And my comment was about clients making changes to the spec. It doesn't matter how good your estimate is or how perfect your project plan is if the client decides to change the project after work has begun. You can refuse the changes, but they can also refuse to pay. You can give up the job, but hey, you're still not getting paid if you do that. The best hope you have is for the client to understand that their change, no matter how trivial it may seem, means more work for you and, therefore, more cost for them.

Or, to put it another way, go ahead and estimate the cost of that paint job. Then build a project plan for it that holds up in the situation I described. I'll be pricing you against a few local shops who are known for quality work; you high has to be competitive or I'll go elsewhere.

This isn't as much of an issue when your client is internal to the company, but that was clearly not the case in my analogy.

And yet, you still get know-nothings who insist that you're wrong and want to push forward anyway. Thankfully, for the ones I've encountered, money is not an object and they're more than happy to pay for the work to be redone. I had one client try and argue the point and I told them very plainly that their options were to continue the project as originally detailed, take the incomplete work, as-is, or pay for the changes they were requesting. Which option they took is irrelevant, but I'll say the project got done and I got paid.

That doesn't negate the fact that people will still insist on changes, no matter how careful you are in communicating issues you find in their requirements and getting clarification before starting work. You're absolutely right, though; many people don't know how to handle it when it happens.

Here's the story. It's free text online. tldr: The government paid for the research and development, took all the risks, an academic researcher did all the work, a private company came along, took advantage of a naive scientist, and sold the test back to the taxpayers for 50 times what it actually cost.

(The New York Times just had a series on health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal which gave a dozen examples like this. Asthma inhalers cost about 20 to 50 times as much in the US as they do anywhere else. There are people who go to Europe once a year to buy a year's supply of drugs.)

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Perspective
History of Medicine
Patenting the PKU Test — Federally Funded Research and Intellectual Property
Diane B. Paul, Ph.D., and Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:792-794
August 29, 2013
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1306755

In 1961, the U.S. Children's Bureau (USCB) embarked on a field trial of the test, requiring rapid production of kits to screen more than 400,000 babies. Guthrie, who had a cognitively impaired son and a niece with PKU, was involved in a parents' group, the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC). In consultation with the NARC, he decided that commercial production of test kits would be most efficient.

Guthrie favored the Ames Company, a division of Indiana-based Miles Laboratories, which marketed the earlier PKU tests. Although Guthrie assumed that the government would enter a contract with Ames, the company said it would manufacture the kits only if a patent were issued. In 1962, Guthrie filed a patent application in his own name and signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Miles, under which he would receive no royalties but 5% of net proceeds would be divided among the NARC Research Fund, the Association for Aid of Crippled Children, and the University of Buffalo Foundation (affiliated with the Buffalo Children's Hospital, Guthrie's employer). There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted.2

Miles, however, couldn't quickly produce test kits in the required quantity. So with financial support from the USCB, Guthrie rented a house in which to produce and assemble kits containing the materials necessary to perform and interpret 500 tests, at a cost of about $6 each. But when Guthrie visited the Ames Company in June 1963, he discovered that it planned to charge $262 for what were essentially the same kits. He was appalled, and when appeals to the company proved futile, he alerted USCB officials. They recommended that Miles not be granted exclusive commercial rights, in light of the large public expenditure on the test, the potential effect on states that planned to manufacture their own materials, and the steep price Miles planned to charge. Although the test had been developed with support from various organizations, the majority of the funds had come from the Public Health Service (PHS), which provided $251,700, and the USCB, which contributed $492,000 plus $250,000 through the states, chiefly for the trial. Given this federal funding, the surgeon general of the PHS determined that the invention belonged to the United States and abrogated the exclusive licensing agreement.

My example was meant to highlight the fact that a single word change in the spec can mean having to redo work. No matter how easy it is to *undo* the work (in the case of programming, it's often much easier than in my analogy, but this is not always the case), the fact remains that the work must still be redone. Just because my analogy did not include having done work that needs to be kept, subsequent to having done work that needs to be redone, doesn't make my honest curiosity irrelevant; and your response seems to indicate that, save for having planned for that very occurance, it is indeed not possible (and even with planning, only maybe, if you're willing to create a new branch for nearly every commit... and you're lucky).

Honestly, I was hoping you'd tell me it was easy. This is one of those instances where I'd jump for joy while screaming at the top of my lungs "I WAS WRONG! I WAS WRONG! THANK YOU, LORD, I WAS WRONG!" Not that I have a use for it at the moment, but it's come up in the past and I'm sure it'll come up again in the future.

You still end up rewriting code. Version control is great for many things, including rolling back to a previous point in time, but please tell me how to undo something I did last week without rolling back everything I've done since. I'd actually really like an answer to that, with regards to Git, if you've got one.

Yes, I read it. It's $83,000 a year, not $147,000. Stop bragging about how smart you are if you can't read a simple newspaper story, realize there are two sides to the story, and do some simple arithmetic.

