61–70 of 89 posts
Good means to advertize your site on HN, though. ;-)
Thats probably lower than a cleaning man is selling his time for.
Oh well, I guess you get what you pay for. No offense, but seriously.
P.S. I checked out your essay about the first person view. I think you should watch this video from the BBC. It describes how this first person view that you describe is not actually making the decisions for your body, an MRI machine can predict what decision you will 6-7 seconds before you become conscious of making a particular decision. This doesn't necessarily answer your question, but the video shifts the question from why am I making decisions to why does brain make me think I'm making decisions.
My biggest concern with doing something like this would be that you'd burn all your time negotiating - because clients are going to show up with a "3 months to implement" idea, and you're may spend more (unpaid!) time stripping the thing down to a reasonable MVP than actually coding. "We'll agree beforehand on a list of features" has a lot of complexity hidden inside; if a client shows up with an idea "be the next Go…
My response was something like "If I could write a search engine as good as Google in my spare time, I'd be living a lifestyle somewhat more luxurious than the one I actually have."
Thanks for all the helpful advice! Totally didn't expect so much feedback. Question for the more experienced people here: if I changed it to "$2,345 per week, and it'll take 1-3 weeks" instead of "$2,345 for up to 3 weeks," would I lose anyone I shouldn't be losing?
A better idea is to go with $12345 for 4 weeks.
I like the idea, but: $2,345 / (40 * 3) = $19.5416666667/hr I guess if you're just starting, that's decent money, but I don't think I could run with the same idea myself. I'd probably need to add a 1 to the front of your number.
To be honest, I said 3 weeks just to be safe (the old rule of doubling what you think you need). The plan was also to work on multiple projects in parallel. You're right though, I am just starting off, and already feel a bit guilty asking for anything north of $5k.
- avoid the arseholes: at 1cent to 50bucks any idiot will spring for the idea and make your life miserable. At 2345, you should be out if their price.
- to fund your own tenure. We work at 19 bucks an hour because the employer just needs our body at a certain location. Not our brain or our lifelong learning. But you need to use those things. Fund them.
Your fee is too low. It turns out to around 35 000usd per year. Before taxes. Thats probably lower than a cleaning man is selling his time for. Oh well, I guess you get what you pay for. No offense, but seriously.
How can you commit to a fixed amount to execute on an idea that requires an unknown number of iterations, re-evaluation of initial assumptions, and customer feedback? Maybe this is possible IF your customer is a sensible designer who can iterate in parallel with you and has a realistic sense of what an MVP is and isn't. If your customer is just some schmuck with 2.5 grand to throw around and no product experience, yo…
Chris Granger does (did?) offer a similar service[1]. I think his price (5000$) is more sustainable for a developer, but I'm not sure how the market is for this kind of work. Chris, if you are reading this, please share your experience with us. [1] http://iwbyp.chris-granger.com/
If I recall correctly, he got more projects than he had time to work on and people didn't care that it was written in Clojure and not Python or Ruby.