Programmer for Hire

Early last week a friend asked me if I knew of any freelance iPhone app developers.  This made now the 4th time this summer I’ve had someone present either a need or interest in my ability to do iPhone apps, so I took it as a sign that I should at least dabble in this new fangled technology and see if the learning curve would be worth tackling.

I’ve been recently delighted to find it was.

After downloading 2.3 gigabytes of installables in the form of XCode and it’s suite of tools and iPhone simulators I was disheartened to find a strong emphasis on GUI-based design of user interface components: even Dashcode, the suite for creating iPhone web apps, seemed intent on generating the HTML, JavaScript and CSS for me if I could only drag and drop things the right way in accordance with their template models.

The breakthrough happened in stumbling upon Jonathan Stark’s most excellent book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.  Thanks to it, instead needing to learn a few new programming languages (Objective C and Cocoa) and a foreign development environment, I learned how to use my existing mastery in the more universal web technologies to make compellingly native looking web apps that run perfectly on an iPhone.

You can see the result here:
http://www.jpl-consulting.com/projects/bumpinta/mobile/

This demo is kind of bland in most browsers, but looks pretty good in Safari, and of course best in an actual iPhone.

Overall my foray into the world of iPhone app development was 4 days very well spent.  The whole shortcut to me being fully competent to make web apps for the iPhone I owe to the really smart work of a few groups who are making tools that bridge the gap between niche devices and open standards technologies, notably David Kaneda and Jonathan Stark of jQTouch, and the geniuses behind Phone Gap.

A while back I interviewed a longtime client on how he viewed working with me: I was looking to get a real, introspective look on what works about my style of service, what’s lacking, why hire me at all, and so on.

I got a number of pearls out of the experience, but one in particular I’d never heard or even considered before: “What’s really nice is that you put up no resistance.”  Eh?  “Say more about that”, I replied.

Paraphrasing, he said that when there’s a problem or a snag I just go with the flow of whatever is deemed important and I’m game to just work any which way towards a solution.  Whenever faced with “hey, this isn’t working”, I’ll quickly improv and alternative and it’s NOT A BIG DEAL.  No resistance.

What a cool distinction.

For sure, it’s common in my field for formality and ceremony to get in the way of a quick, pragmatic solution to a problem (this is, after all, an industry that derives a lot of self-importance out of months long dev cycles, rigid road maps to follow, rigorous testing, and the occasional $370 million dollar error).  So if a programmer assumes the demeanor that doing X or changing Y will be a big deal and is likely to take loads of time or apt to cause tons of complications, their expertise and warning generally needs to be heeded, at least by non-programmers.  (This is not unlike the futility of arguing with your mechanic over the state of your car’s transmission, when you are not a mechanic.)

Being a low resistance programmer requires a combination of both mastery over the domain (necessary to responsibly perform a given task, correctly and without ill side-effects) and the discipline to not indulge in a story of exaggerated burden (which can be gamed for inflated pay and longer time lines).  So when it comes to the relative merits of programmers, low resistance is of course favorable, but only given comparably good end results.  Two programmers might share the “can do, no problem” attitude up front, but if one of them took 3 times longer than anticipated or made a quick mess of things, that’s a matter of being naive, not willing and able.

Every situation is different, of course (some things should be a quick fix, and others genuinely are a big deal), but over time I think it’s possible for a non-programmer to gauge what kind of programmer they are working with.  Say you have a programmer that you rely for keeping critical parts of your business operations running smoothly.  If it’s a pleasure to bring issues to their attention because you typically leave the interaction with a sense of peace and that all is well in the world, you probably have a programmer who makes your issues theirs, and then makes small and tidy work of it.  If you have someone you hate to bring problems too because it makes you feel like life is generally a complicated mess, then you probably have a programmer who’s more invested in telling you how hard their work is than actually tending to what you need them for.

There are some services for which I think the model of charging based on an hourly rate is appropriate.  Software development is not one of them.

