
I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page - firefoxd
https://idiallo.com/blog/18000-dollars-static-web-page
======
crispyambulance
My parents had been running their own tailor shop in the 80's, barely making
ends meet, pulling in less than $20K a year.

It wasn't for lack of business, father was a master tailor trained in Italy
and capable of elite bespoke craftsmanship. They had as much business as they
could handle. The problem was that they were charging what _they_ thought the
work was worth rather than what their customers were willing to pay.

At some point, during the Reagan years, my mother had an epiphany and jacked
up the prices massively, far beyond what my father thought was remotely
reasonable. The result? Even more business, more pressure, more return
customers. That put me and my brother through an expensive college.

There's something about high rates that makes customers feel more important,
it's a status-thing and it also propels them to take you more seriously even
if they have you do low-value stuff.

~~~
Bokanovsky
This is a classic example of a Veblen good [1].

"Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded
increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of
demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. Some goods become more
desirable because of their high prices."

The suits are expensive, so they must be good. It's also a status signal to
others that you can afford such goods. (Edit minor typo).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good)

~~~
n-exploit
As the Director of Technology at a non-profit organization, how am I supposed
to staff software engineering resources when these pricing practices like
these are commonplace in the for-profit world? How am I supposed to make an
argument to the board that a single technology staff member, let alone a
working team, is 5x-10x more valuable than the rest of the workforce? I'm
going to admit it - it's hard to see stuff like this and not be extremely
frustrated. Tech is already one of the largest cost centers in an enterprise,
and it's proving to be nearly impossible to find any tech staff willing to
work for, admittedly, crumbs.

~~~
owaty
Don't compete on the price then. Compete on something else, like the working
conditions.

The author describes how they had to drive 50 miles every day, use the
corporate laptop (or install shady software on their own one), not get a
response for many days. Basically, their rate (and the total cost) covers not
just the work they do, but all the frustration that comes with the work.

Now, if you treat your staff better than that — remove all the hurdles, answer
their emails promptly etc. ­— then there will be many talented people who'd
prefer it over a meaningless-but-highly-paid alternative.

------
aequitas
A valuable lesson I learned at a young age from one of my first 'customers'
when doing computer repair jobs for friends and neighbours was is that you
don't get paid for what you can or do but for the value you add or time
(money) you save someone.

Most of the time the problems I had to solve where easy ones. Install printer,
update software, remove toolbars, email settings, etc. All 5 minute work jobs,
seldom totalling to more than an hour or 2 an evening. Not even worth asking
money for in my opinion, because it was so easy en quick for me to do. But my
neighbour always insisted I accept his money. Because for him, having to solve
these issues himself would cost him multiple evenings. So the money he was
giving me, which felt like too much to me, was stil a bargain for him. Also in
his words it was easy for me because I had spend years in training to acquire
this knowledge, or as others might call it: wasting your time behind that
computer playing video games.

~~~
wallace_f
That's lucky. When I sas 19, around the height of IE and 'every Windows box
with malware,' I tried to start a similar business.

Probably my most wealthy client, with an oversized SUV in the driveway, had a
home computer rendered unusable by malware--something I had fixed before. But
she ended up asking me to leave. She decided she wanted "real professionals"
working on her computer. She told me I didn't know what I was doing, saying
'are you really going to fix it for this much or do you actually need to just
start searching the web for what you are doing? (she saw that I had performed
a google search...).'

It took me way, way too long in life to learn most of it is just perception
and learning how to manage dealing with less-than-ideal people.

~~~
pimmen
This attitude to googling is poisonous. I once helped an elderly relative in
my teens with his router and I got the same treatment after I googled the
answer. Later we watched a court drama the entire family, with the same
relative present, and there was a scene where the lawyers crack the books and
review the legal paper work. Being the obnoxious teen I was I couldn't help
myself from blurting out "Wow, what terrible lawyers, look at them doing
research for their cases before they solve the problems. Wow, I figured they
could recite every law and ruling ever by heart since they supposedly know
what they're doing, now I question why the defendant doesn't just represent
himself, I mean everyone can read a book, right? This movie is so
unrealistic!"

I got scolded by my parents but at the end of the day: worth it.

------
ryanbrunner
Entertaining story - although as advice to anyone reading it, running up the
clock without proactively notifying people that you're going way beyond your
original estimate is a very good way to make getting paid incredibly
difficult.

~~~
_bxg1
It was my impression that that's what he did. Of course the whole situation
still could've made it difficult to get paid, but I don't think there's
anything else he could've done.

~~~
Semiapies
Specifically telling them that they had kept him over his initial estimate
(and so his estimate was increasing) when he neared or passed that point. He
didn't sound terribly proactive about bringing this up while talking to
people, either. Lunches with the manager where they didn't talk any business,
etc.

------
duxup
I know someone working as a contractor for a big company.

1 year contract.

6 months have gone by and they've done ... nothing. Their boss keeps saying
"Don't worry we'll get to you, we're just swamped right now, you're good."

They're already talking about extending the contract.

~~~
sharkweek
Big companies (rather, people at big companies) WANT to spend money on this
kind of stuff for all sorts of reasons.

