25
Condor
4y

Earlier today I had a old schoolmate of mine PM me.. long time no see, yada yada, don't beat around the bush please... Turns out that he wanted to get a bot for OldSchool RuneScape and found a bot that was paid... And didn't want to shell out 70-odd shekels and wanted me to write a "private script". Looking at the program he linked, it looked like it'd easily take thousands of lines of code and well over half a year to reimplement.

I'm sure that it's a problem we've all had at some point, and with old friends it's especially hard to deal with. Would you give in to something that's obviously gonna be a trainwreck of a project? Tell them that they're an ass for even thinking of something crazy like this? It's not exactly hard to get offended by something like this, as if our time and expertise is worth absolutely nothing.

Honestly, I just told him.. this will take several months to implement. Here's another project I wrote (https://git.ghnou.su/ghnou/cv if you're interested) and looking at the commit log, you can see that I started it half a year ago, and more or less finished the project 3 months later. That project took ~100 lines of code and this project would easily take thousands, and months if not over a year of work. It's easy to see that it's unreasonable. Now he's going to get a project that's behind Patreon instead, after I told him that it's completely reasonable to ask money for a project like this. What's more, when private it would cost a hell of a lot more - my time isn't free.

Long story short, just honestly explain that so and so is why it's unreasonable, and this and that are other more viable solutions because such and so. Non-technical people aren't necessarily unreasonable because they're dicks, most of the time it's just ignorance. Nothing wrong with that, and mistakes happen to the best of us :)

Comments
  • 3
    I always send a "fuck off!" google spread sheet estimate project bill with 3 tiers. Large, Medium, and Small.

    Large = I don't want to do that, fuck off
    Medium = i can do it, but make it worthwhile and i'm not keen on doing it
    Small = Seems reasonable doable within 5-10 hours. Still costs money are you really interested? (please not)

    hours * money + extras = 😲😭

    Usually they back off when they see the price and the detailed listing of tasks and hours required. And if they're desperate i'll show them fiverr.com 😆
  • 1
    @yowhatthefuck thanks! It's pretty easy to set up Gitea actually, you can pretty much just download the binary and run it. Here I run it in an LXC container at home and forward it to the internet through some reverse proxies. Can recommend! :)
  • 2
    @heyheni I like the "please not" part 🤣
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