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hourly or not
Monday, September 13 2010
A cool and rainy day kept things somewhat unpleasant all day. Adding to the vague sense of misery and despair was the news that my improvised message board system, which would normally be fine for small applications, wasn't being deemed elaborate enough for the application in which I was attempting to use it. This application was the sale of a niche product for an activity I hadn't even known existed until I'd met the guy who owns the company. This is the risk of not billing hourly for a poorly spec'd-out job. Inevitably some massive new feature that was never articulated is suddenly required, and you're screwed. (And then, if you're really unlucky, the company that hired you never actually pays you.)
I'm working on several jobs simultaneously, as I have been since December or January. One of my other jobs that I thought would be kind of difficult proved amazingly easy. It was an AJAX-style live search. As one types into a form, an increasingly-narrowed list of possibilities is pulled from a database and displayed as an ever-shrinking menu. I found an example of someone doing this (though it searched an XML file, not a database). Converting it to work on an MySQL database proved easy. So that would be an example of the upside of being paid per job instead of per hour.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100913 feedback
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