My experience with a freelancer from unity forum

This happens to me ALL the time. A few years ago I started a "bad programmer" page for all the people who would rip us off and waste our time (like just happened to me again) but Unity took it down. Shame

 

Yeah not all are serious !

 

It's a tough situation. You can't just publicly shame someone and Unity deletes these threads with reason. For one, no matter how nice and trustworthy you seem, they have no way to verify that your story is accurate so it may be unfair to the other person. Also, there are so many of these stories I see where both parties are at fault because the consumers of the services either forego or don't write good contracts. Personally, I would only ever hire someone that was based in my own country unless I knew them or their reputation well (I have hired a few). The reason for this is because I have the backing of the legal system should I need to use it.

 

I just found this thread and I have to say that the project was completed. After he tried out the admin panel on wordpress he came to the conclusion that Woocommerce (that he asked for) didn't suit all of his needs and refused to pay the 2nd part of the money and also rejected any way to compensate the changed requirements. My original quote was 800$ for the project if I remember correctly, he cut it down to 400$. After I said OK because I didn't had too much work back then, he cut an additional 100$ from the money because some other developer already did some UI work. When I demoed the project, he also wanted to completely change the UI that he subtracted from the project money. That was not just a drag and drop task... It got all the data from the server and displayed on double embedded scroll views. The debate was so long that I unfortunately lost the project due to a hard drive corruption. I was planning to to upload it to a GIT repo after I got the money. Yeah always back up... After that, I started to remake the project from scratch, and sent him the server files too. He came up with new compile errors that didn't even appear on my side. He got all the client and server code, still no money. That's where I just abandoned the project. And you guys can tell him that NDA and contracts all the way, he was changing the specification and not only just refused to pay more, but he refused to pay any money until the new stuff is done. And on the top of all I'm the scumbag because I had enough of this while there was customers who actually paid for my work. I wish I can say that he was my worse customer ever, but there was a guy who refused to pay any money in advance, we split the project in 3 parts (1500$ project) and when I demoed the 1/3 of the project and asked to pay he just deleted me on Skype. I just wanted to be clear with you guys I won't start another debate here. Also I had to pay for a VPS for the project that puts this case in the joke category in my opinion.

 

125$/hour? Really? That's 1k per 8 hours. Do you seriously charge 20k$+ for a month of your work?

 

That's not how calculating freelancer income works, imho. High hourly rates factor in things like that you will usually not be able to fill your available time even close to 100% with "billable hours", that you have massive overhead of administrative tasks related to your work, which are "non-billable hours" because no one pays you to do stuff like your accounting, taxes, backups, maintenance, self-promotion, self-education, writing quotes for people that thereafter will never again talk to you (that one often costs me 1 or 2 hours per inquiry and gives me nothing in return), etc.. Those are things that in a normal employment you'd have to do too (to varying degrees of course), but there it usually happens on company time, so you're basically getting paid for it. Also there is a difference of costs that freelancers and regular employees have. I can't say much about how this plays out in the US, but in Germany it's a considerable sum that your employer would pay each month for your healthcare and retirement fund, freelancers pay all of that themselves.
Also one has to keep in mind that exceptionally experienced people that usually are able to do the same task in less hours than someone with less experience, often have acquired their knowledge through forms of study that don't pay at all. So high hourly rates sometimes have to compensate for that as well. And still, the pro with the high hourly rate may be cheaper on the bottom line.

People that do "naive extrapolations of income" like you just did (no offense), are the reason why often freelancers (like me for example) avoid naming hourly rates like the plague. Based on the numbers in @Dustin-Horne's post, would you have raised an eyebrow at "a coding job for 250$ to 375$" ? Probably not, because it isn't that much really.

 

That's my bill rate but as Martin said there are lots of other expenses. I also don't bill 100% of my time and I don't bill clients for research time. And not to sound conceited, but I'm good at what I do so clients pay it. I generally use that as a basis and estimate which I use for fixed bid projects, and i rarely do small projects.

But to give an example, i recently built a premium calculator for an insurance company. It was written in typescript, transpiled to JavaScript. I wrote a custom decision tree for it. I charged $1,500 in total. I slightly underestimated but it was fixed bid so that's all I billed. In contrast, their regular web development company gave them a $5,000 estimate for the same task and would have only had it integrated in their public site. By contrast, not only was I cheaper, but I built it to construct and output it's own css and run on a cdn so they use it also on their internal site for their agents and integrated into a mobile app and their agents love it.

So you can't base everything on bill rate. In my regular job as a consultant there is a mix of onshore and offshore. I'm billed at over $100 per hour and the offshore guys are about 15 or 20, however my colleagues and I, while more expensive, produce over 10 times the amount of business value functionality, making us actually a better deal. Food for thought.

 

Good developer and bad developer are differents, the price too.

I work for a company, and I can create a game in only 1 week, the previous developer worked 3months and the result was very bad.
To create a plugin to communicate with 6 bluetooth device , I did the task in only 2days, and that works perfectly, the previous developer worked 2months to communicate with only 2 BT devices, and the latency was horrible, the code too.

I worked a lot with Indian/Pakistan people, and it was always a nightmare, but cheap.
The quality is very low, poor performance, complex code for nothing.

I prefer to pay $1000 a day a good developer than $25/hour a bad developer.

It's the same when you want to build a house.

I ask between 800 and 1000€ per day, and it's not so expansive.

 

For an experienced professional developer I don't see why not, especially with the caveats listed in the follow up post. You can get people cheaper, but they're either not as good or don't understand the value of their time.

 

being a freelancer, for AAA and indies and others, I get jobs by word of mouth and only work with people that know someone that I know etc......So most of us good professionals won't have to deal with any hoops, I won't deal with that crap.....I been doing this for decades, and have no interest in going through any hoops for any amount of money..

UI design, for a good person you are going to pay, 80- $ 120 an hour .. Period....Unless you get someone, that will work for less, but most good experienced UI designers won't work for less.. I been a UI designer for games and web for decades and you get what you pay for...Now people I work with all the time I do give them deals.. all the time and charge them less do to the amount of work they give me and when they send me others..

But there is not alot of good free lancers that will deal with any hoops for any reason, most of us have plenty of work anyways...

 

You can find freelancers who will work for less. A lot depends on the quality of service you are looking for.

Some examples

• There are freelancers who work as hobbyists. You can get cheaper rates, because the day job pays most of the bills. But you will also always be behind the day job on the priory list.
• There are students. The risk is they might not be capable of doing your work.
• You can go offshore. This opens you up far more to scams, as enforcing contracts internationally is virtually impossible. Sometimes the language barrier means that work has to be done

Ultimately you will get what you pay for.

 

So, what happened with the flag button ?
[Edit] - It is called Report now

 

I dont know from where to start man, from the lie you said you buy VPS because at the start you said you have your own server, or when you said i deleted you from skype or when you said i said i dont need woocommerce anymore, please stop it, im not complaining here because as i said my feedback you also have the right to say yours but not with lies ! you kept threaten me about going to a lawyer if i didint pay then when i told you there is no contract neither me or you can do that you sent me a project with a bunch of errors (im not making them they appeared by themselves...) I can show all screenshots of this, thank god skype dont allow users to delete their very old messages so yeah proofs are still saved !

Im tired of explaining... we had the time before to discuss this but you didint even replay to my messages its too late now... In the end what is done is done now... and i already lost the money and the project itself and i didint even contacted you again and yes i didint deleted you (check screenshot)



I just deleted any info related to you on the first post and made it as an anonyme experience.

Why for ? it was a real experience that i faced and i writed it from my point of view, since in the end he is not cooperative back that time to find a solution between us...