How long will the project take ?

[venturi]

Agreed, Dravyk!

It's a slippery slope on both sides. I truly feel that developers want to satisfy their clients' needs as soon as possible, but as a developer I also know that shit happens all the time that gets in the way. Say I sold you a script 2 months ago and while I'm working at a deadline something happens with the script I sold you. What should I do? Supporting my clients is very important, and getting the work out the door is too. It's hard to handle sometimes.

I think, and I'm just free-thinking here, that more people that are looking for custom solutions need to focus on really writing down exactly the business problem they need a solution for and realizing that even if it's a simple thing it may not be a 2hr job. Things happen in development - heck I had a snare put in my widget tonight and it's going to be tomorrow before I can get it fixed.

The other thing is because our clients tend to want everything yesterday, rather than understanding that things, even the simple ones, do take time. Clients need to plan ahead rather than behind.

Don't come to me wanting a full featured paysite backend and expect that in 3 days I can make that happen. I'm just as busy as you, and projects like this take time and consideration to pull off correctly. If you want it done "right now" be prepared to pay a hefty price for something off-the-shelf that you'll still need someone like me to customize to fit your needs and that's going to again take time.

We as developers tend to set unrealistic goals for completion and/or pile on too many projects and get into trouble. It's tough to really balance things. We under bid almost religiously, we run into issues that affect other projects and before we realize it we're backlogged and scrambling to get caught back up.

At the risk of giving away a secret, I think that we all need (developers and clients alike) to get back to the "Scotty Principle". Scotty, from the original StarTrek series, used this principle:

Always tell the captain it's going to take 4 times as long as you know you can get the job done.
The captain will only give you half of that time.
You get the job done in the original time you figured it would *really* take and you're a miracle worker.

By using this simple negotiation tool you can save all parties lots of headaches.