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by cannam
1322 days ago
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> Unless you're promising them a long-term commitment (and at that point are you really freelancing?) they might be hesitant to invest I think this aspect can be overstated, or at least it varies a lot depending on type of project. A while ago I was hired by a small client to fix a serious and tricky bug in an iOS app. I have never written an iOS app, I use neither ObjC nor Swift regularly, and at the time I had never compiled an iOS app and didn't even own an iOS device (though I did have a Mac to hand). But the bug was in audio processing code and I know that field quite well. They gave me access to their code repo, I bought a cheap iPad, I spent a few billable hours getting the app running, fixed the problem, a couple of rounds back and forth with the client to establish that they were happy with it, and done. It genuinely wasn't a trivial bug, but the investment in time on the client's part was perhaps one person-day and the entire exchange was over in a week. Had the client been a bigger company and not just another indie, in theory I could have charged an arbitrary amount, as this was a revenue-threatening bug. But a bigger company surely wouldn't have hired an outsider to do it. An example like this suggests to me only that the problem is commercial or organisational rather than technical. |
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That's exactly right. Most businesses (including freelancers, the original question) fail based on their "commercial and organisational" success. If you want to come into a project and be the bug fixer for hire - you'd better have technical, commercial, and organizational success in mind. Fixing real bugs means fixing business problems, and no one is going to make inroads on technical terms alone.