You say it would be fair for them to make $35/h. Well, $35/h x 40h/wk x 50 wk/yr = $70,000/yr, which is pretty close to $83,000. So they merely drove a good bargain. You have a problem with people making good money?

There are reasons why they make so much money that you resent them.

First, they know how to negotiate. That's something you might learn from them.

When they negotiate, they don't want to match the race to the bottom. They know how much their employer is making and they want a piece of the action. They want job security and they want, in effect, something like an ownership interest in the company. That's not so strange. In Germany, unions have a seat on the board of directors of a company.

Second, they made a grand bargain decades ago. There was new technology that would make their job more labor-saving and efficient. Instead of obstructing it, they agreed to be forward-thinking and go along with it. However, if the company got the benefits of improved efficiency, they wanted the benefits of improved efficiency too. That's why they're making $83,000 a year. Here's a profitable business, where the owners are making millions a year. Why should they settle for $70,000 when their boss is rich and could easily pay $83,000 a year?

My landlord was making at least $300,000 a year, probably more. He inherited the building from his father, like most landlords. He worked hard, just like a longshoreman. Do I envy him? No. That's the free market.

If you live in a rental building, do you envy your landlord if he makes $300,000 a year? Do you envy your maintenance man, who fixes your boiler? Do you envy your auto mechanic? This is a rich country. Why do you want to drag everybody down to the bottom?

Well, yes, if a car was a data construct. Way to miss the point.

Or were you going for funny? in that case, yeah I'll grant you that. ;)

You've got a few years on me, actually! I've just spent a little over 4 years working for a guy who's made some real boner mistakes and got to learn form him. :)

I'll drop you an email in the AM, I really should be asleep right now.

I have a project that was due last week that I haven't started on yet. I got the deposit check the day I handed over the SoW, but didn't get the signed SoW back until last week, 6 weeks later. As per the terms of the SoW, I'll reschedule it when I find time.

Most of the delays I encounter are caused by someone else; either the need to refactor someone else's shit code (that I wasn't allowed to review before providing an estimate, of course), delayed approval for the work, delayed access to resources, any number of external forces. Very rarely do I exceed my estimated *hours* for a project unless changes are requested (but then I'm not exceeding the estimate, either, since I make the client either agree to a new estimate or accept a refund of any portion of their deposit not already applied to the hours I've worked), but all too often I find myself completing projects well past their due date because some resource wasn't made available to me until after that date had lapsed.

Fortunately, I foresaw that unforeseen things would happen when drafting the boilerplate language of my SoW and covered all of those cases. I go over the entire SoW with my clients before starting a project and make sure they know what the triggers are for a re-quote, what will cause the project to be delayed, and under what circumstances they're entitled to a refund of any deposit they pay (e.g. if they back out of the project once I've started work, I'm deducting my hours from that). As a result of that, and perhaps a bit of luck, I haven't had any disputes over project scope, budget, or timeline, and the one client I did have back out of a project simply said they no longer had the budget (they were being sued) and told me to hold on to the remainder of their deposit as they'd be back to finish the project after they lawsuit ended, hinting that, even if that didn't happen, the small sum would make no difference going forward (of course, I'm sitting on that money for now, and if they fully back out of the project I'll insist that they either accept the refund or sign a document releasing the funds to me).

That was one thing that really pissed me off when I was working for someone else; I had no control over external interruptions or delays and it was usually the person interrupting and delaying me who was holding me accountable for all of them. I'm not out to scam anyone, but I always felt like I was when dealing with my previous employer.

Not my problem if you're stuck in the '90s.

Two words: "Package manager".

But I'm thinking you already knew that but couldn't resist making that hoary old troll in lieu of expressing an original thought. Much less having one.

There's also a 15 point IQ difference between a normal human being and a racist. Guess which one you are.

He may have been able to write more maintainable, more stable, better tested, and altogether cleaner code, given what he asked. Possibly in half of his worst-case estimate of 2 years. In the long run, the crap that needed to be slapped together to get the project "done", in 4x the time he was allotted, will end up costing the company more than giving him what he asked for in order to do it right. You must be an MBA.

Depending on how far along in the project you are, it's reasonable to expect changing a single word in the spec to have a major impact on the project. Consider:

So you do all the prep work, car's primed with a dark primer, black paint is mixed and ready to go, then this change request comes in:

Well, now you've wasted the paint you just tinted black, and you can't paint white on top of dark primer (well, you can, but you need many more coats), so you've got to redo the prep work. That means waiting while the primer fully cures, so you can sand it off properly; otherwise, it'll gum your sandpaper. then re-prime, then you can paint. Assuming you don't see

in the meantime.

That was one word. Yes, one line matters.

I haven't heard anything so naive since Mitt Romney told kids to borrow $1 million from their parents.

The commenter who replied to you pretty much pointed out where you're wrong, so I'm not gonna waste my time. I'll add one bit that he missed, though; the relevant 8 pages are a subset of Title II's 33 pages. Have a nice day.