----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Singer" Subject: Re: [OT]: Hiring a PIC consultant/developer > Just trying to imagine what would be the bronz level reply, a torrentof vulgar invective? I think that is a little unfair. Of course, the customer is always right. However, Vitaliy isn't Olin's customer, and Olin is trying to give him some honest input. Anyone who has been around here a while will recognize that Olin is sometimes a little more blunt than the average bear, some would say "honest", but I certainly didn't see any attacking going on. Having worked with a lot of Dutch guys in the past, who tend to be ruthlessly honest, perhaps I'm a little more tolerant of Olin's brusqueness than most. Olin's Massachusetts address doesn't sound like it comes from .nl, but he sounds a lot like a Dutch guy. Olin is one of the more knowledgeable folks on this list, and I for one appreciate that he doesn't feel compelled to sugar coat his responses. If Vitaliy wants a contractor on site where he can watch every step, then as the customer, he has that right. I think Olin was trying to tell him that in asking for that, he is asking to pay top dollar for a third rate consultant. He is also asking for a lot of schedule uncertainty. Having understood that (unfortunately without quantitative measures), Vitaliy now has more information on which to base his decisions. Sadly, programmers in general have an issue with communicating things they know. In a more common situation, managers tend to ask for unreasonable schedules. Programmers know that means higher cost and more bugs, but managers believe that the compressed schedule will help constrain costs. The industry has good data to show the programmers are right, but we rarely present that data in a clear fashion. Unfortunately, I know of no data to support some of Olin's contentions, but I suspect he is right. Some things are fairly obvious. Clearly, if you can't come up with a good spec, then decisions will have to be made during development. Those decisions will take time, and that will mean downtime for the consultant. By having the consultant onsite, you are guaranteeing that you will have to pay full price for that downtime. If the consultant has other work, then you don't need to pay for all of that downtime. Further, having the consultant right there where you can keep changing the spec becomes an excuse for a bad spec in the first place, and an expectation on the consultant's part that there will be a lot of changes. Also, by expecting 100% commitment, you are preventing the consultant from lining up the next project, so he has to recover the expected post-project downtime from you as well. This is good data for Vitaliy, though. Now he knows that if the consultant is not asking a terribly high price for the project, then that consultant probably doesn't know what he is doing. --McD -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist