Freelance Work and Unprepared Clients
Posted July 14, 2008 at 12:28 a.m. by wheaties
Reflections on a recent experience as a freelance developer.
I've been working on a freelance job for the past couple months. I can't get very specific about what I've been doing because of non-disclosure agreements and such, but suffice it to say that it's an interesting project. For someone else, that is. The main reasons I took the job are because I expected to have a little free time between semesters and it was supposed to pay well.
The first strange thing I noticed was that it took a considerable amount of time to get any sort of information about the project after signing the appropriate documents. Never once had it taken that long to get any useful information on a freelance project.
The second strange thing about the job was that the terms of the deal changed by way of compensation. This was excusable because of my relative lack of experience with certain required technologies.
Anyway, after I got the initial requirements and specifications document for the project from the client, I was surprised at how incomplete and unclear it was. I am used to very explicit documents for requirements--at least several times more explicit than this particular document.
Now, everything up to this point was quite strange, but I kept going with the project anyway. Naturally, this project required that I use some 3rd party tools and utilities in order to arrive at the end product. The first week after having received the specifications was spent almost in its entirety trying to get one of these to work properly. Thankfully, this particular utility was open source, so I could freely make modifications to fix it. After a week of off and on debugging, I found the one line of code that I needed to change in order to make the entire utility functional.
