You want an employee, not an independent contractor. An independent contractor is allowed, by law, to come up with the correct result in any legal way. An employee follows the ancient natural law of “There are three ways to do any task: the right way, the wrong way and the boss’ way. We do it the boss’ way.”
Now, you can reject the improper results of the failed contractor’s attempts and make the contractor fix it, but if it does not appear broken, then you breach if you don’t accept.
Sure, why wouldn’t I? I didn’t name a price; that’s what he bid, so that’s what I paid him (well, technically I paid him twice that, but he didn’t expect it), and he and I were both happy with the end result. I’d call that a success on all counts.
In principle, I agree completely. In practice…let’s just say that as soon as I find a guy with adequate skills in T-SQL, Delphi, ASP.NET (C# and VB), Flash, JavaScript, VBA, Photoshop, PHP, and whatever other technology I might chance to need a smidgen of work done in maybe once a month, who’s willing to work for the prices I can currently get in exchange for a bit of diligence on my part, he’ll be my man for life, and no mistake. I do have repeat projects with the same people wherever I can, but the sort of things I need done aren’t anywhere near consistent enough for a single-person solution to be practical.
See above. Assuming that a single person who could readily accomplish everything I might need done actually existed, he or she would command a salary a couple orders of magnitude higher than I could possibly afford to pay…especially when you consider that my average expense for these one-off projects is somewhere between $50 and $100 a month.
I can see where that would be true if the means to achieve the end result are not specified in the contract, but the way my projects are written, the methodologies are as much a part of the deliverables as are the actions they perform. If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that if I contract someone to complete “Project D” with a (digitally) signed Statement of Work exactly as written in the OP, and they provide me with the paste-then-remove solution instead of the character-by-character the contract specifically requires, and I refuse to accept this as completion of the contract, then I can be sued for breach. If that’s correct, then no offense intended, but I’d like to see a cite for that. I’m having a very hard time believing that that’s true, but if it is, then I need to stop hiring contractors altogether, as that would mean it’s legally impossible to contract for what I actually need done.
I suspect that the last thing you would want to see is a cite for that. http://www.cbs.state.or.us/wcd/compliance/ic_what.html http://www.cbs.state.or.us/wcd/compliance/ic_what.html
http://www.wwwebtax.com/general/independent_contractor.htm
You exactly risk being sued for breach for rejecting a conforming final result. The important exception is if you can prove that the result is non-conforming. The proving part will probably run you $100k to start and up from there. And if you can’t demonstrate to 12 people who could not get out of jury duty why it is non-conforming, you will lose. In this thread you have been utterly vague about what the difference is for the outcome. That may be because it is a trade secret, it is too technical for us, or something else.
Now I haven’t done a lot of research on this, but the general law is that the contractor may make substitutions that do not affect the quality of the result. You have specified in great detail in the contract “the process” required. I don’t know if this is an exception to the general rule. Certainly the temp contractor companies aren’t yet insisting on this. You may want to consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction for an answer more suitable to your exact situation, in fact, I’d strongly advise it. It would be money well spent to have a lawyer review your contract and that provision. Show him/her my posts so that the concern is obvious.
I should finally add, that engineers think they know a lot about contracts and how everything must be done their way. For engineers there is their way and the rest of the universe are idiots who don’t know shit. I have seen dozens of engineers get educated the hard way about how human relations work differently than the math. Don’t let this happen to an engineer you love. Lawyers understand the gray areas of law much, much better than engineers.
Well, the only real adjudicating body for any of my projects has been the Rent-A-Coder arbitrators, but for what it’s worth, I’ve never had an arbitration result in anything other than a judgement in my favor and a full refund for non-delivery.
I have not at all been vague about what the difference is for the outcome, although the fact that you believe I have gives me a good idea where the misunderstanding lies. The difference, sticking with project D as an example, would be that I hired a contractor expressly to provide me with a program that copied one character at a time and pasted each character into a new document, and the contractor provided me with something wholly other than that. That I end up with two identical Word documents at the end of each process is entirely irrelevant; at no point in the project description did I mention that I even wanted a second Word document as a deliverable. The deliverable, in its entirety, IS the process, and the contract is worded as such. That the contractor does not know why I want this process has nothing to do with the price of tea in China; plenty of contractors don’t know the nitty-gritty details of what their employers intend to do with their creations, but that doesn’t stop the job from being what it is.
Given that, I don’t believe your statements about substitutions and acceptable final results applies to my projects as they are defined. Does this explanation help to clarify my position at all?
The OP was contracting for a specific process not just a final result. So if the coder did not deliver the process that was specified then he didn’t deliver the result that asked for.
Suppose I want to know how long it would take the average person to add up a series of a hundred numbers by pencil and paper. So I hire a bunch of people to add up the numbers and tell them that it’s a requirement that they do it with just pencil and paper.
