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@ostream yes, I said I'd update the website (the database was on them, I can only rebuild the structure, not the data) for 50 euros an hour.
Which, is actually really low for a freelance job (average here is between 70 and 90 euros excl. tax).
They tried to make a "counter offer" for 12,50 an hour.
I told them 50 euros of they could F-off after how they treated me in the past.
Haven't gotten a reply yet (since it was around 1700 when I replied, so they were closed).
So let's see how they'll respond later tomorrow. -
@FinlayDaG33k Also remember to hold your work ransom somehow until they have paid. Fuckers like these will also try to dupe you with pretexts for not paying.
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Best thing to do is to work out roughly how long its going to take, double it and provide them with an estimate saying you want 50% up front and 50% on completion. put it all in writing and have it signed off. Don’t start until the money is cleared and don’t hand over until the money is cleared. Always generate a paper trail!
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@helloworld paper trail good the rest sounds like they’re hiring Bruce Willis to off someone lol
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@helloworld I meant the payment terms most would balk at those
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@MadMadMadMrMim That's the intended filter. Just don't work for customers who prefer balking to paying because their balk won't pay your rent.
In particular in this case, let them balk for some days. They will stop once they realise that they have painted themselves into a corner. I wouldn't even have given them the discount and charged them at least the average rate for that country because they don't deserve any sympathy points. -
@Fast-Nop personally I hate i9
I prefer w2 -
Made me think of the small internal NodeJS Express app that I left for a company a while ago. They would call me from time to time before to add additional functionality, they will not let other developer touch it and thus far it works for what they are doing with it.
Hopefully no one fucking nukes that thing while I am not there.
If they do it would be fine, the owners would probably ask me to code it up again. But I do not know if I would be up for it unless I really need the money. -
50 an hour?!
Dude, you have the upper hand here. Use it. I wouldn't have settled for anything less than 100, and if they said no then that's just as well considering how you've been treated by them in the past.
If someone comes to you with an emergency, then charge emergency rates. They're higher than normal rates, not lower. -
@MadMadMadMrMim
why not though?
It's always about the monez.
It was obviously their decision to let @FinlayDaG33k go,
and now they want him to fix it? I mean are you sure about that? F*k no.
Would've done the same and demanded something around that too, because i know that, some clients are nothing else than a bunch of asshats.
We call that A****lochsteuer in germany, and i think it's beautiful. -
@thebiochemic you want to keep the moral high ground
Oh yeah take the money
Make a contract
Cover your ass
Charge a respectable contract rate
But you want to be remembered as the guy who fixed something in a pinch and if the garbage secretly resents you for it fine but you get another feather in your hat and no possible way a bad reference can be provided.
But yeah secretly I’d eat up that they NEEDED me
However contract
Rate doubling does make sense
However bear in mind that’s because they won’t need you long and you don’t get uc if you’re in the usa -
@MadMadMadMrMim i mean it's fair to assume not to get personal with that type of stuff.
But if a company doesn't respect your expertise, and even says, that they have better devs (the same ones, that broke the system, because they obviously didn't know shit about it)
then they can shove their respect up their asses.
Especially for that short period of time 50/h is pretty okay. It's an emergency expense for the company. If they don't want to pay, it's on them.
Do or die. -
@MadMadMadMrMim I wouldn't act immorally, but I would charge a hefty fee (if I wanted to do the work at all that is.) Sure, you shouldn't act like a dick by holding their stuff to ransom, pretend it takes longer than it does, etc. - but you absolutely should charge as much as you think you possibly can and be open that it's not worth your time otherwise.
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@AlmondSauce Holding their stuff ransom is required because they are dicks, and dicks will try to avoid paying. If you deliver fully before getting paid, you'll be in for lengthy court proceedings to get the rest of the money, and the time you waste on that will be unpaid.
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Sorry guys, been very busy with other (personal) stuff the past few days so I didn't check DR a lot D:
Anyways, I ended up not doing the job.
They tried to go up to 15 euros an hour "because that is above the average paygrade for a developer in The Netherlands" (which is true).
I refused saying that 40 an hour is the best I can do (and remember, since for these kinds of jobs 70-90 is the average, that is ridiculously cheap).
They refused saying: "You know our financial situation, you know that this is already a lot for us".
I was like: "Well, and whose fault do you think it is? Not mine, I tried to actually fix the company when you guys decided to sink money into other ventures while the main company was bleeding money".
I have no clue how they are gonna fix it and frankly, I don't care.
I think 40 euro an hour (more than half what would be average here) is very reasonable and if they can't afford even that, well, not my problem. -
@FinlayDaG33k omg they're Dutch, what a klootzakken. Please keep us updated
Does their program work again -
@alexbrooklyn Yes, we are Dutch (both them and me).
I've checked the customer site real quickly for ya but it appears they decided to use an off-the-shelf sitebuilder (Wix) instead.
Idk if the customer terminated the contract or that ex-employer did this.
What I do know is that it's gonna backfire real quick as a lot of the functionality the site had was completely custom and I had to painstakingly write by hand.
I'm just gonna see how shit unfolds and whether they get desperate enough to pay me properly.
If not, I don't really care, it's their grave they are digging. -
@FinlayDaG33k OMFG, a web dev company that does paid customer stuff with Wix? That is meant for completely clueless hobbyists who want to click some shit together on the quick.
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@Fast-Nop Considering that when I worked there every project I *wasn't* involved in was basically a WordPress site with some off-the-shelf plugins and quite literally 0 code (outside maybe changing the colors in the CSS) of our own, I'm not surprised.
