Met a guy that ran some dropshipping thing in a bar once, once he found out i was a programmer he kept on trying to get me to fix his website for free because it was easy, would not take no for an answer. I just kept upping how much money i would charge him till i got sick of it and left.
I knew a few guys like that in crypto too, before crypto came along and they got into that, this guy told me he’d written a twitter app, it was a bot that pumped gold at some influencers command. Spurred me to write an app though.
"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."
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".
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.
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.
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.
Tangential, but in my previous apartment one of my neighbors really wanted me to build him a website after he found out I work with computers.
I told him that I don't really build websites, and what I mostly do is write things that move information from one computer to another and that I haven't really enjoyed web development so it's not something that I do in my free time so I'm not good at it, and he should check out SquareSpace or Wix something.
He kept assuring me that it would "be easy". To shut him up, I gave him a quote of my daily rate for contract work (which honestly wasn't even that high by software engineering standards), and he backed off because he didn't realize how expensive software engineering is.
This happened all over our office for a while after we got new monitors, it was the pneumatic jacks (?) in the chairs compressing triggering them, it took a while before anyone figured it out, IT eventually went round and put ferrite cores on all the cables for the monitors and that seemed to fix it.
Domestic surveillance was an example of a limitation that Anthropic wanted to put on their software. But in order to enforce that limitation, Anthropic would both need to monitor DoD usage of their tools and have a kill switch. Both of these were the real sticking point and the reason why the Trump Admin was willing to make an example of Anthropic.
I’m all for this. The more cars removed, the more pleasant a city becomes. While i don’t live in a car free city, i don’t own or need a car, when i do, i’m a member of a car share and can just pickup a car from my local supermarket, that i can walk to. I live in a very hilly city, while i walk a lot, i know every lift, escalator and sneaky bus or metro to get me up a hill, it’s no joke here, i used to walk 20min to my job, that had a 200m height difference, but there are paths everywhere.
And the city is working more on greenspaces, little urban oasis’s with a fountain or some trees to provide places to cool down as every year gets hotter
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