-A team might have use-it-or-lose-it budget, so they have to spend it on something, and a contractor might be the lucky recipient!

-Tax purposes!

-Spending a lot on a contractor gives them someone to "fire" when they need to explain why something wasn't getting done or something went poorly!

The list goes on!

All that being said, as a consultant myself, I consider those types of
projects windfall, as they tend to be the ones that end abruptly. It's kind of
a scary feeling getting paid without actual work to do. I have found I 100%
prefer the projects where there are clear tasks, goals, and results to report,
if for nothing else than my own sanity.

~~~
madeofpalk
Its stories (and personal experience) like this that make me laugh when people
try and say that governments are inefficient and lacks accountability.

~~~
antepodius
Big things are more likely to be inefficient and lack accountability.
Governments are big, so are big corporations.

~~~
atoav
Interestingly enough there is also evidence, that a government structure with
much smaller parts (decentralization) is even more inefficent, and especially
prone to corruption.

------
IkmoIkmo
I've got similar experiences working for corporate clients, but it was legal
work, not tech stuff. It was a bit more complex than the equivalent of a
static HTML, but something that anyone with an IQ of > 90 could learn in less
than half a year.

There were days when I'd charge clients $15k... for a day's work. This
wouldn't have been possible if I worked on-site. But I was essentially
completing $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-
fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200
in total.

Corporations get kind of crazy, there's extreme focus on some areas (mainly,
those with KPIs and KPI owners attached), and extreme nonchalance on others.
They're so big that there's just lots of insane things like this that slip
through.

~~~
pault
> $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in
> return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in
> total.

This sounds like a SaaS waiting to happen.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I'd mostly disagree.

If you have an extremely high-margin service, e.g. perform bill $10k of work
for $100 of salary, there's absolutely no incentive to automate things on the
seller's side. It essentially means hiring someone to build out a (software)
solution to squeeze the $100 into a dollar of payments on a cloud provider.
All you're doing is raising your margin from 99% to 99.99%, it's meaningless,
your profits increases by 1%, assuming the Capex for development was zero. And
given this is typically a low-volume kind of transaction, with considerable
development costs to build a Saas solution, this assumption is way too
generous.

It's exactly these kinds of services which are completely fine to have humans
perform.

It's the type of legal work where you bill $200 for a simple contract review
and have to pay a paralegal say $100 for the work, which would be great to
automate to a $1 of AWS payments. Here you're increasing margins from 50% to
99%, doubling profits. Any development costs can be averaged out to approach
zero, as document review is a high-volume task in any organisation.

------
osrec
You should try working in an investment bank as a contractor. You need to find
the right team, but a lot of them are massive collections of people doing
virtually nothing but getting paid great daily rates. The trick is to look
busy and wrap your team/yourself in a perceived sense of enigma and
complexity. If you play your cards right, you can end up in a situation where
no one will ask questions as long as you fire off an email now and again. You
can keep getting paid for doing almost nothing for _years_.

~~~
mprev
Ugh, but who wants to do nothing all day? You get one life; why waste your
days?

~~~
sosodev
Are your days any less "wasted" laboring away?

~~~
osrec
Labouring away can be hell, unless you're like me and doing what you love :)

------
rocky1138
This is how corporate works. They have budgets for things. The money doesn't
come out of the pocket of the person who cuts the cheque. You send in an
invoice and it gets paid. If it doesn't, the company is insolvent or they are
at risk to lawsuits which will cost them more than your paltry $18000. But
they don't even think about the lawsuit part. Bill comes in, cheque goes out.

~~~
derefr
How do they prevent paying random people who decide it'd be funny to send them
an invoice?

~~~
LeonM
This is actually a really big problem called invoice fraud. Many companies
struggle in setting up some workable system to prevent it.

The problem usually is that someone at the accounts payable department
(sometimes in a different building or country) must pay all the hundreds or
thousands of incoming invoices. Having a robust system in place for them to
check if the product/service is actually delivered for the price agreed upon
(or even delivered at all) is hard.

~~~
mediaman
Usually they use purchase orders initiated by the buyer/manager to solve this
sort of problem.

Hiring a freelancer? Issue a purchase order to the freelancer for the maximum
amount you think you'll pay them. They then bill you for how many hours it
actually took, after completing the job. Then accounting can process it if
it's under the PO value.

No PO, invoice doesn't get paid.

------
gk1
Great illustration of why hourly billing makes no sense, for either side.

In this case, as usual, the amount of hours "spent" on the project has little
to do with actual value provided.

From the contractor's side, he's excited about getting 12x the original quote,
instead of realizing he's been severely undercharging for his work and
could've been earning 10x or more all this time. I wonder if the author will
start charging appropriately for the value he's providing, or if he'll
consider this a fluke and continue with $75/hour.

Phrased another way... How many times did you complete a project within the
estimated time and get paid $1,500, when actually the company would have been
glad to pay $18,000?

Last week there was a thread about consulting tips. I couldn't believe how
many people were arguing _for_ hourly billing. One person was even proud of
billing by the minute! I hope those people see this story and realize what
they're leaving on the table.

