> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me.
From the article:
> They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.
The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.
I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it might not have been directed by a manager!
At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful things like PowerToys and GraphingCalculator.
It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying for billable hours. If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.
There's also a pretty big difference between spending a LITTLE extra time on a side project vs not even finishing the actual project because your side project became the main focus. This is probably OK: "Hey, here's that finished logo you asked for. By the way, we had plenty of extra hours left, so I spent an hour on this new design mockup... doesn't it fit in much better with the new logo? What do you think, should we consider expanding the project scope to pursue this, or drop it if you don't like this direction?"
That's not what this agency did. They were more like "Ohhhhh yeah we still haven't had time to finish your logo. We need a few more months while we figure stuff out internally. Sorry, you're just not a high priority for us. But hey, one of our designers took half your hours and made this, check it out! Yeah, I know it's not what you wanted, but the logo person is busy. But check it out anyway! C'mon! By the way, if you paid us more, maybe we'd take you more seriously." What bullshit, lol... =/
> If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.
Additionally, if he was “such a small % of their total revenue” it should have been nothing at all to eat the inappropriately high costs on this project.
> Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told
I don't believe this is true for adhoc work. There's often pressure to get a job done under time under budget to maximize profit. It's one reason I much prefer working for a service based company as there IS room to do what you want and push boundries.
I did it plenty when I was working as part of a contracting house where “every hour is billed to a client”. There’s plenty of room to spend time making crazy tools to automate your work or provide internal/external/personal value.
Sometimes these rogue gambits pay off and return multiples of value…sometimes they just waste massive time.
But I can say that I was absolutely a rogue project-doer in an engineering body shop.
From the article: > They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.
The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.