[habibur]

A programmer views "a year late" as, makeing him do more work than he was contacted to do. House construction doesn't work that way. You hand over a detail plan diagram and the contructor develops exactly that. One doesn't break down half the house after it's 80% done to build it a different way and check how it looks. Though that happens frequently in software development.

Most probably than not, this programmer can work a year more on this project and still not "finish" it in real sence. Specially if there was no specific finishing point mentioned in the agreement.

Software rarely gets finished. All these might be the programmer's point of view, just wanted to mention.

[potatolicious]

To add to this: I recently finished a small contract that I took on for the sake of family (don't do this, by the way). As a general rule I don't take contracts from people who don't know how to program, for the following reasons:

- They don't know how to write a specification. It's like asking a non-architect to draw you blueprints to a house. You end up with things like "there should be an arch here that's... um... about this tall".

- They don't actually know what they want 80% of the time. They will tell you (and you will document if you're smart) how they want it built, and when they see exactly that they will turn around and want it another way.

- They have absolutely no appreciation for how much work you're actually putting in. "But it's just a button on a page!". It's often insulting to work with people like this.

The spec for my contract changed constantly, and in the end took twice as long as I had anticipated.

And I still haven't gotten paid.