I have similar stories to this, where work got delayed due to issues on
client's end. One time, I spent a month doing nothing while the client was
dealing with something, which later turned out to be a big acquisition. If I
billed by "hours worked" then I'd get nothing, but because I had a monthly
retainer I still got paid.

Edit: I'm not advocating "fixed price." I'm advocating monthly retainers.

~~~
dymk
I'm gonna disagree that hourly billing makes no sense for the contractor. He
clearly just didn't charge enough per hour; $75/hour is way too low for
contract work, and his $21k could have been $56k at $200/hour.

What if the project was billed at a fixed cost, he negotiated $21k, but the
project took a year to complete because the company moved so slowly? That'd be
a terrible salary. He'd have to quit and somehow bill even with no
deliverables. How hairy would a contract covering that be to defend when you
sue?

~~~
derefr
I don't think that the parent means that you shouldn't be structuring your
billing to be per hour/day/week of work. Rather, their point is that you
shouldn't be doing math like this:

1\. "I think I'm worth $75/hr"

2\. "the job will take 40 hours"

3\. "I'll charge $3000 for it"

but rather, like this:

1\. "I think they would be willing to pay me 40k for this, and I think the
project _should_ take 40 hours"

3\. "Therefore, I'll negotiate for a $1000/hr pay-hourly contract with a
projected end-date of two weeks."

~~~
tsss
Well, the problem is you have to estimate how much they are willing to pay and
this varies wildly.

------
S_A_P
I don't find this to be beyond belief, but there are a few things the author
should have done differently.

1) Notify when hours were exceeded 2) Get written notification that he was
still required to come in to the office while waiting for assets or otherwise
at a blocker 3) Ask questions to further cement the requirements 4) pick up a
phone?

I think that ethically this was not a great move on this persons part, but we
live and learn, and hopefully they did learn from the experience.

Large companies have budgets that usually are "use it or lose it", so the ROI
doesnt really matter most of the time. Secondly, large companies are less
likely have "gate keeper" folks ensuring that there are not wasting hours when
the timescale is less than one month. As costs escalate and budgets get blown,
that is when they thin out the contractors.

~~~
analogmemory
I mean they were pretty clear they didn't care about the money. Emailing daily
to check in on progress is good enough. I've been in a similar situation. The
manager isn't really concerned about the money. They just need someone to
justify their expenses.

> We need your full undivided attention to complete this project. For the
> duration of the contract, you will work exclusively with us to deliver
> result in a timely manner. We plan to compensate you for the trouble.

~~~
S_A_P
In my experience as a contractor, the client doesn't care about the money
until they do. The contractors that I have seen thrive and the times that I
have thrived as a contractor is when I showed that I was there to provide
value and not just "coast". Most businesses don't have time to deal with
coasters until they need to cut their burn rate. If you are providing more
than what you're asked you can usually stay or be first in line to return when
help is required.

------
piptastic
The author basically just had a job for a while. They aren't charging 18K for
a web page, they're charging 18K to commute/be there for 7 weeks.

A lot of big companies aren't paying for output, they're paying for butts in
seats. Why they do this has been discussed somewhat already in these comments.

~~~
biztos
> they're paying for butts in seats

There's also the case, which IMO is the standard case, that the company is
_trying_ to pay for output but it's a long and winding road from the butt in
the seat to the output to the sale.

Within that, if you're say a dev manager, and it's really hard to get head
count allocated, then it can be totally rational to keep an idle butt in a
paid-for seat so you don't lose the seat.

Even if the Mr Idlebutt is terrible at his job you have at least some
possibility of replacing him later on, when you have a need for some work to
be done and probably wouldn't easily get a new seat allocated for it.

Not only is it nearly impossible to establish a direct relationship between
any particular butt-in-seat and your budget, in principle it's probably a good
thing to operate with a little excess capacity.

Until the dream of the Fully Fungible Knowledge Worker is achieved, which it
won't be, this is a lot more rational than the implied waste would lead you to
believe. Of course this doesn't factor in morale impact...

------
rhacker
Sometimes I do kinda wish to get back into consulting because of situations
like these. In almost all cases the work is never used, but instead of bailing
the company out, it's really just bailing some situation out. It's all
internal politics.

Back when I was in my 20s during my walks from the light rail to the office I
would have constant thoughts about how idiotic programming and office work is.
The ONLY reason it all exists is because people can't trust each other. And
that maybe trust isn't really necessary in a society that lessens personal
ownership and has more of a share-all-but-do-your-part approach.

It's literally so unfair the way we've segmented people into knowledge zones.
Bankers know how easy it is to double money without taking risk. Programmers
know how to pretend something will take 3 weeks when it will only take 2 days.

Recently I've learned how easy it is to set up solar. I cry every time I hear
someone get trapped in some solar contract when they sell their house. It's
literally mind warping how fucked up every aspect of this economy is.

~~~
cmcginty
Taking a left turn here, but how is it "easy" to setup solar? At the minimum
you'll need a master electrician to sign-off on your install and might be hard
to find after-the-fact.