Consider: some services fit the hourly model to a T.  These are jobs where the hours spent are directly proportional to the value realized by the hirer.  It makes sense that getting the hour long massage costs roughly double what the 30 minute session does.  Or manning a reception desk.  When somebody needs to be there, every hour that a body is there that creates value and fulfills a need of the hirer.

But software development runs counter to this notion.  We programmers are pretty much always hired to solve a real problem stemming from a real need, not to provide hours of coverage hunched over a keyboard, and certainly not to provide extended enjoyment for the client by virtue of working longer hours (the massage therapist might hear the phrase “hey, that’s nice, why don’t you do that a little longer?”, I don’t think a programmer ever has).

No, in software development it’s virtually always the opposite: the longer a project drones on, the more painful it is.  Just ask any stressed-out looking project manager who keeps getting excuses and pushed back deadlines from her development team.

But doesn’t more hours mean more quality?

Maybe, but that correlation is sketchy at best.  To realize a given set of features, a pro can often do it both better & faster: the number of hours spent becomes an argument against quality, not for.  (I’m much more apt to trust that a WordPress install got done right by someone else if it took them 15 minutes rather than 3 hours.)

Programmers can (and should) be hired on the overall demonstrable quality of their work, and a review of their portfolio plus a mutual understanding of the level of thoroughness/quality that is called for (throw-away prototype or enterprise level masterpiece?) keeps the fixed price model honest.  (Because yes, without that mutual understanding a developer could hack the fixed-price model by racing through a project and cutting corners, to say nothing of whether or not he’ll be hired again).

Alignment of Priorities

If we can assume that a contractor is guaranteeing satisfaction (and we probably should, right?), than a faster execution of a fixed-price project is in the best interests of both parties.  The client gets what they need sooner, and the effective hourly rate of the contractor is higher.  When an accurate sense of the quality to be expected and a correlate price tag are established, the fixed price model creates this  nice alignment of priorities between contractor and client.

By contrast, hourly creates a misalignment of priorities of client and contractor: the contractor gets rewarded for dragging their feet and making problems out to be more complex.  Not a huge amount of course, because in the logical extreme they’d get dumped sooner or later.  But it’s just too easy to milk the clock and divert energy from actually solving the problem, to instead convincing ones self and others that it’s more difficult than not.

Effective software development is all about fewer smart hours as opposed to longer hard hours.  Pricing for it should probably then reflect that, and by the  same token programmers should probably strive to avoid the Curse of the Hourly Wage.

It may be either a sign of laziness or of wisdom, but I’ve had a few conversations of late where I’m deliberately selling my clients on fewer and/or less complicated features.

On the surface this is bad salesmanship: I bill by the project, and of course the price tag for a given project grows with my estimate of the complexity of what I’m building (and hopefully the value gained by the client, as well).  The more features a client is certain they want, the more features I get to build and charge accordingly for that work.

So what’s up with my recent kick of advising fewer features?  Turns out it’s mostly situational with a dose of outside wisdom.  The projects I’m thinking of are both of an “expand in a new direction” variety: one is a pilot program to prove a new concept in their e-commerce, the other is to make a hub for a community to interact online in a way they haven’t before.

The dose of outside wisdom is the 37 Signals bit on the Race to Running Software which states simply “get something real up and get it up quickly”.  Both of my clients found it refreshing to hear things like “Tell you what, it’s just the pilot: we can leave the customer address book feature out for now, and add it in later if it turns out to be important.” and “Let’s see what your users do with just the ghetto-fab system of posting comments.  Then we’ll know what they’re bumping up against, if anything.  If it suffices, we’ll have saved ourselves a lot of extra work.”

Planning to build non-critical stuff up front involves a lot of guesswork and creates a bigger gap between speculation and real world feedback.

Would I like to be hired to build the customer address book feature?  Sure, it’s a tidy little feature that would be really slick and is clean to implement.  But let’s wait to see the first 5 repeat customers who place orders shipped to more than one address before we build it.  That will save time and money while we focus first on getting the system ready to launch at all.

