[nobleach]

"My nephew makes websites, and he's 14... I could just have him do it"

- Every client of mine during my contracting days. It took me way too long to reply with, "Oh that's great news! I wasn't sure of my availability, and was certain I was going to be way too expensive. Glad you got it figured out."

[dpb001]

I think the 14 year old nephew has been around for every iteration of technology - there are probably clients now threatening to just have their nephew vibe code the thing you're trying to spec out.

Once, when fed up with this during a discussion on a small moonlighting job I said "Yeah, kids are pretty good with this stuff these days, Tell you what - have him get started and I'll be available to give him any help he needs at 2x my rate".

[tombert]

Someone told me that in 2013 when I was trying to do contract work. I gave him a quote that I thought was reasonable, and he thought it was too much and he told me that his thirteen year old son could do it for free.

I responded that he was the one who had reached out to me, and if he feels like his son can do it then he shouldn't have wasted his time trying to find a contractor since that will be more expensive.

The client didn't like the attitude and I didn't get the job, but I was kind of glad because it was pretty clear to me that he would have tried to weasel out of paying me regardless.

[nobleach]

Yeah, that's really the hard part of contracting. I was in my 20s and was certain I HAD to win every bid to keep feeding myself. I took longer than I should to realize that 3 worthwhile jobs is far better than 10 hassles. All clients required changes, most thought they were overpaying, and many gave me a hard time when the bill was sent. Meanwhile, when I'd toss out $20,000 as a price tag, those folks were far more serious, and they paid on time! It caused me to learn a valuable lesson. You want to quote high enough to offend the folks that aren't serious. They were gonna be such a pain.

[tombert]

I don't even think I was charging very much. I was still pretty junior in my career, so I think I was charging something like $40/hour, which was double my nominal wage at my previous W2 software job (doubled to cover stuff like health insurance and overhead and the like).

$40/hour is an extremely low rate for a software engineer, even at the time. I'm not sure what the guy was expecting, and I'm quite confident that he would have tried to weasel out of paying the second I delivered a product by claiming it didn't match his spec. Honestly I don't really think I'm ever going to contracts for small clients again regardless; a lot of them can get away with a SquareSpace site, and the ones that can't should probably spend their money buying a few courses on using Claude Code or ChatGPT.

There's also the fun scam of wannabe Steve Jobs characters. I had a person try to recruit me for a job where I worked for 2% equity in their business, where I was expected to write the entire codebase myself. Of course the remaining 98% went to them, and as far as I can tell they felt that their "idea" was just that valuable and didn't plan on contributing anything else. Fortunately, I didn't really fall for that one.