theirs†. If they want anything other than what is in that contract - additions, changes, removals - you send them a change order. This is a new document for both parties to sign, c…

There aren't change orders per se but usually in one of the clauses in the contract you specify that work outside of the scope (outlined in the contract), once all parties agree, will incur an additional charge or something like that.

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#83

Post by rayiner »

This answer is great: "This is the right answer. In business, when someone asks you do something extra the correct answer is "Yes I can do that. It will cost you $X." Make the other person say no if you really don't want to do something. Charge a ridiculous amount for it. Of course, there is the danger that they will agree which is why you charge something that would still be happy with. I would probably want it up-front as well."

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#84

Post by mindcrime »

ZoFreX wrote: post #32

Something I dealt with a lot in oil & gas engineering, and have never personally witnessed in software engineering, is a "change order". The contract is signed. At this point, if you deliver on your end of the deal, they have to deliver on theirs†. If they want anything other than what is in that contract - additions, changes, removals - you send them a change order. This is a new document for both parties to sign, c…

Something I dealt with a lot in oil & gas engineering, and have never personally witnessed in software engineering, is a "change order".

This is commonplace in custom software development in my experience. Having a change control process in place, and negotiating a price-tag for changes to the original contract, happened all the time in my first programming job. We were mainly working for government agencies (municipal and county government), universities, etc., and this was all completely normal.

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#85

Post by passerinelabs »

j_s wrote: post #80
passerinelabs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching Notch's Ludum Dare videos inspired me to create my first OS X app store app. It takes screenshots at a configurable interval and than creates H.264 encoded video of the resultant timelapse. Here it is: http://appstore.com/mac/ScreenshotTimelapse Here are 25 promo codes if anyone wants to try it out: http://pastebin.com/K6Xx59jY

See also: http://www.timesnapper.com/ for Windows (Classic version 'free forever'; doesn't seem to support stitching all the images together to export a video but should be do-able manually.)

For OS X users, you can take a screenshot from the command line with /usr/sbin/screencapture, so putting together a little script to make a screenshot timelapse is pretty trivial. With that and ffmpeg you can replicate most of the functionality of my program in just a few lines of bash. :-)

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#86

Post by mindcrime »

smackfu wrote: post #54
ZoFreX wrote: post #32

Something I dealt with a lot in oil & gas engineering, and have never personally witnessed in software engineering, is a "change order". The contract is signed. At this point, if you deliver on your end of the deal, they have to deliver on theirs†. If they want anything other than what is in that contract - additions, changes, removals - you send them a change order. This is a new document for both parties to sign, c…

This is extremely common in corporate software engineering, where a contract specifies exactly what will be delivered. In practice, those change requests are usually rejected, because the people with control of the money aren't the people using the product, and the customer ends up paying for something they aren't happy with. A lot of Agile methodologies are a response to this extremely strict change control.

A lot of Agile methodologies are a response to this extremely strict change control.

The problem, from what I've seen, is that developers understand agile development, but the "money people" don't. To them, "agile" is just a buzzword that means "good" and they aren't actually interested in participating in the process. So now you get people who don't understand, or aren't interested in, attending demo sessions, prioritizing the backlog, or reading/writing user stories. And when things don't proceed along a nice, smooth, water-fall like sequence, they get stressed and start complaining.

One place I'd say the Agile movement has fallen on it's sword, is in terms of promotion, education and buy-in from the "business community" to the point that they understand that Agile processes require their active participation.

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#87

Post by agravier »

passerinelabs wrote: post #78
srik wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All codes have been grabbed; saving you time to check. That said, the codes were a nice gesture. Will definitely put it in my list of apps to watch.

Wow. Here's 25 more: http://pastebin.com/r2KVSmXp I'm happy to hear any feedback: andrew at passerinelabs.com or @passerinelabs on Twitter.

Thank for those codes, Andrew. I have grabbed LYAEFN4PPWHW. I will use it to self-monitor my procrastination.

My first feedback to you is that the first contact is great thanks to the app's minimalism. It's really unobtrusive.

A second piece of feedback is that the menu bar icon looks poor on a retina display. I believe that one can use vector graphics (in PDF) or double the resolution (I always feel weird saying that, and want to say _quadruple_, but you know what I mean) to get a crisp rendering. I can screenshot what it looks like on my screen, if you have no opportunity to see it.

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#88

Post by skisly »

chops wrote: post #44

This is something I actually offer to my clients, and I do it for fun. I guess I was inspired by watching some of Notch's screencaps over a few days. So I capture it with RecordMyDesktop (I run xubuntu), and run through an ffmpeg script ( https://github.com/choptastic/watchmecode ) that resizes the video to be the same length as an MP3, and makes an X minute screencap montage for the client. Then it produces somethin…

ODesk have time tracking software. This system makes screenshot every minute I guess. It's very helps when you working with new developers. And you want to know for sure that he works on your project.

Re: My customer wants me to record a video of how I develop his software product

#90

Post by Amadou »

carbocation wrote: post #41
PerryCox wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kind of quotes from a customer should be instant red flags that they are not someone you want to work for. Devilboy does have a good bit of advice about charging an outrageous amount, but it's important to pick your battles. Sometimes no amount of money in the world is worth the headache that a customer like this could cause.

There is always some amount of money that is worth the trouble. Now, it may be some amount of money that cannot be paid by any entity aside from governments, Exxon, Apple, and a few others, but it is some amount of money nonetheless.

True. The problem is getting paid.

The client can agree to a ridiculous rate, but actually collecting is a whole different story. My gut says clients with red flags like this will be exceptionally difficult to collect from.

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