It’s simply having an eye on the prize.  And I’m talking business win, not a juicier contract.

A few weeks ago I was on a conference call with a client talking about a new, expanded direction they were mapping out for their e-commerce.  The scope of the project was well within my reach to execute quickly and thoroughly, but there were good & valid concerns expressed over me being the keeper of the system as a one-man show.  After all, it would not work if a problem arose that only I was trained to address at a time when I was, say, gallivanting about in Panama: it would be irresponsible to structure a major part of their business to be vulnerable to failures that arise with poor timing.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m a big fan of the benefits made possible by being a team of one.  I also really like the agility and flexibility afforded by being a solo act in the business aspect of my trade.  So when it was asked if I would hire and train up others to make possible a 24/7 manning and support of the project, I saw it fit to propose a re-framing of the situation.

This particular client is big.  The company has their own dedicated IT department complete with plenty of smart folks who are able to build, run and maintain complex systems.  They are also savvy about outsourcing: they know how to keep their own internal team smoothly handling internal operations by calling in outside talent to help with big initiatives when they come down the pike (which is why were having the conversation at all).

Rather than operate as a separate team on this project, I reasoned, why not have my contribution to the project be an augmentation of their existing resources?  Given they already have an in-house team that works on other things which integrate tightly with their e-commerce, I could do the heavy lifting for the project (that is to say: design and build it to everyone’s delight, and see it through to a successful launch), and then take necessary steps to leave their internal team empowered to own and maintain it with minimal effort.

It’s like building a building.  The work of the architect and the construction crew are distinct from that of the maintenance team and cleaners.  The better job that the former does enables an easier ongoing job for the latter.  In our case of software development I’ll refer to these two parties succinctly as builder and maintainer.

Characterizing a Successful Arrangement

So what are the characteristics that should probably be in place for such a collaborative hand off work to everyone’s delight?  There are a few things I can think of (this list is no doubt exhaustive, if you can name one I missed please leave it in a comment):

• The system handed over by the builder should as clean and intuitive as possible. Clean software architecture rules the day here, and any lingering patch-job hacks represent a great disservice of future burdens to the maintainer.
• The builder should train the maintainer. Without a doubt, the curse of knowledge can easily give the builder a comforting illusion that it should be easy for the maintainer to spot and fix problems the arise.  Rather, a maintainer should be left confident that they know how to navigate the structure of the code.  When they have reached that level it should be their call to make, not for the builder to assume.
• The builder should be accessible to the maintainer over time. Not 24/7 for hot fixes (that would defeat the purpose of handing off to a maintainer), but as an adviser for deeper, more long term issues including building further on the system.
• The maintainer should be technically qualified for the role. They needn’t be as skilled with the code as the builder (after all, it’s easier to maintain a well built system than to build it well in the first place), but they should be able to track down and fix minor bugs in addition to more regular maintenance.
• There should be general camaraderie and a shared commitment as a team between builder and maintainer. While hardest to quantify this is perhaps the most important: it’s a problem waiting to happen if a builder hands off the project with any air of “it’s your problem now”.  When the builder is oriented as a long term partner, his or her priorities are well-aligned with the project as  a whole: “I will do it right because I am ultimately accountable for its performance”.  The desire to avoid saddling the maintainer with a problem is a powerful motivation to set them up well.

These characteristics represent a chunk of overhead of the Augmenting a Team route, relative to using a separate one.  When handing off a project to a separate team, that team is free to manage long-term maintainability internally, however they deem appropriate.

What’s interesting about is that is how, in the scramble to get it launched, notions of longer term maintainability can (and do) fall by the wayside.  When a builder steps in to augment a team on a project, the above characteristics form a nice recipe for clean execution of a project; one that is mindful of both the initial work and long term maintainability.  It’s like having people over for dinner: you’re more likely to clean up your place out of courtesy to your guests.  A builder who knows that a maintenance team will be looking at and learning their code soon will do more to be proud of such a close inspection.

