Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by xacaxulu on Monday June 22, 2015 @10:54AM
(#9758727)
Great takeaway. Debt tends to make 'good little workers'. Stay free my friends!
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by moron4hire on Monday June 22, 2015 @04:41PM
(#9761052)
I think P.T. Barnum wrote the prototypical "Self-help: finance/entrepreneurship" book in "The Art of Money Getting: Or, Golden Rules for Making Money" [0]. A lot of it sounds like the stuff you hear getting hammered to death on motivational TED talks. It's a pretty short book and he doesn't go into too much exposition on a lot of the issues he addresses, with the exception of debt. He probably spends half of the already short book on talking about the evils of debt, especially debt put into things that aren't assets. It's not the debt that is the problem, it's the mindset you have to be in to take the debt, the mindset that the debt puts you in, and the mindset of the type of person that continues to use debt, especially destructively. There are some closely related issues with spending money, which tie in nicely.
It's an interesting read. This book was written in 1880, and if not for the dated writing style, would fit right in to the modern day self-help genre. It really helps underscore the idea that there's "nothing new under the sun."
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by crdb on Monday June 22, 2015 @12:11PM
(#9759291)
I've come across this a few times. The managers' thoughts were probably along the lines of "great, I got all my code cleaned up/the hard part of my product built for the expensive rate, now I can fire him and pass on maintenance to the cheap guys over there".
And of course your thoughts were "I'm going to work extra hard initially, which will make a good impression and get the product built on time and all the tasks automated, and then I can coast and it will still be worth their money."
The manager doesn't care because when your code starts rotting due to bad maintenance and badly added features (or just the fact that nobody has bothered taking it over), he'll already have been promoted or changed companies.
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by moron4hire on Monday June 22, 2015 @12:15PM
(#9759312)
Except this was a 5-person company that could have used all the help they could get. They styled themselves a "startup", but I don't know how valid it is to call yourself a startup after 8 years. They had me very cheaply, but I think they knew I was never going fit their "company culture" of lying to clients.
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by crdb on Monday June 22, 2015 @12:21PM
(#9759358)
Oh, I completely agree - this is terrible for the company.
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by msandford on Monday June 22, 2015 @10:37AM
(#9758595)
I read this story and had a bit of a chuckle. And then I read your username and had a real laugh. Thanks for that!
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by wodenokoto on Monday June 22, 2015 @12:23PM
(#9759375)
Billing by the hour is basically just telling people how much effort you expect the task to require smoothed by how valuable it is to you. If you can do it quicker, I say bill the full amount of time and if they have extra inquiries, fit it into the buffer zone.
Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft...
by moron4hire on Monday June 22, 2015 @12:36PM
(#9759462)
For one of my current clients, I still bill only the time I actually work. It's a long-term project with no explicit end-date. I'm trying to get out of, I want to do shorter-term projects now, but while I'm here, they've hired me for the fact that I can crush out code and make things better than their own employees. They didn't buy a specific thing, they buy my expertise.
It means I'm not making as much as I could be, but it's not their fault I agreed to the arrangement 3 years ago.
They could have given me more work, put me on new projects, etc., like I kept asking to be done, but instead they just wanted me to figure out some way to bill the client for 60 hours a week, and not call it "bug fixes" or "new features", because the client wasn't paying for it. That left data entry, which I had automated from a whole day to 10 minutes. They wanted me to go back to entering data by hand.
I would have quit then, but I didn't want to give them the pleasure. A flood had recently destroyed all of my stuff and I used the insurance check to get out of debt rather than replace the lost stuff, so I suddenly didn't need money for a LONG time. It's funny how easily debt can make you a compliant little slave towards people who want you to perform bullshit tasks.
I've been freelancing ever since, making twice what they paid me for only half a week's worth of work. And the flexibility of the freelancing enabled me to pursue a long-distance relationship that eventually lead to marriage. So I say getting fired was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.