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[Thursday afternoon on a call...]
Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?
Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.
[Two hours later...]
Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?
Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.
Client: So when are you going to get it done?
Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.
Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.
Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.
By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.
If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.
I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.
Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.
I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.
[Next morning...]
Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.
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Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.7 -
Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.
After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.
Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).
Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.
I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.
The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.
I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.
I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.
The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).
Hey all! I’m new on devRant!12 -
My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.
That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.
But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.
So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!2 -
So finished a project for a client, the client signed a contract. He signed off that all milestones where reached. Text me that he was very pleased.
We give 30 days to pay. 8 days before the due date he asked for a meeting, telling us he wants to go another direction and he wants the source code to show the new development team he's going with to get a quote from them. I tell him that, that's fine he can have the source files once he pays for the product which was in the contract they signed mind you!! And this FUCKING DICK FART threats to sue, saying he's calling his lawyer, threatening me and my development partner with physical violence, and saying he's going to sue me personally not because me work was bad but because I refused to give him the product before he paid. I was calm we offered to meet his new dev team explain the code, and show them what they needed to see to give the clients a quote and they would not allow that, saying how now I'm not getting paid instead I'm getting sued and that he will publicly shame my startup company. Just complete bullshit, good thing I saved the original contract he wanted me to sign which had threats of physical violence I. His contract... Which in retrospect should have been a hint, but it was the highest paying contract we ever landed. Seems he never planned on paying. What's a guy to do?26 -
When I was 17 years old. I had difficulties in understanding math problem “Calculus” (I can’t remember which one was it). This one day when we were in a Computer Lab, our teacher was showing us how really software’s are made. During my time, it was vb6. I paid close attention. When I went home, I started to think things that I can make using that software so one day I went to my teacher and asked if I can have a copy of the vb6. He gave vb6 and told me that inside are few eBooks that will help in learning.
Fuck School, from that day I started to concentrate on programming only. Made a small calculator which will help me to understand a Calculus problem and double check my answer. From that day, I love programming.
I’ m 26 now and a full stack software developer. All I want to do it build cool shit, something that will blow the eyeball of my friends and that eyeball should pop out from their asshole.
Joke: The person who scored highest in the computer class was afraid to switch on the PC.1 -
The everything is Data science craze trend.
Honestly it's not even sustainable with every kid and their grandmother wanting to be data scientists because it's a 'passion' and a 'dream job' and all of that click bait stuff.
It's just become ridiculous at this point and I doubt we'll even have the long awaited 'breakthroughs' people have been talking about for so long.
Also I have a strong feeling everyone thinks it's their 'passion' because it tops the lists of highest paid jobs out there and everyone thinks with 3 months of training they're a fully fledged data scientist because some Python or R package implements all the algorithms he could ever think of using.
Add to that the fact that most advertised data science jobs are actually data engineering where you maintain a date store and that's it.
Agree or disagree that's my piece and if you can convince me otherwise I'll be surprised because I've been subscribed to this idea for so long that it lost me some real good opportunities because I thought it was just what I was meant to be doing which turned to be false after I thought about it. There's a million other jobs that are more impactful and with pursuing.2 -
~~ 2020 exp.
Best: Got my highest paid freelance project.
Worst: My highest paid freelance project gave me the highest burnout of my life.1 -
HR: "you are the highest paid dev on team"
Dev: Then not just me, the entire team should get a hike 🥴
HRs are hired because they are good negotiators.
#aFriendsStoryAtABigMNC -
Figured out the root cause of slow code by using a profiler in an afternoon (more like an hour but needed to confirm/investigate)...
Team spent over a week trying to figure it out using logging and debugging...
Even after I told them to use a profiler...
Guess now I've justified my position of being the highest paid dev on the team.
I just know how to use other tools besides a hammer.1 -
Billing by hourly rates is like getting paid by lines of code: the worst coders will get the highest scores.9
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The delta between the HiPPO and LoPPO (“highest paid person’s opinion” and “lowest paid person’s opinion” respectfully) is proportional to the schizophrenic actions of the company.
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