{"id":388,"date":"2009-07-01T01:03:51","date_gmt":"2009-07-01T05:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rakkar.org\/blog\/?p=388"},"modified":"2009-07-01T01:03:51","modified_gmt":"2009-07-01T05:03:51","slug":"never-offer-to-work-for-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/07\/01\/never-offer-to-work-for-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Never offer to work for free"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tAn old customer of mine is using the\u00a0NAT punchthrough<\/a> feature of RakNet. After my recent work on this feature with Stardock, the success rate is much higher. So out of a desire to help I offered to upgrade this feature for this customer for free. My terms were either remote desktop, or on-site if they covered the costs. I was only planning to spend an hour or two on the upgrade, basically replacing that one file and adding the extra functionality needed.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, they wanted me to fly there to do the upgrade. As the date approached I started to regret not thinking it through. They wanted me to go there for the whole weekend. At first I just thought of this as a vacation. Work half a day and screw around in another city for some fun. But as the date approached I really regretted making that offer. Two lost days when I had a lot of other work to do, plus the tremendous inconvenience that comes with business trips. In any case, I missed the flight that morning. It was because the airline didn’t allow electronic or Kiosk check-in when the operating flight is different from the purchasing flight, and the line for the agents had 30 people in it – way too long for me to get on board on time. I’m not making excuses; that is just the reason why I missed it.<\/p>\n

I called the customer that morning telling them I missed the flight and I’d just have to do the work over remote desktop. I did the work over the next three days, although I have to say with extreme reluctance and second guessing myself about why the heck I agreed to do this. The reason it took three days is because I couldn’t just change that one file as I had hoped. The customer had changed half a dozen or so related files in RakNet, and I had to integrate those changes. With those changes, it made more sense to just update the whole system while I was at it.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, I suspect nobody told the lead programmer I was working with that I was doing this for free. So I got the impression he was annoyed when I was unwilling to do the work except at my own convenience, which meant during time I wasn’t working for a paying customer instead. I saw him as being awfully demanding and unappreciative considering I had no financial or legal incentive to do the work.<\/p>\n

The next day, the customer sends me a thank you letter for the work done… Just kidding, they sent me an invoice for the unused plane ticket. A rudely worded one. And not an ounce of appreciation.<\/p>\n

Never offer to work for free.<\/p>\n

A. You’ll feel resentful
\nB. This will translate into being less cooperative
\nC. The customer will not appreciate it as much as you think they should\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An old customer of mine is using the\u00a0NAT punchthrough feature of RakNet. After my recent work on this feature with Stardock, the success rate is much higher. So out of a desire to help I offered to upgrade this feature for this customer for free. My terms were either remote desktop, or on-site if they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}