[gameprogrammer] Re: Contracting lesson: Never offer to work for free

Dear Kevin,

    That's really a depressing experience.

    What I learned from your lesson is that a thorough estimation of the
task is significant.

Regards,
Philip.

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Kevin Jenkins <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> An old customer of mine is using the NAT punchthrough feature of RakNet.
> After my recent work on this feature with Stardock, the success rate is much
> higher. So out of a desire to help I offered to upgrade this feature for
> this customer for free. My terms were either remote desktop, or on-site if
> they covered the costs. I was only planning to spend an hour or two on the
> upgrade, basically replacing that one file and adding the extra
> functionality needed.
>
> As it turned out, they wanted me to fly there to do the upgrade. As the
> date approached I started to regret not thinking it through. They wanted me
> to go there for the whole weekend. At first I just thought of this as a
> vacation. Work half a day and screw around in another city for some fun. But
> as the date approached I really regretted making that offer. Two lost days
> when I had a lot of other work to do, plus the tremendous inconvenience that
> comes with business trips. In any case, I missed the flight that morning. It
> was because the airline didn’t allow electronic or Kiosk check-in when the
> operating flight is different from the purchasing flight, and the line for
> the agents had 30 people in it; way too long for me to get on board on time.
> I’m not making excuses; that is just the reason why I missed it.
>
> I called the customer that morning telling them I missed the flight and I’d
> just have to do the work over remote desktop. I did the work over the next
> three days, although I have to say with extreme reluctance and second
> guessing myself about why the heck I agreed to do this. The reason it took
> three days is because I couldn’t just change that one file as I had hoped.
> The customer had changed half a dozen or so related files in RakNet, and I
> had to integrate those changes. With those changes, it made more sense to
> just update the whole system while I was at it.
>
> In hindsight, I suspect nobody told the lead programmer I was working with
> that I was doing this for free. So I got the impression he was annoyed when
> I was unwilling to do the work except at my own convenience, which meant I
> wasn’t working for a paying customer instead. I saw him as being awfully
> demanding considering I had no financial or legal incentive to do the work.
>
> The next day, the customer sends me an invoice for the unused plane ticket.
> Not a word of thanks for the free work either.
>
> Never offer to work for free.
>
> A. You’ll feel resentful
> B. This will translate into being less cooperative
> C. The customer will not appreciate it as much as you think they should
>
>
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