My recent involvement in spot checking someone else’s proposal really brought home for me an interesting dichotomy in approaches and schools of thought when it comes to spec’ing out a project.  (By “spec’ing”, I refer to the process of assessing and describing the specific needs of a project, and then assigning a price tag and time line to that assessment.)

My training (or, perhaps more accurately, my invented approach from when I started doing this back in the MonsterCommerce days) has taught me to do a rigorous analysis of all facets of the project up front.  I don’t submit a proposal until I can firmly describe what features will be included (to at least the level of detail of which entities the system will model and manage), and am able to assign a price tag to each one of those features.   There are a few pros to this approach that I can think of:

• A pretty accurate price tag for the whole project falls out just by adding up the module costs, plus perhaps some overhead of communication, project management, and/or padding for middle- and end of-project tweaks and revisions.
• I’m clear what I’m committing to so I know I can deliver on time (and not bust).
• My client sees exactly what they’re getting: it’s an opportunity to verify that our understandings align, and they can spot if there is anything missing.
• A sort of a la carte pricing becomes possible when clients can see how various features contribute to the cost: it enables them to tailor things to fit their budget or decide to hold off on certain features if necessary.

The major con of this approach is the time and effort it takes on my part to cook up such a rigorous sketch of the project before I see the first dollar.  The ability to do it quickly thanks to copious practice do well to mitigate this con, however.

The other approach then is of the quick, more glossed over variety.  This is where a price is given based on satisfying the high-level needs of a project, and that price will be set to cover a fair chunk of reasonable expectations to that end.  (In other words it’s like the contractor saying “We don’t need to go into details, I’ll price it so that no matter what specifically you’re thinking I’ll be happy to deliver.”)  I’ve seen it done often enough to know that it’s not uncommon, and there’s good reason for its popularity.  From the perspective of the one preparing the proposal, it’s quick, it’s easy, and though it may be accepted less often, it’s more profitable when it is.

Now with this dichotomy laid out it bears mention that the two approaches I describe are actually two points on a spectrum, one that extends out to greater extremes in both directions than what I describe above.

There is no objective best place on this spectrum to be for both clients or contractors, every point has certain drawbacks and merits.  (I may seem biased towards the detailed end, but rest assured I know the dangers of being too detailed: clients eyes glaze over, and/or they’ll feel locked in by too much contractual rigidity).  Still, if you’re hiring someone to do a project, it’s probably useful to recognize where your contractor is with their proposal: if you get a proposal where the feature scope is fuzzy AND it names a price, you’re probably paying for a big cushion of guesswork.

Last week the members of an organization I’m friendly with looked to me to what you might call “spot check” a project proposal that they had received.  It was a sizable project, so there was to look things over to ensure that it, as scoped out, would predictably leave them happy with the result when the work was all done and the fee was all paid.  I looked for answers to the following concerns:

• Are there any disconnects between the expectations of the organization and the contractor’s understanding of those expectations?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is the scope of the project sufficient to complete what the organization wants?
• Are there any gotchas, or foreseeable add-ons that will be needed later?
• Is the time line accurate and realistic?
• Is the price commensurate with the work, and reasonable against industry norms?

Doing this was a great opportunity: I got to exercise one of my more unique abilities to help out some friends, and I got a rare chance to compare how I roll with others in my trade.

What ideas, lessons, or insights did I take away from that comparison?  Plenty, but for now I’m going to focus on the one that strikes me the most:

I’m super inexpensive and work uncommonly fast.

(A corollary to that, I suppose, is that my sales process is rubbish: if I could pitch on a lot more projects a year I could perhaps get away with selling fewer but far less sweet-of-a-deal jobs for my clients.)

