[rartichoke]

It's definitely true. People don't really understand the circumstances the coder was in when writing the code.

I sometimes come across low paying clients who try to take advantage of you at every chance. They also come to me with hosting and have even changed hosts without even asking me while having no tech knowledge (then call me to fix the million errors they have).

For these clients I usually just throw together some fast low quality hand rolled PHP sites if they are not very demanding sites. There won't be tests, I'll haphazardly inline some CSS because when you get paid almost nothing the last thing you're thinking about is wonderful to work with abstractions that are maintainable.

You're only thinking about getting the job done as fast as possible and getting out because you have no interest in doing business with them again and due to their personality you don't want to be recommended to their friends.

If you compare that code to the code I write for my own side projects or proper clients it's night and day. You wouldn't even know they are the same person.

[nailer]

I contributed a fix to something on github, making one function signature which required 'options' have them optional like all the other functions.

Repeated throughout the code base was some copypasta. I dutifully committed more copypasta.

[rartichoke]

Yeah, that reminds me of the broken window tip from the pragmatic programmer book.

[erikb]

Applying Pareto's rule to your client list might help improve your life's happiness and hourly rate tremendously. Saying that you need to do bad work because your clients don't pay you well enough is a quite bad excuse.

[rartichoke]

It's not as simple as you think it is.

A lot of them already use shared hosting from previous sites and want to stay with them because it happens to work in their case.

So now you're stuck using some old version of PHP and mysql. What if you haven't bothered spending a ton of time with PHP lately and for the last few years you've been working with node and rails on projects you deem "worthy"?

Should I spend dozens of hours researching best practices for an obsolete version of PHP and make sure I do it right? Or should I lecture someone on reasons why they should allow me to host their site somewhere else and then setup a VPS for them? No frikken way.

Also when you need money, you accept work. That is how the world works. For some people/situations it's not worth throwing away $400 on some job because of annoying clients. You deal with it and put the money in your bank.