More freelance woes :(

[thephosphorbox]

I love to hear other people's freelance (and non-freelance) development stories. There is so much amusing stuff out there.. I wish there was a compilation of this material out there that I could refer to when I need a good laugh :)

I've been taking some time away from freelancing lately as my 9-5 has been busting my hump (I'm the only developer working on an app currently). When I get home at night I just don't feel like sitting in front of a computer for another 5-6 hours. Despite that, one of those "friend of the family" jobs came up recently that I didn't feel right turning down, so I took it.

So I meet with the guy, he says he has an existing Flash site he had made by some local developer from Texas where he used to live. He wants a whole new design, but he wants to save elements from his existing site.. so I ask him to give me a copy of the original stuff that I can go over for reference. He sends me a CD with all the materials on it including the FLA and the resulting SWF with a post-it note attached to the sleeve saying "alot of people complain that the site loads slow, can we fix this in the new version?".

I fire up the CD and expect to see a bloated SWF, but nothing could prepare me for the 9.6meg all-inclusive SWF monster I found :o And if that weren't bad enough, they didn't even build in a loader to give feedback to the user.. just a static text box that reads "loading...." the entire time the ~10meg behemoth is clogging up the internet pipes. I looked for some sort of credit in the FLA from whoever made it, but no dice. This thing was a really old-school 1000+ frame job with scenes and super-long timeline tweens.. embedded MP3 files.. the works. When I mentioned it to him, he said he knew it was really large, but the developer told him there was nothing they could do about it!

Ugh. It really pains me to see people doing work like that and having the gall to charge someone for it. Gives the real developers a bad name. Is this sort of thing more common then I'm aware of? :confused: Back when my skill-set only allowed me to make stuff like this (though I could never claim to have output a SWF intended for the web that was THAT huge) I would never have dreamed of charging anyone for it.

[CyanBlue]

That only tells me that your potential client did not really do any research when he was hiring the person to do the job... If he did, he'd have seen what the 'developer' can do and cannot do... If he was not able to determine what the 'developer' is capable of, he could have asked around before he signs a contract with the 'developer'... ;)

[thephosphorbox]

I agree CB, I think it's a combination of not understanding the medium and not researching the "developer" enough. I shouldn't let it bother me so much :)

I'm working on the job now, doing a complete rebuild from the ground up. During my face-to-face with the guy, he seemed taken aback every time I said "feature X" was no problem. He kept saying that his previous "Flash guy" told him that 1/2 the things he wanted were impossible :( *sigh*

[CyanBlue]

Impossible to that person's knowledge not to yours... ;)

[Flash Gordon]

Because I'm a whore, let me just say, if you want to throw any freelance work my way that you don't want to take, I'll give you 10% - 20% commision on it.

That aside, there are so many stories out there. My tend to find my work goes easier when I'm working for a company rather than an individual. Lots of good memories......

[CyanBlue]

Hey, that's not the deal we've made... I'm supposed to get 75% when I throw a work to you... :p

But sometimes, you've got a hell of time to convince the client why it takes xy amount of hours when somebody else can do a crack job at 1/4 of that time... That's one of the time when I've got to work out of the deal... ;)

[thephosphorbox]

But sometimes, you've got a hell of time to convince the client why it takes xy amount of hours when somebody else can do a crack job at 1/4 of that time...

Too true. That's been one of my biggest stumbling blocks. "But soandso said he could get my job done in a week, why are you quoting me twice that?". Trying to explain the difference between quality work and shotty thrown-together junk is usually futile. It's all about the bottom line :)

Next time I turn something down, I'll point them to Flash Gordon :) Beware, the stuff I've been turning down has been for good reason :)

[Flash Gordon]

Hey, that's not the deal we've made... I'm supposed to get 75% when I throw a work to you... :p Just trying to maximize my profits now. Trying to learn a lesson from the oil companies.

It's all about the bottom line :) Yea, I was recently talking with someone about a project, and there was 2 ways of doing something (keeping in mind this was a very major project would would earn the client a lot of money) the first question asked was "Which way would be cheaper?" instead of asking which way would be best. Needless to say, I wasn't awarded the job...

Next time I turn something down, I'll point them to Flash Gordon :) Beware, the stuff I've been turning down has been for good reason :)Cool Thanks!

[evride]

Ya i totally hate explaining how flash works to people. I had a web design teacher who was a complete dumbass. He didn't know a thing about flash. I wanted to make flash stuff in his class and he'd always tell me how you could make flash intros with powerpoint. That made me angry and laugh at the same time. Then he'd say how worthless flash was because no one would wait to watch a flash intro. I have never used flash to make an intro nor will I ever. If anyone wanted an intro I'd kick my foot up their ass and tell them to look elsewhere.

And also I absolutely hate when people don't make the content inside a flash file dynamic or make the flash file small. I try to make 95 % or more of the text dynamic and all images dynamic. It must also resize dynamically and use swfObject. No use of flash scrollbars except on multiline input boxes.

People that make crappy flash sites seem to be kids or HTML developers that are willing add flash content to draw an extra customer.

[Assertnfailure]

Not freelance...but I worked for a consulting company that had picked up a flash project that was started (and couldn't be completed) by another consulting company.

Needless to say, the whole thing was garbage. The project was a pair of two pieces, and you can tell the each piece was worked on completely separately from the other...in other words 2 devs. The XML used to populate them must have as well, as I saw plenty of duplicate data spread across them.

My guess is that they had spaghetti'ed their way into a corner, and gave up on the project, but I managed to fill in the rest of the gaps on my own over the course of a week or two (also trimmed like, 400 lines of code into less than 20 at one point too ;) )

When I called them out on the unprofessionalism, the client apparently brought it up to the previous company as well, and naturally they got defensive in a manner not unlike this line:
When I mentioned it to him, he said he knew it was really large, but the developer told him there was nothing they could do about it!

Its a pity too, cause it could've been a really fun flex 2 project...if it wasn't already built in Flash 8.