Again, I don't know whether the customer just terminated the contract and did something of their own or whether it's actually my ex-employee but I wouldn't be surprised anyway. -
@FinlayDaG33k €15 an hour "above average" in the Netherlands?
You're getting taken for a fool there. -
@kwilliams Yeaah, I'm stumbling over that sentiment also. Looking at numbers from Germany that's nowhere near being close, hard to imagine it's that much lower just across the border.
Frankly being professional about this is fine, the moment I personally would have went up with my demands is after being "counteroffered" 12,50 after asking for 50. That's practically a provocation.
Ultimately sometimes there are consequences to mismanagement. Worked for such a company in the past and frankly, they can eat it. -
@kwilliams Believe it or not, around here the *net* (so after taxes n shit) average salary is only 7,52 an hour for a 22y/o medior webdev.
Once I reach the age of 25, this suddenly spikes up to 16euro on average (again, net) tho (which is still pretty low but that's just the result of market oversaturation with shitty business owners I suppose).
Which is why I'm still unemployed after nearly one and a half year of being unemployed :^)
I know I deserve more but nobody is willing to give me more (because for the price of just me, they can just hire 2 maybe 3 people that do more but worse work). -
@Maer Yea, it is because I do still have *some* amount of human decency *not* to lower myself to their level that I didn't.
And yes, there are already severe signs of their mismanagement coming after them.
Back when I still had a decent say in the company, we had an enormous growth.
Then they gave me less say because they hired a new manager (and thus making me "obsolete") and everything went south horribly (getting towards the point were there were quite literally plenty of days where I was the only person that wasn't in the management to show up (morale among employees and students was ridiculously low) :^).
We went from: "Fuck, we have a shortage of desks" to "Well, pick whatever desk you want really..." in about a year (luckily I had my own desk that nobody sat at without my permission, mainly because all other employees and students respected me). -
@FinlayDaG33k That's barely more than the minimum wage, and that's usually for unskilled labour.
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@FinlayDaG33k That sounds crazy-close to a company I used to work for as a student. If you hadn't mentioned this happening in the Netherlands, then I probably would have wondered whether it was the same place.
Especially the last detail of going from getting more desks to not having any employees anymore to fill those in the span of a year is chillingly on point. -
@Fast-Nop Welcome to the sad reality that is getting a job in such an oversaturated market here.
If you don't like the low pay, you can bugger off because there is an extremely high likelihood that some less self-respecting person is willing to do that job for less. -
@Maer It happens all around here tbf, especially in smaller companies ran by people with 0 clue on what they are doing.
Like, I only have a sample size of N = 12 but in that sample size, I noticed that companies that have at least one person with a decent background in the field do significantly better than those that don't, which shouldn't come as a surprise either.
Our management wanted me to build *an entire CMS*, basically from the ground up, and expected me to do so in half a year, on my own, while still also maintaining other projects and helping our students along.
They had completely wrong expectations on difficulty and time taken for such things. -
Oh right, I forgot to add as well...
Those managers... If you came in as a student and tell them you "want to learn to program", they basically saw that as cheap labour and put you on real projects immediately...
On your own...
You could ask others to help you out but besides that, you were on your own...
Building whatever the company asked you to (this could be an intranet project... or worse... *an actual customer project*)...
Yea... Imagine that you have no clue how to program and they expect you to deliver a properly functioning website for a customer within 3 months :^)
That wasn't "a one-off" thing either, that was standard practise there.
I can rant all day about how shitty the company was (and in fact, I posted an article on my website soon after I got fired and was "freed of any fear of losing my job") and still be only half-way done at best.
tl;dr: company just deserves to burn down to the ground and never rise up again. -
@MadMadMadMrMim You don't, we're in this together.
one of us. one of us. one of us.
@dfox maybe add a button of sorts where people can "unsubscribe" from threads (possibly either completely or until they have been mentioned again).
@Maer Yea... Too bad those are rare af around here atm and those that do either don't suit me in other ways (eg. using stacks I don't use/like) or just reject me (which is fine, their loss). -
@FinlayDaG33k could just keep this a going lol ding ding ding lol
And yes props on the unsubscribe idea
This rant is not very interesting -
@FinlayDaG33k LOL!!!!!! Didn’t realize you’re the one who wrote it lol
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@Maer yes but then that would turn off all notifications wouldn’t it ?
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@Maer oh they adddd that this time lol
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@SkuunAn Even if I did, it wouldn't fall under breach of contract (they never specified those kinds of things) :p
Got laid off my by old employer back in 2019 because they have their priorities completely wrong.
Got a mail today whether I could fix something for them (ofc, they wanted me to do it essentially for free).
One of the websites I built for a customer back when I still worked there had a massive bug (that I was aware off and patched in later versions of the library causing it).
They never updated it so, I told them "just update the library".
Apparently, the idiot that was in charge of maintaining said site after I left didn't know how to and completely broke everything.
The hilarious part: While I setup everything using stuff like Docker and Git to make rollbacks easy...
That idiot went back to FTP and manually upgrading the databases through PhpMyAdmin :^)
He nuked the entire site.
Database? Gone.
Codebase? Borked (installed a version with a lot of breaking changes without properly reading the migration guide).
And knowing that shit company, they don't have any backups either.
They said "I wasn't needed because we have other good devs" when they laid me off.
Uhu, I can eh... see those good devs doing their job :^)
rant
old employer
ayyyyyyyy get rekt