Topic: Did I get too much or too little? (Page 1 of 1)

A company around me "hired" me to write up some software for them. We have had good relations in the past, (I had a highschool co-op there, worked there during the summer), and this winter they contacted me to write some software for them.

Essiently, it was a program that needed to access a database to keep track of teach applicants, what they were qualified to teach, etc. Their top priority, was to have "no brainer" searchs. They didnt want to need to worry about syntax like * & > etc.

ie: If they wanted to pull up applicants 3 4 and 10, they could just type in 3 4 10 into that field, and not 3 OR 4 OR 10. Or, if they
wanted to find all applicnats from 10-20, they could just type 10-20, and not have to worry about >= 10 AND <=20 and what not.

As I was still in school at the time, I'd simply work on it whenever I had the free time. Some days, I'd work on it for 10 hours,
then there would be weeks were due to school load / etc, I wouldnt work on it nearly as much as I would of liked, if at all.

All in all, it took me about 3 months to do, I could of gotten it done in 1 and a half months if I had more time to dedicate on it. However, I got $2,000 for it. I got $1,000 the day they implemented the program, then the other half a few weeks after they had used it for a bit and I got all the final bugs/kinks worked out.

IMO, I think they paied a little to much, and I shouldnt expect the same for future jobs. Am I correct in this? or is this about right, or did I get paied to much or to little?

OK, let's look at it in terms of salary, assume you did stuff like this all the time, for a living. Now, if you could have done this in a month and a half, then this would earn you $1,333/month, or $16,000/year, or the equivalent of a full-time job paying just $7.70/hour. Now if you were a freelance consultant, you'd have other costs involved, your computers and equipment, taxes, (both as a company and as the person who gets the money), space for all this stuff, network connections, etc... By these calculations, you didn't make near enough money, you'd go broke pretty quick at this rate! The question is this: if you *did* do this as your full-time job, would it always take 1.5 months, or would you get faster and faster as time went on? To calculate your costs, and the value of your work, always try and evaluate it in terms of "what you get paid per hour", this will allow you to come up with a good "magic number" you'd like to earn. Then you can add in the % multipliers for all of your costs, and the next job you do you can just figure out how long it'd take you and give people a price based on that value, you'll now have a quote based on real numbers, and you'll feel more confident about asking for it. Welcome to the world of consulting! This is how it's done.

Your pal, -doc-



[This message has been edited by DocOzone (edited 03-28-2002).]

Thanks for the advice, I'll keep that in mind if I end up doing more work like this. But for this paticular job, I was more then content to do it for $2,000, was more of a "for future jobs" reference. The company was my local schoolboard, and I have been doing work with them for awhile now, and I have wrote more complex software for them before at no-cost (but due to changes in the way their systems work, was quickly obsolited and not used for more then a month or two).

But, thanks for the advice, I'll need to keep that in mind

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
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Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.