After fully grokking the project as laid out and enjoying a follow up conversation with members of the organization, I was clear I would be delighted to do it for literally half the price and could deliver it several weeks sooner, which made me feel pretty darn effective.  My deepest compliment however was what came back to me from the contractor: the presumption that in order to realize such cheap speed I would be using off-shore resources.

Nope, it’s just little ol’ me and my friends at Playground Creative.

It’s worth acknowledging that anyone who hires a professional to build a web application (me, for example) is taking a sizable risk: for a sizable amount of time and money, they will get an end product that doesn’t yet exist, the description of which itself is subject to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and mistranslations, and the implementation of which is often fraught with surprises and complications.

To mitigate this risk, a professional can (and in my opinion should) take a risk themselves: to deliver the system as specified for exactly the agreed upon price.

How could that be considered a risk?

Most web applications are inherently complex, and a large portion new applications consist of one or more novel problems to solve.  Both complexity and novel problems contribute to the likelihood of unforeseen gotchas, surprises, and challenges, and guesswork is accordingly injected into estimating the time and money involved.

Therefore when a professional gives a price, it’s an assessment of how much work a project will take that is made without the luxury of hindsight.   Saying something like “you know that thing I said would cost $800?  Yeah, turns out it’s harder than I thought and so it’s going to be $400 more.” to a client is an admission of a failure in making this assessment.

“Fixed Price or Bust” is the model I subscribe to handle this risk: I learn what I need to about the project, estimate the complexity of each segment, assign appropriate prices for each, and then for each segment, one of three outcomes will result:

1. Nailed it. All went according to plan: I complete the segment within the time that I’d estimated, and all is well.
2. Stumbled. It was harder than I thought: I got it done and on time, but not without sacrificing extra hours dealing with curve balls I failed to foresee.  I lost some time but gained some learning, and it looks just like the first case to my client.
3. Bust. It was much harder than I thought: so much so that I need to let my client in on the problem(s) that have arisen and given them options.  This step constitutes reorienting to reality in light of new information and experience, because the estimate in this case has proved be wildly inaccurate/optimistic, and I take as much responsibility as I reasonably can: either we renegotiate the time line and/or cost, revise the approach somehow, or we drop the segment outright and I eat my time already spent.

Bust represents an occasion where a client is saddled with the uncertain complexities of software development, something we web professionals are hired to abstract away as much as possible.  Accordingly it should happen as rarely as possible.  In my 4 years of freelance web development there was only one time that I busted.

Fixed Price or Bust creates a responsibility on the side of the professional that I think goes a long way to support clients and foster trust in the process.  It puts the onus on a professional to accurately assess the complexity of a project.  They have strong incentive to get it right, and a strong disincentive to get it wrong.  If a segment of work turns out to be harder than anticipated, Fixed Price or Bust nearly ensures that the situation remains their problem, and not the problem of the client.  Working faster for a fixed price both increases the profitability of a professional as well as gets a client a completed project sooner.  It’s a great alignment of priorities.

If web developers were elected, that’s one of the platforms I would run on.

All other things being equal, we’re all pretty much hard-wired to prefer pretty: the people we’re with, the spaces we live and work in, the scenery around us.

What we have to stare at on our computers is no different.

Making software that is pleasing to look at is a good way to honor your users.  It’s a way of saying “I know know you may be staring at this for a considerable amount of time, so I want you to enjoy it.”  Apple has done this remarkably well: I’m been a Windows guy since my first computer, but I still have moments of being drawn to my gal’s mac… it’s just so… so shiny and looks so good.

Where Design Gets Neglected

In the realm of companies who need custom software built for strictly internal use, I’ve noticed a certain acceptability of ugly software.  After all, it’s not like the the users of it need to be sold on the design.  Once it’s built, that’s pretty much what they need to use to get their job done.  Adoption is mandatory and there’s only one option.

So the desire or tendency for companies to skimp on design, or for developers to phone it in (favoring instead to focus on making it work), is understandable, if not outright pardonable.

But the web, as a medium for creating applications, changes things a bit.

