Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me

There are pros and cons for each method. Perceptionally, charging hourly is safer or you. But clients always think that you will pad the bills and take more time to do things than it should. It's in your best interest to take as much time as possible. That's just the way it is. Now, fixed bids. There's a risk doing for a fixed price. What happens if it goes longer, and you spend more time than you planned? You take it in the shorts. But, the customer knows that you are going to do your damnedess to get it done on time and under budget. But for comparison, look at public works construction companies. Those that build airports, highways, etc. All the companies give a fixed bid, and the lowest fixed bid wins. Adding a $5 billion wing to a major metro airport Like LAX or SFO is incredibly complex. They key is to be super careful on your bid. And, like construction companies that do bids on complex projects, you have to be super vigelent about change orders. Meaning, the person you are working for wants changes to their original proposal. Because then it changes your bid. And, in construction and in programming, there are ALWAYS changes. So if they change their specifications in the slightest bit, you have to be 100% sure to charge them more. This is how construction companies actually make money. On the change orders. Here is what the ABA says about construction change orders: link This is just general information for you. I am not a lawyer. But, after you make a bid, and the person that you are doing the work for decides to make a change, that's on them, so they can't really accuse you of trying to "pad the charges." Fixed bids are actually really great if you get super good at doing one thing, and get it done under the time you bid. If you work super fast and efficiently at an hourly rate, you won't get paid as much. For instance, if you do a bid to do create a software powered toenail clippers for $4,000, and you've done it before and can do it in 2 hours, you get paid $2,000 per hour. But if you do an hourly rate at $150 per hour, you only get a total of $300. So doing a fixed bid, as long as you actually know how much time it will take you, is the best of all possible worlds. The only thing to be 100% on point about is that any changes make a change to the fixed price, and you can either go hourly or fixed price on the changes, depending on the situation that you can do. For sure you need to make progress payments as you go along, and make sure you charge a hefty amount before you even start. Whether it is 25% or 33%, whatever the situation demands, but you want to get some cash flow going right away. Cash is king. Money talks, bullshit walks. Never take someone’s word on it. Never take any job where you don’t get paid a portion up front. Before you walk in the door. And make sure you watch the definitive video on getting paid: ▶ this video

A large chunk of what I do has nothing to do with writing code or solving problems... Sales, accounting, contract negotiation. They are more time consuming than they need to be, but at least cost of doing them is very much built into my rate. They are tedious beyond belief. Work for trade has gotten me the help I need in these areas from accountants and lawyers and built some solid relationships that I didn't have before. This is all upside for me. I can't stress to you enough how important the contract is, if you were thinking about a consulting style business you need to watch this before you dive in: ▶ this video

> they have no realistic choice not to If folks expect someone to solve problems for them, than 100% people end up unhappy. The old idea of loyalty buying a 30 year career with vertical movement died sometime in the 1990s. Ikigai chart will help narrow down why people are unhappy: link Even if folks are not thinking about doing a project, I still highly recommend this crash course in small business contracts ▶ this video Rule #24: The lawyers Strategic Truth is to never lie, but also avoid voluntarily disclosing information that may help opponents. Best of luck =3

Hardware is artificially underpaid work, good positions are sparse in the US, and generally most engineers end up in niche coding environments. Most people that land a successful long career, also refuse to solve some clown firms ephemeral problems at a loss. The trend of externalizing costs onto perspective employees starts to fail in difficult fields requiring actual domain talent with $3.7m per seat equipment. Regulatory capture also fails in advanced areas, as large firms regress into state sponsored thievery instead. Advice to students that is funny and accurate =3 "Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me" ▶ this video

As a palette cleanser and loin girder: ▶ this video (You already guessed it was Mike Monteiro.) For this project: Did they refuse to pay actively ("We won't pay you."), or passively (No replies to emails.) The latter might be incompetence. As others mentioned, specific legal advice depends on respective jurisdictions, but an offical lawyer's letter sometimes wakes up legal when accounting is drifting. Did you deliver the final access to the code / server / credentials? If not, gently bring servers, DBs, platforms to a halt pending final payments. Future projects: Contract, always. Up-front commencement payments, always. Price yourself higher in the initial quote, and ask for staged payments, such that by the time your delivery schedule is 50-75% done you are 100% paid. You control the source code accounts, you control the server credentials, you control the database access credentials, you hand over final access after the final check has cleared.

%25 percent the day you sign. This covers what it cost me to scope the work and bid on the contract. %50 The day I am done writing code. This code should meet all the spec's you set out in the agreement. %25 percent after QA/Live. There are always bugs it has to go out, a last minute tweak or two, general deployment support. You can cancel at any time but pay me out to the next point in the contract. If you sign up, and cancel the next day I get 75 percent. Someone will tell you that's "not fair" or "we wont cancel" ... then they should not have a problem with the terms, if you are serious they aren't at issue. Have a major scope change. Pay out the contract and let's write a new one. Or we can negotiate an amendment... Either way it's very hard for you to rug pull me. Get a very good lawyer. Pay them well. It will hurt at the start, but in the end you will be better off for it. This is all you need to know: ▶ this video

Don't forget the larger companies who'll try to negotiate Net 90, one month in arrears, in which they'd still probably feel they had another 2 weeks of wiggle room. Companies try that. With me it ends up Net 30 as usual when we edit the service agreement, but lordy do they TRY that. Which is why you need airtight service agreements, and then the willingness to follow up on them. Obligatory video, "Fuck You, Pay Me": [▶ this video] I only ever had two customers (out of > 200) not pay in about 15 years. One got a lawyer letter and paid up. The other (new customer, and one I was warned to be wary of) I actually dragged to district court to receive a judgement. They then still wouldn't pay. I figured there was no one there I'd ever see again in my career... so I sent the sheriff. They wired payment within hours.

> Like I don't wanna reject them, but if I can somewhow ask them to pay that would be great. Never ask for pay. Demand it, and refuse to work until you've been paid. There are four words you need to learn to speak without fear, and shout if necessary. Anybody who has seen GoodFellas knows what they are. The four magic words are... FUCK YOU. PAY ME. Clip from GoodFellas: <link> Also, you need to watch Mark Monteiro's lecture, "Fuck You, Pay me" at <▶ this video>. My employers can always rely on me. But they gotta come up with my money every week. Payroll company fucked up? FUCK YOU. PAY ME. The client didn't pay you? FUCK YOU. PAY ME. It's an emergency and you want me to work late? FUCK YOU. PAY ME TIME AND A HALF FOR OVERTIME.

You give people something cool for years at no cost and now they're pissed that they have to compensate you for your labor. The way that people value software these days is completely insane. People writing you hate mail are bad clients that you don't want and you can feel free to ignore them. Also watch this video that was doing the rounds on HN a couple of years ago: ▶ this video Your app looks neat - I'll go try it out.