~~~
imtringued
Parent is probably talking about some sort of solar lease where you get
paid/receive electricity for providing roof space to install the panels on but
you don't actually own them.

------
testplzignore
Anyone else think $21k for this much time is too low? That's $156k a year
assuming full-time hours which a contractor probably isn't going to get. Plus
the guy lives in California. Plus health insurance.

What's a typical rate for this length of contracting work in California?

~~~
greggyb
Keep in mind the work being done. He emphasizes its simplicity. This is not a
senior role requiring a huge amount of expertise.

Of course, he's probably charging too little in general. Everyone is.

~~~
busterarm
3x salary is the general advice given to contractors starting out.

~~~
mrguyorama
$156k is 3x my salary from a few months ago and I'm building out business
critical systems, not dreamweaver level websites

~~~
busterarm
Having been severely underpaid myself in the past, please know that you are
_severely underpaid_.

You should definitely look for somewhere else that will pay you more money. If
you'd like to discuss it offline, I'm happy to.

------
qaq
Had a similar story was a subcontractor to a huge digital agency on an
advertising related project for F50 company. Was a small webapp (40h of pure
dev time) we were actually on a fixed price contract 15k. Had a bunch of
meetings with up to 20 people on the call (copyrighter from digital agency
present in every single meeting for an app that had a single button with a
single word submit). Eventually we had a meeting with actual VP of the F50 who
said he forgot to email that he no longer needed the project and to pay
everyone. We got our 15k and digital agency got prob to the tune of 500K.

------
cosmodisk
I used to live with this guy when we were studying. He got himself a job with
the largest DIY retailer in the country.It was an office job with a relatively
good salary. Eventually I moved out nad only saw him again after half a year
or so. I asked how's the job to whoch he replied thst he quit after 3 month.I
asked why..He said he used come to the office every day and ask around if he
could help with anything.. Everyone was nice but kept saying no help is
required.He got bored after 3 month of doing nothing and quit. He now runs his
own business...

~~~
notahacker
The early winners of the UK Apprentice were awarded £100k jobs as a prize,
which didn't actually entail doing anything, because the only reason they had
been created was as a prize for winning a TV competition. One of them sued for
'constructive dismissal' on the basis she felt that not creating any work for
her was an attempt to force her to quit. She lost, presumably on the basis
that most people given nothing to do on 3x average salary would either find
something to do or consider themselves extremely lucky...

~~~
whamlastxmas
To be fair it can hurt your long term prospects to have a do nothing job,
especially if it's public knowledge it's a do nothing job. It's an
understandable thing to be unhappy about if you were told otherwise.

~~~
notahacker
Hurts your long term prospects a lot more if you sue your employer for not
giving you the sort of work or access to the celebrity boss you wanted...

(nobody else said anything about the roles they'd been given being a non-job,
although everybody else found something better to do elsewhere after a couple
of years. Looking like a smart businessperson on TV is actually incredibly
good for career prospects)

------
koala_man
As a teenager I once got paid a flat rate of $300 for what turned out to be a
ten minute job with Excel vlookups.

Funny that my hourly rate peaked at 17.

~~~
lixtra
You probably saved the company 1h of work per week for some years. Finding
another expert would have taken them half a day of searching. So it made
economic sense from their part as well. Did you learn to seek such situations
to profit?

~~~
koala_man
They were very happy to pay me, and gave me that same spiel themselves.

Turned out they had budgeted twice that amount for an external professional
consultant to look into it, and just figured they'd let me have a whack at it
first because why not.

------
oceanghost
I love this article. I had a similar thing once. I worked for this deeply,
deeply dysfunctional company (salary). My project ended. I asked my boss for
something to do, and he said something to the effect--"we're kicking off a new
project at the end of the week until then look into XYZ because we'll be using
those technologies."

So for political reasons, this new project was delayed and delayed again. I
asked my boss for a project, he said, he'd get back to me. This ends up going
on for a year. I stopped asking for new projects because I've done my duty
frankly by asking several times, and at this time, I'm just reminding him to
fire me.

It might sound like fun to get paid to do nothing, but, it's pretty
demoralizing. There's a certain amount of paranoia associated with it as well.
Eventually, I started taking long lunch breaks and going to the gym.

This went on for a year, then one day... We started a big new project, and I
had something to do again. Very weird year, though.

------
ErikAugust
For those trying to understand the behavior of big companies, Marc Andreessen
has The Moby Dick theory:
[https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html](https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html)

Which is: "The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed
from the outside."

------
codegeek
The adventures of enterprise/corporate payments. They can be annoying, slow,
bureaucratic but boy when the time comes, invoice gets paid. One of our
smaller business customers recently got acquired by a large corporate so the
next $5000 "small enhancement" project had to go through their procurement who
then apologized when we demanded the payment immediately. Why ? Because they
thought they had not paid on time even though we literally had sent them the
invoice a week ago (our smaller business clients will pay "due upon receipt").
This corporate client apologized profusely but when we finally realized it was
not 30 days (they pay net 30), we backed off :). Still got a couple of
apologies.

------
dzhiurgis
I'm in midst of a contract that was supposed to take 2-3 weeks - my mate asked
for help, they desperately need good developers.

I think it's 6 months now ($60k++), while past 3 were "we are almost there
now". It's all typical crap - trying to squish some crap into JIRA, molesting
Slack in some weirdest ways, tester reporting bugs in less than 6 sentences...
All I can think of is that I didn't ask for a high enough hourly rate and I
want this over ASAP.