Design for, say, Windows desktop applications (a longtime dominant platform for corporate custom applications) has been largely tethered to the native look and feel.  When you build something to run on Windows, it’s presumably a path of least resistance.  You know the look:

The web, on the other hand, is aesthetically powered by its delightfully simple and powerful CSS technology.

That’s good news, because if you’re building a project that will run in a web browser and your developer is CSS savvy, the cost of realizing any given look-and-feel throughout the system is drastically reduced.  You can set up a developer with a PSD that reveals the aesthetics of the common widgets to be employed throughout the system (buttons, text inputs, tabbed regions, etc.), and he or she can remix and re-purpose those widgets to build the entire application to match.   If it’s built right, it’s just a matter of swapping out one or more images and/or tweaking one or more CSS rules to achieve system-wide design changes, from minor tweaks to thorough overhauls.

Why This is a Win

It’s true, ugly software that doesn’t need to be peddled to a finicky public won’t suffer from fewer sales, nor will it reveal to a wider audience any embarrassingly bad sense of taste.  The benefits of working daily on software that looks good are less tangible but still probably important: morale and productivity.  “I love what I do” is a good way to cause a highly effective team, just look at Zappos.  If you have a single program that must be worked on an hour or more a day by your team,  better to have that program say “I want your experience to be pleasant” than “this is ugly and we know it and we don’t care.”

The web era makes pretty software design much easier to implement, so with that lessened barrier it’s become an even better investment.  After all, the forces of aesthetic preferences are always at work in the consumer market for software.  The same human element is present for people who must work with corporate software, it’s just that, given the lack of choice, the effect plays out in different ways.

In my experience, some of the formality of programming for hire seems to precipitate an unfortunate reliance on email for communication in lieu of picking up the phone, and this goes both ways: client to programmer, and programmer to client.  There are a number of reasons for this that I can see:

• The stereotype that programmers are anti-social and/or need to concentrate (a client might think “maybe I shouldn’t call them and interrupt their programming mojo”).
• The reality that programmers are anti-social and/or need to concentrate (a programmer might think “if I call them we’ll get wrapped up in all kinds of winding dialog about out-of-scope feature requests and what-ifs”).
• An unclear working arrangement for that kind of time spent (does phoning up the programmer hotline rack up billable hours?).
• A perceived notion that an email, being less intrusive, is a better way to respect the other party’s time.

These are all valid reasons, but the downside of being stuck with them is the [largely hidden] downside that lurks in relying on email communication for such a thing as software development.

Software development is complex.

It’s not necessarily hard, but it’s complex: there are many small parts that come together to make up the finished product.  The process of creating it is therefore is ripe for ambiguities, misunderstandings, and varied interpretations of the same stated intentions.

The antidote?  Clear and fluid communication.  Communication that does not require formalities like a scheduled meeting with 2 weeks lead time.  My ideal is being able to pick up the phone, get my client up to speed on what’s going on, and answer whatever questions are on the table.  Five minutes is par for the process, and when it really works we end the call feeling like genuine collaborators building something great, clear that our visions are aligned and we’re on track.

By email that kind of satisfaction just isn’t possible.  If I have a question, there’s a decent chance that what I’m asking won’t be fully addressed by the email answer I get back, and an even better chance that I’ll have a follow up question precipitated by that answer.  The minutes both me and the client have spent typing up our correspondence quickly passes the five minute mark, and the back and forth doesn’t do nearly as much to bolster a sense of team, or confidence that all is progressing smoothly.

That’s why I like to encourage that kind of accessibility: I want my clients to call me up when they’ve got something on their mind pertinent to the project, and I request of them license to do the same.  I have yet to have a client abuse the privilege or even come close to doing anything that could be called wasting my time.  When I come across a design decision I hadn’t considered and don’t know enough to pick what will be best for the business, I love calling my client and getting them in on the scenario.  It gets them interested and involved in new opportunities, and lets them be more at the helm of getting exactly the end product they want.