I Wasn't Paid • Hacker News Board

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#131

Post by vacri » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:05 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #58

Similar situation, but closer to $9k. Filed a lawsuit in court - still waiting 3.5 years later (NYC). I suspect it'll take a long to collect even after a judgement. Yes, don't extend so much credit - lesson learned (the hard way). I consulted with a number of people debating whether or not to blog about this situation with the person's name. In the end I chose not to at that time, but realized later that this person…

Another middle ground would be to name and shame just to thing that are factually part of the public record: "I am suing John Smith in court for non-payment of $9k for work done 3.5 years ago". Don't go into fiery detail, keep it to the facts that are part of the court record.

Of course, the hard part is keeping all the opinion stuff out of the blog posts around the fact-only one.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#132

Post by bugmenot » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:06 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #69

patio11 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to perform (for lack of a better word) a mitzvah for the community, rather than picking out a single abusive customer, use your experience and teach people how to pattern match. Memo to young Rails developers: "I have an idea for a website. If you build v1.0 I'll pay you a whole thousand dollars and you might get equity if it works very well." has never had a happy ending. (Slight overstatement there, but…

"I have an idea for a website. If you build v1.0 I'll pay you a whole thousand dollars and you might get equity if it works very well." If only all the assholes were so easily self-identifying. The real problems are the charming, smooth talking, dream clients offering cool projects, top dollar, and paying on time...until they don't and decide to start making your life hell because you're in so deep already. They're n…

> Being able to identify them means being warned.

Not usually. It'll come with experience.

Which, to be frank, it sounds like you could use some more of, both to have more and better options available, and to be more adept at recognizing those options. Chalk this one up to relative inexpensive experience, as it's a trivial amount of money in the long term: I was aware of (but didn't have a fiscal stake in, fortunately) a project with a TV & movie studio that did $7.2B in rev last year, ($300M of operating income), and the guys working on their site had to eat an ~$80K invoice on the ultimatum that they could either press for payment and get it, but 'never work in this town again,' or write it off and get more work in the future, that may pay better if that film doesn't flop.

Consider yourself a business: businesses eventually write off and move past losses, in part because of the opportunity costs involved, but also because it'll ruin a culture of any size to get too bitter and petty debts.

Anyway, bad clients usually have no shortage of warning flags, but until you're relatively secure and diversified, you'll be too hungry to notice and/or pay attention to them. And that's fine, provided you don't wreck your own reputation and business model in the meantime.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#133

Post by tsotha » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:06 PM UTC

gavingmiller wrote: post #28

barefoot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point does it make sense to involve a lawyer? $5,000? $10,000? Isn't it expensive to legally fight for your payment?

Stipulate in your contract that the losing side has to pay the legal fees for the other party. That way getting paid doesn't cost you more.

I used to work for a company that put a late-payment clause right in the contract. If you didn't pay us you were on the hook for a fee plus interest on the outstanding balance. So essentially it was like owing money to the IRS.

As far as I know nobody ever gave us trouble about payment.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#134

Post by easy_rider » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:11 PM UTC

minus1 wrote: post #90

patio11 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to perform (for lack of a better word) a mitzvah for the community, rather than picking out a single abusive customer, use your experience and teach people how to pattern match. Memo to young Rails developers: "I have an idea for a website. If you build v1.0 I'll pay you a whole thousand dollars and you might get equity if it works very well." has never had a happy ending. (Slight overstatement there, but…

Here's my mitzvah: Don't do work for individuals or very small companies. People are much more reasonable when your fee isn't coming out of their pocket.

- I agree, I've had bad experience with both. Be wary of individual/companies who work for clients and outsource their technology to you. Often the specifications will be very vague, and even if you manage to communicate a better level of understanding what THEIR CLIENT actually wants (which takes time and effort..) - you might end up not getting paid, because their client doesn't accept the solution, and doesn't want to pay the guy who hired you.

- Always have signed agreements, ALWAYS, can't stress that enough. Unless you have very good reasons of trust. Chat logs, e-mail conversations, all cool, all legal, but you will always get a yes-no story. Signed agreements are often very clear cut.

= Never agree on doing a revenue share with individuals or smaller companies. They probably won't have a clue what they're doing.

- If you don't believe in the product when you get your first impression on it, you never will. Don't let 'em fool you and convince you otherwise.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#135

Post by vacri » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

jebblue wrote: post #120

gavingmiller wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutely brilliant talk. And if you do any freelance or contract work you can learn something from it. The quote: 'when you hire a lawyer [to handle contracts] you switch from being a design amateur to a design professional' really spoke to me, and it applies equally to programmers.

I was about to watch it but the page starts out with an F Bomb, if I wanted to aspire to that level of communication I could have stayed in the Navy.