~~~
davinic
If you've signed a contact for a fixed period, demand that they raise your
rate at each renewal. Don't give them the entire benefit of your flexibility
without some concession on their end. If they want you month-to-month, your
rate changes month-to-month.

------
qnsi
Amazing. It kind of sound unbelievable, but I don’t have that much experience
working with big corporations.

This should be read by everyone concerned about, how few people in a startup
can beat big corporations

~~~
noir_lord
Big corporations are batshit.

One division will be counting paperclips and another dropping $50k on a
machine no one needs to do their job.

It entirely comes down to management in each place.

~~~
protomyth
Be on a project where you billed over a 100 hours for some aspect of it that
they decide to cancel. It is amazing how group decisions can blow so much.

Now, I do not mean experiments and throwing the artifacts of that
experimenting. That makes perfect sense. Its when they have a need for
something that is part of their current business and they just don't execute
properly to the point of cancellation.

~~~
irrational
I work for a Fortune 100 company. I've seen $5+ million spent on some software
that was abandoned a year later, and nobody loses their job! It happens
frequently enough that everyone is basically blase about it.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Ive heard $300 million was spent on a system at a comoany I worked at which
didnt work at all. They bought it because a competitor did. The lower-level
managers had to tell the higher-level ones that it was OK "despite some
problems." They kept tying more things into it and recommending it to others.
Media reports same thing.

Funny that the supplier's entire business model seems to be to charge so much
for a BS solution that each company is forced to recommend it to others to
avoid reporting the loss.

------
0898
People think government is wasteful, but in my experience big corporations are
an order of magnitude worse.

------
adamqureshi
We did some agency work Ad agency / sub contract) in NYC. I said to the agency
we will deliver HTML/CSS/JS and its $12,500 for the site / pages. They came
back with NO our budget is $25k and we will pay that. Im like ok wire be the
bread, here is my ACH ( They did) I delivered the HTML/CSS/JS. They came back
with but who is gonna do the API work with our back end guy. Seems they could
not make a distinction connecting the front end to the back end. I can only do
HTML/CSS i can't do the API stuff and i told them in writing very clearly.
they had a back end guy we delivered the work to. I got played too many times
NOT to get my money upfront and send a bill when I use up the time. They said
sorry for the confusion , ok so how much for the api and will cut you a check
from accounting. Accounting has no clue what marketing is buying.

~~~
LocalPCGuy
In my experience, where the Front End stops and the Back End starts is always
a fuzzy line for non-technical clients (even if that have devs on staff).
Especially when you're talking to the marketing department and devs work in IT
or another similarly separated department. It pays to have the discussion and
get it in writing up front (plus, if you CAN do API work, it may provide
additional revenue that you didn't necessarily know was available).

~~~
vkou
20 coins for the horse? Done, and done, Sir.

Now, how much will you pay me for the tack and saddle?

------
ycombonator
This is how your tax payer money is wasted in State & Federal Gov IT agencies.
I spent an entire year doing nothing in a Gov agency and in the end I was so
bored that I quit. Fannie & Freddie hires tons of non citizen constractors
with usually no work. It’s a big carnival.

~~~
WaxProlix
It's all big orgs, everywhere. Seen a lot of it even at hip modern BigCorps.
Leave your axe and grinder at home :)

------
shams93
The larger your company is the more costly it is to do something even as
simple as a static html page. That's because everything that goes out to the
public has to be subject to a heavy review process. You're not being paid to
write an html page you're being paid to shepherd new information to the
public. That's why you can never just estimate cost only on how hard you think
it would be to do the task you need to get enough information about the
customer's process to understand how much work its going to take not just to
complete the task but to shepherd it through their review process and the
larger the company the more layers of review and process they are likely to
have.

------
tigroferoce
At this point it is mandatory to remind us all the story of the forgotten
employee.
[https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

~~~
csunbird
Is this real ?

~~~
nefitty
Well, this one sure is: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-35557725](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35557725)

Spanish civil servant off work unnoticed for six years

------
jbob2000
Pfft that's nothing. We just had a contractor charge us $50k to setup a simple
HTTP proxy. I looked at the code; it's a .NET starter app with our endpoints
in it that route to other endpoints. $50k and it probably took them 2 hours,
which was probably mostly just packages downloading.

~~~
holler
did you pay it? that's crazy!

~~~
irrational
He didn't, but I'm sure his non-technical business boss did.

~~~
danmaz74
If that was the amount that was in the contract, of course they paid.

------
davinic
It's okay to be a value-based consultant or contractor. There is no ethical
requirement that your work be priced by the hour. You've potentially spent
thousands of hours (25k in my case) honing your skills, and those skills could
help your client make a lot of money. If a static site can make a company
millions (they can!) then it's not unreasonable, nor unwelcome from the
client, to charge a couple hundred thousand dollars, regardless of the time
spent!

------
llamataboot
Ha ha cute! Meanwhile that's about half of what we pay teachers for a full
year of work tending to the emotional and intellectual well-being of children.

