| Assume you are dealing with rational actors, be a good judge of character… You work for corporations, right? It's never a good idea to bet big money that a human being who is rational and classy today will remain so for months or years in the future. (After you've lived with a few Alzheimer's patients, you'll know what I'm talking about.) But corporations aren't even human. Their character is literally for sale. The honest and rational person you worked for on Monday could be bought out and replaced by a knuckle-dragging troll before the week is out. Seven years from now, when one of your customers has been acquired by some new company that has never heard of you, and that new company's East Texas-based law firm decides to make some easy money by sending out letters like this: "We had a software problem last month that we believe cost us $1 million and which we traced to a line of code that you committed eight years ago. Would you like to pay us $200k, or defend our incipient lawsuit?" What are you gonna do? My plan is to take the problem to my lawyer, who will say: "Can you give me a copy of the signed contract that, together with an hour of my time, will make this problem go away forever?" And I will say: "Yes". And it's not like this contract took months of my time to create. If you're not picky, you call up a lawyer, you say "I need a boilerplate consulting contract," they pull one out of the files and hand it to you. |
But trust me the corporations (the one I work for is an international electronics manufacturer) are very polite and respectful and very much understand the realities of risk/reward, and that you have to spend money to make money. And they all have an army of QA engineers double-checking work because they will not allow $1 million dollars of business to be dependent on a single point of failure. Even if they bring you to court (they never would) I'd assume its VERY difficult to get compensation. If you hire an employee and he does a bad job, do you get to sue him for damaging your profit margins? Hell no, you just get to fire him and hire a new guy. If everyone were legally on the hook for the work they produced, it would be like assuming that everyone you ever hire is required to be omniscient. The reality is, you can't hire someone with a 50 IQ and then sue them because you believe one of their lines of code hurt your profitability. It's your fault for hiring them.
I gotta say a lot of these responses I'm getting are very paranoid. When a company pays you for work it's really hard for them to take that away from you. The most that's ever really at stake is your current paycheck and not even that really because the department of labor is VERY harsh on reputable employers who deny paychecks.
It seems like your point is more of a fantasy scenario where they give you a billion dollars & 5 years of unsupervised time to design a huge blackbox program that has to do X, then find out it doesn't do X. The software industry is simply not like this. All tasks are broken up into discrete components and if you're not doing a good job they'll fire you and bring in a new team to finish the job.
The ONLY way I've actually heard of an employee losing $$ is when they have a long-term employment agreement and they break it. It's kindof like an athlete signing a 10-year deal & walking off the field after 6 months. Then, yes, you're liable.
Otherwise being a paid consultant is pretty much the same thing as being an employee. Also, I doubt that companies will sign some "boilerplate contract" that absolves you of all liability. They'd rather hire someone who is more confident. That's not a dig, I really mean that sincerely. Over-negotiating and specifying a bunch of "unrealistic-covering-my-ass-terms" can come off as amateur.