I find use of 'f bomb' less professional than the use of 'fuck'. It smacks of prejudice, plus it's using slang to deride slang.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#136

Post by nfm » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:29 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #69

patio11 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to perform (for lack of a better word) a mitzvah for the community, rather than picking out a single abusive customer, use your experience and teach people how to pattern match. Memo to young Rails developers: "I have an idea for a website. If you build v1.0 I'll pay you a whole thousand dollars and you might get equity if it works very well." has never had a happy ending. (Slight overstatement there, but…

"I have an idea for a website. If you build v1.0 I'll pay you a whole thousand dollars and you might get equity if it works very well." If only all the assholes were so easily self-identifying. The real problems are the charming, smooth talking, dream clients offering cool projects, top dollar, and paying on time...until they don't and decide to start making your life hell because you're in so deep already. They're n…

Fortunately, 90% of bad clients are the former.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#137

Post by gee_totes » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:42 PM UTC

I was involved in the case involving Carlos 'Storm' Martinez, who is an amazing post sound mixer and a stand-up guy. I am a little perturbed to see him mentioned on the site.

The design of the site in question was good, no doubt, but it was also riddled with a stolen Neutraface2 font face and the HTML didn't validate. And there was no RoR backend; the whole site was hosted on a GoDaddy shared server.

From my understanding of the dispute, the site was delivered many months late, and then the designer doubled his price. When Storm refused to pay double for late work, the designer linked in an overlay from a file hosted on Dropbox that announced 'This site was stolen'. That was the 'kill switch'. The designer also made a few blog posts and tweets bragging about his 'kill switch', which he later took down.

This lead to a panicked call from Storm to me to move the site over to my servers until the dispute could be resolved. A few days after that, I received a very aggressive e-mail from the designer threatening to sue me for stealing his work.

What iwasntpaid.com needs is links to conflict resolution and contract negotiation books, which are important freelancing skills that the designer sorely lacked. You never introduce yourself to a fellow freelance web programmer with "Hi, my name's Jeff, and I'm going to sue you over this dispute I have with another party".

Given the designer's history of posting complaints about how he's been screwed out of $500 and then taking them down once he realizes that it might be bad for his reputation, I wouldn't be surprised of that post about Storm gets taken down as well.

Also, from my web-stalking around this issue, I wouldn't be surprised if the hours that the designer put in trying to smear Storm across the internets, billed at the designer's normal rate, exceeded the payment he was expecting from Storm.

tl;dr: Settle on a rate before you start doing work, and if it's not a flat rate, keep the client up to date with projections of the final bill.

PS Carlos 'Storm' Martinez and his team at Creative Mixing are amazing, talented people and I would recommend them to anyone looking for post-sound work. It saddens me to see the post on iwasntpaid.com

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#138

Post by chc » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 9:50 PM UTC

reinhardt wrote: post #93

chc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular criterion has the benefit of helping you filter out about half of the job listings on Craigslist all on its own.

Only half? For Craigslist this sounds on the low side.

Heh, I'm sure it depends on your market. Here I'd say it's 50% obvious jokers, 49.5% who could be all right (but could just be less obvious jokers) and 0.5% who really sound like good clients.

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#139

Post by k-mcgrady » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 10:11 PM UTC

I just read the first story on the site. Taking someone to court over $1000 is a waste of time. $1000 may be a lot of money to you (it is to me) but I have faced this problem twice and you are much better spending your time on new projects and forgetting the client.

I have found the key to getting paid is milestones. I will not work with someone unless they are willing to pay 50% of the total before I start. This way if they cancel the project you are getting some money for your time. I also make clear to the client they do not need to pay the final 50% until they have the project from me. This way they need to trust me enough to pay the first 50% and I need to trust them that they will pay the final 50%. I've been using this system for the past 12 months and haven't had any problems with clients since.

There is a good thread on Programmers Exchange about charging clients (particularly for freelancers): http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/63042/recomme...

Re: I Wasn't Paid

#140

Post by davidpoarch » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 10:28 PM UTC

I think this issue is very significant these days, with the boom of outsourcing and remote freelance work. For scenarios with no down payment requirement, there's no guarantee the service provider will receive payment at all (and no guarantee the rest of the payment will be paid for the down payment scenario either). And for scenarios where a down payment (or full payment) is paid, there's no guarantee the service will ever be delivered to the requester. And how about scenarios where the wrong service was delivered? And how about if the service provider and requester are not in the same country (how do you go about taking legal action)?

I am a co-founder of a nascent third party payments aggregator (TPPA) called PayGuard. We are currently building our Beta, but our system specifically targets such scenarios. And with such capability, our system inherently solves the same issues with material products as well (a market PayPal currently dominates, though it does so extremely unsatisfactorily).