~~~
himynameisdom
This is misguided anger at best, and trolling at worst. What were you hoping
to achieve with this?

~~~
llamataboot
Oh, it was perhaps some cathartic snark that doesn't add much to the overall
discussion, but considering that the majority of comments on articles like
these tend to be made up of people glorifying such income, talking about why
such income isn't enough, hoping to someday have such an income, or otherwise
somehow on the hedonic treadmill that makes programmers some of the wealthiest
workers that have ever existed on earth, yet always looking at the coder that
got better stock options and/or explaining how capitalism is simultaneously
the best socioeconomic system yet ha! of course every BigCorp doing little of
value in the world has such money to waste...

Well, I think it's a measured dose of realism and maybe /every single article/
posted on HN about compensation, IPOs, exits, salary negotiations, etc should
have a reminder that much of the world is doing far more important things for
far less money than whatever ad-tech startup got some VC money from their
fellow Stanford grads this week.

~~~
dimnsionofsound
I appreciated your original comment for the reasons you listed in this one. +1

------
jamesb93
So much waste - I'm not saying he didn't earn his money but how is it possible
for a company to run cash positive when it wastes like that?

~~~
pornel
Large companies operate on a completely different scale of money. If this was
a page for a product that's going to make a million dollars, this expense was
still a rounding error.

~~~
axlee
But why are they so stingy with salaries, then?

~~~
was_boring
It's the largest line item for most companies, so apply pressure there and get
the most dramatic result in the shortest time. Do that to every project and it
takes too much mental overhead.

~~~
le-mark
That's also why when companies start talking about "cost cutting" on the order
of $millions, it almost always means layoffs. That's a big lever to push on
earnings, for example.

------
IronWolve
Back in the 90's, I got a buddy hired at my work, and typically all co-workers
come through a contracting agency. Work hired him as a direct contractor
without the agency BUT at agency rates. He did his 90 day contractor probation
period and then hired directly.

After he left the company years later, he told us the story of the 175 hourly
rate they gave him for 3 months, instead of 25 for a junior admin.

Good times.

------
mcv
The moment you do the work on-site with the client, with their resources,
their equipment, on their laptop that you first need to configure and install,
with their environment and everything, dealing with their bureaucracy, work
time goes way up.

Had you done this from home on your own machine after they quickly mailed you
the necessary resources, you'd have been done within those 20 hours, but
frankly, large corporations don't really care. $18,000 is still pocket money
for them, and they apparently prefer if you do everything their way instead of
your own.

You didn't just deliver a static html page, you delivered a static html page
as part of their process.

Let them pay. You earned it. They wasted your time, you didn't waste theirs.
It's not the most fulfilling way of working, but it pays the bills.

I do almost entirely projects for large clients like that, and it's not
unusual that just getting started takes a week. I used to get frustrated about
that, but it's their choice, and now I just go along with it.

It does underscore how unbelievably inefficient large companies really are.

------
sxp62000
Ha! Imagine how much a Deloitte-like company would've charged them for making
that html page.

~~~
moron4hire
10x just to come up with the PowerPoints saying they could do it for another
50x. Then still fuck it up.

------
dcl
I had worked for a big bank doing financial modelling, reporting, random ad-
hoc stuff for about 3.5 years before getting fairly bored. I quit and went to
work for a small AI/ML* consulting firm whose biggest client turned out to be
the same bank I used to work for.

Before I left, I gave my boss an opportunity to beat the new salary that was
offered to me. He said he couldn't.

My annual pay was ~170k at the bank, but now they pay $2500 a DAY for me to be
there, and, as a consultant, I work FAR less hard and far fewer hours (albeit
in a completely different division). I've been here for 10 months now and it
seems like it will continue indefinitely...

This article has strongly reminded me to start doing my own thing and charge
even more.

*In reality, all I do is data engineering/munging because their data models and systems are so poor.

------
tmaly
Icing on the cake would have been if he had made a little extra effort and got
additional contracts from the same company

------
atemerev
Some static HTML pages (e.g. ICO landings when it was still a thing) could
well be worth $18k and more.

~~~
readbeard
Indeed! Consider a simple brochure-style marketing page, which is often a good
use case for static HTML. Such a page should be centered around content, and
that content (photography, illustration, copy, animation, etc.) may need to be
specially built for the page and may be expensive to produce. Everything has
to fit together flawlessly, telling a compelling story while staying on-brand.
Performance needs to be great. And if the page is generating much revenue, it
is easy to justify spending even more money in optimizations if they are
likely to improve conversion rates.

I realize this has nothing to do with the ridiculous situation described in
the article, but I do think it's worth pointing out that $18k is not at all an
inherently ridiculous amount of money to charge for a static HTML page. In
some cases, it may not be nearly enough.

------
grecy
I worked for a large company who wanted their public website re done to be
"mobile friendly" (in 2015).

It's Drupal, with a custom theme. Everything that was actually "tricky" was
de-scoped, so it wound up being something my university buddies and I would
have charged $5k for back in the day, probably would have charged $30k these
days.

That project cost well over $1mil. For a Drupal site with a custom "Mobile
friendly" theme.

~~~
JakeTheAndroid
When I worked for a non-profit they paid like a quarter million dollars for a
Drupal site with some slight modifications that never even got completed. I
had to trudge through months of debugging and solving problems, and ultimately
I couldn't be bothered with Drupal Core so we brought in some contractors to
solve the biggest issues while I worked on rebuilding the whole stack. Drupal
knowledge seems to pay well, they were able to charge us $150 an hour at their
non-profit discount.

------
b123400
Years ago a company similarly contacted me for some "emergency" tasks. I flied
all the way to Japan and realise they haven't got the tasks ready, more than
half of the time I wasn't doing anything. I honestly (stupidly?) charged them
with my actual working hours, they seems surprised. A lesson learnt and the
next time it'll be a different story.

------
davinic
After the hours in the initial estimate were used, I would have renegotiated
and charged a nonrefundable retainer in order to be on call to deliver the
project as soon as the assets were ready. This retainer would be my normal
rate, and the hours would not carry over to another billing period. I would
not be driving to their office every day.

------
mixmastamyk
Would love to see the finely-crafted, artisanal HTML and heirloom CSS.

~~~
mixmastamyk
^ organic Javascript, ;)

------
Insanity
I read the title, expecting it to be kind of a 'scam', or at least that they
overcharged and got away with it. Turns out he did spent that time at the
company where they hired him and it only seems fair to me. Even though they
probably just wasted too much of his time - and their money.

------
Causality1
Federal government is the only place I've worked that had a reasonable
work/pay ratio. Every private company has either been eye-bleeding amounts of
work and weekly hours for unsatisfying compensation or doing almost nothing
and then getting a check that made me feel guilty.

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
Randomly enough, the writer of this previously achieved HN fame when he was
unstoppably fired by a machine:

[https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-
me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

~~~
snazz
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645)

------
aplummer
I'm shocked at how much this person undercharged, for a contract like this to
a large company $1K P/D AUD time and materials is not even particularly high.
A consulting firm would be 2.5-3.5 so it's a bargain.

------
DaveInTucson
* Your time is worth something, even if your employer isn't making the best use of it

* I'm surprised he waited 7 weeks before submitting a bill (especially given the hurry up and wait circumstances).

------
jondubois
That's the problem with corporations; it's not the manager's own money, they
don't know where it comes from, who the shareholders are, what the real goal
of the company is, what high quality work looks like, etc... So if you're
friends with the right people, you can get whatever amount you want and nobody
cares.

The company is like a giant communal wallet. It sucks money out of lord-knows-
where and dispenses it back to you. You just have to physically sit at your
desk and waste time for 8 hours a day.

------
anonytrary
This sounds like an awful experience. You were brought in to write a single,
trivial HTML page and thought the job would take you about 2 days, give or
take (which, it would have). Then, it ended up taking 7 weeks because the
company's communication was incredibly poor. The error here is so large, I'd
be pretty upset. At least they paid you for your two months of service,
though. How are companies _this_ inefficient? They completely wasted about
$20k for no reason.

------
_bxg1
The traditional wisdom is that as a technical employee, you don't want to work
for a non-technical company. Sounds like as a contractor it's the opposite.

------
otakucode
Companies don't seem to realize that the bad practices they engage in are
actively harmful to themselves financially. Maintaining that office that
doesn't produce as much value as it destroys in expense. Not investing in IT
infrastructure (whether real or virtual). Not actively working on making
communication efficient and valuable. These things don't just get on peoples
nerves, they cost money.

------
craftoman
Look at Apple. People are buying their over priced products years now. If you
compared them equally based on the actual hardware and leave their software
out, you'll clearly see that market is offering you the same products at half
price. If Apple release a laptop at 5K$ with a 4K screen and a (hypothetical)
screen keyboard or something fancy, people will go crazy and start buying it.

------
Moru
At a company a few years ago, we paid about $25k for a website layout
delivered in .psd, a coloursheet as a .pdf and a recommendation on a typeface.
The boss was not happy and the defence was sort of "It was very hard work to
select just the right colors and font, we have used many hours!" (Not exact
words but something in that direction)

So yeah, they beat you :-)

------
tamersalama
Tangentially: I liked listening to the article, with the background soothing
music, in the author's voice.

~~~
geophertz
If only we could change the speed.

------
mygo
I like the story, as my experiences resonate with it, but I dislike the title.
The pay was fair for the time spent -- especially since it was exclusive and
included travel. He effectively became a full-time employee during that time
span. No benefits, and his profits will be taxed by the IRS.

------
zitterbewegung
I charged $500 for a single static HTML page in the early 2010s. I figured out
free hosting using Google App Engine. Also I was on a Skype call the whole
time and it had to be done by the end of the day with the client . I don’t
think the author did anything wrong .

~~~
Insanity
the money is good, but the working condition seems to be bad :D I'd hate
having to work with soemone constantly 'peering over my shoulder' even if just
virtually.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I sent them pictures not a live video screen cast..

------
endtime
I've had a couple experiences getting paid to do nothing for a couple months,
one during a summer research project in undergrad and one at a big tech
company. I found it far more stressful and less valuable than if I'd had
actual work to do.

------
mensetmanusman
Why has no one mentioned the American Dream:
[https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

------
morenoh149
This isn’t that crazy of a story. The static page part is the hook but he was
on site for a month. I’ve been on projects clearing 40k in 2 months for onsite
work. Doesn’t matter if it’s static or api work.

------
jmkni
Cool article, one thing:

> The designer had sent me some Adobe Illustrator files, and I couldn't open
> it on the MacBook.

Can't you just change the file extension to _pdf_ to open an Adobe Illustrator
file?

------
fullhelp
Reading the article and the comments here makes me consider raising the price
of a self-hosted help desk software I recently released. Or at least, adding a
new premium price package.

------
eljimmy
Title should read “I charged $18,000 for many hours of my time”

------
justaguyhere
Cool story.

Now, how can I find such jobs/companies, minus the commute? :P

------
martin-adams
This might be one of those cases where they want to keep spending money so
they get a budget renewal for the next quarter.

------
spsrich2
He's lucky to have got paid at all. But his experience is totally normal for
how large companies operate.

------
smashah
Wow. I listened to the post and felt like I was in the developer equivalent of
the twilight zone. Love it!

------
potta_coffee
Man I thought I was doing good at $1k.

------
jhallenworld
But is this really want to do with your time, even if you are getting paid?

------
kissgyorgy
Sounds like real-life to me unfortunately :D

------
amatecha
Saving you a click: He charged $75/hr for a job that included a ton of waiting
around and idling on-location at the client's office. :)

------
ausbah
who says that businesses are any guarantee to be any more than large
government bureaucracies?

------
whiddershins
I would have billed incrementally.

------
_davebennett
Legit the definition of corporate

------
eej71
Sell value not cost.

------
jnaddef
Spoilers : he did not actually get paid $18,000

~~~
dymk
... he got paid $21,000

~~~
jnaddef
I did not want to spoil it all :)

------
aqibgatoo
lmao

------
monicageller018
This is an impressive story! It's unbelievable to read about how some big
companies function. The funniest part is that he didn't get paid $18,000 like
the title says - but $21,000!

------
sureaboutthis
I charge $30,000 and did absolutely nothing.

I was hired by a publishing company to take their 1990s web site into the
modern age, a couple of years ago. I reported directly to the owner of this
small but well known company in their industry. On day one, he sat with me for
10 minutes and outlined what he wanted done and then promptly left for a
publishing conference for two weeks. He gave me nothing to access the web
server or any of the source.

So, I spent two weeks putting together a few potential designs and showed them
around to influential persons inside the company. They loved it! But when the
CEO returned, he immediately pushed back against the hamburger icon for a menu
selection among other things he thought his customers would find difficult to
use.

I said I would work on that, made some changes I thought he would like, but
when it came time to present them, he was gone again on another sales meeting
out of town for a few days.

When he came back, he asked me to work with his graphic designer to create
some animations for an iPad program they sold. I had never done that but
quickly learned. He then went to France. He called me twice to ask about the
progress and some additions he wanted but, when he returned, he was too busy
to meet with me about that project.

I continued to ask for access to the server but never received a response.

Then, he presented me with an iPad app they had some company in India develop.
He said it had some minor issues but he wanted me to work on it. It was
written in ObjectiveC but I knew nothing about it and had never developed
anything for Apple products before. He gave me access to his Lynda account but
he needed the app fixed in two weeks. I told him it was impossible.

So, he hired a college kid who was fluent in all that. He gave the kid two
months to solve the problem but he hit a road block and last I heard it past
the three month mark trying to get that to work.

For me, since he didn't have time to work with me on the company web site, he
said his mother had an event coming up for a charity she ran and she needed a
web site right away. I knew nothing of the charity or the event. I had no
pictures, no text, no idea what she would want beyond a general outline the
CEO gave me but he wanted the whole thing up and running...in two weeks.

I said I can't do that. So he fired me.

I had accomplished absolute nothing. I asked him why he thought I could write
iPad apps. He said it was because I said in the interview I once wrote an app
for the iPhone. I said, no, I wrote a little test program--a "Hello
World"\--using Cordova but that was it.

------
Nanocurrency
Got it, so I need to start working as a contractor for various big
corporations.

------
jbverschoor
He didn't charge 18K. He got lucky while he did not keep his promise of his
quote.

He kept his mouth shut, even though he knew he needed to have a difficult talk
about assets and time reserved etc. Instead of that, he waited for weeks
before he nervousy crafted an invoice full of mistakes because he was probably
editting and re-editing because he knew he was doing something wrong, but had
a conflicted mind because he felt entitled to get paid a daily rate instead of
fixed price like he agreed. He then sent the email safely from home miles
away.