Now when I start getting my results I see a range of times between four hours and six hours with five being the average. Then I have one person telling me he got the right answer and it only took him ten minutes. When I ask him how he added up all those numbers by paper and pencil that quickly, he tells me he used his calculator instead because it was more efficient.
Now he better not ask for his payment. He can claim that the result I wanted was the sum of all those numbers and he delivered that, so he’s entitled by law to his money. But I will tell him that the sum was not the result I wanted. What I wanted was the amount of time it would take him to add up a hundred numbers by paper and pencil. And he did not produce that result.
This sounds like making a computer do copy work like and old monk, from one format to another. If you are sure your arbitrator can understand it, then you are probably on good ground. However, advice over the internet isn’t how it is done for the same reason you don’t orally give your requirements over the phone. All arguments in law are made to an audience, a judge or jury or opposing party in mediation. If you can communicate both ways with the decider, you will win most often.
The neat thing about well written code (as I remember) is there is only one thing that can be done with it: execute as intended. Written constitutions and laws operate in a world of uncertainty.
This whole thing about the legalities of Roland Orzabal specifying how the project is to be done is just silly. Of course he can specify that, and refuse to pay if his directions aren’t followed. I can think of a dozen reasons off the top of my head why a company might want something coded in a specific way, including:
the specified manner is an algorithm that’s used many other places in the code, and even though it’s not the most efficient way, code consistency has been deemed more important
The company has a defined coding standard that requires it to be written that way
it’s part of a big system, and in order to plug in and play correctly with the other bits of the code, it must be done in the manner specified.
And that’s just off the top of my head.
If I take a contract and the client specifies that all my variables begin with “PoopyHead”, then as far as I’m concerned (and I’d guess a judge & jury would agree with me), if I wanna get paid, all my variables better start with “PoopyHead.”
No, that’s the very definition of BAD code. Good code is written so that it can be read and understood by programmers, and thus can be maintained, ported, etc.
If I insisted on writing spaghetti code in BASIC when my boss wanted re-usable Java classes, I’d be fired, even if the BASIC did work.
To be perfectly blunt, then…you can’t afford and have no right to demand good results from people you are only paying 50 to 100 bucks to do this sort of work. It’s like the owners of a Yugo complaining about quality control, or someone buying a pair of $5 dress shoes and complaining that they hurt his feet.
This is the kind of crap you get when you can’t afford what you really need. No contractor that I know of would go through most of this even for ten times what you’re paying. Even a kid in college, if he’s any good at this ort of thing, can make more than you’re willing to pay for all the stupid hassle he or she has to go through. So you’re getting the folks who have no better way to make money than to deal with all the BS of the RAC model for tiny projects.
I understand your frustration, but you’re seriously barking up the wrong tree. The guys and gals who know how to read for comprehension and produce a working product with a quick turnaround dont’t work on 20 dollar projects very frequently.
He posted what the job was and people voluntarily stepped forward and said they could do it and quoted a fee.
What’s this “can’t afford” and “willing to pay” business? Never once have I named a price, or even a price range, for anything I’m talking about here. I post the project, people bid, I pay them what they asked for. If you’re saying I have no right to demand that people do what they freely agreed to do at the price they themselves set for doing it, then you and I have very disparate definitions of “right”. If it annoys you that I pay so little, then your complaint is with my bidders, not with me.
I’ll also note that over the past three years, at a rate of just under one per month, my method has succeeded to the satisfaction of both parties a total of twenty-eight times. Thus, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m skeptical that it’s impossible to do something I’ve regularly been able to do at will for years. The only thing I’m looking for here is something I can write to discourage the people who can’t be bothered to read the description from bidding in the first place, so I can avoid wasting my time and theirs in dealing with them, and concentrate solely on the people who are happy to do what I need at the price they named (who, again, not only exist, but do so in sufficient quantities that I’ve been able to find one in a matter of days every time I’ve ever wanted to).
Given that I already regularly receive competitively-priced bids from both the reading-comprehension-enabled and otherwise, your post is rather like telling a guy looking for a machine to separate dimes from pennies that there’s no such thing as dimes…and if there were, he has no right to expect that they actually be worth ten cents. In this case, I’ll accept that the “machine” might not exist, but I already have all the dimes that I need.
What the hell? Did you even read the OP? He’s actually getting the results he wants, at least from some people. It may take him longer, but he still gets it done. Thus your entire statement is wrong.
It is clear that you are not being blunt. You are condemning somebody for doing something you don’t like.
I’m honestly getting tired of this shit. The OP asked a specific question. If you can’t answer it and just want to tell the OP how stupid for even asking, shut the fuck up and go on your way.
Or, yeah, what he said. Maybe I need to be taking “effective conciseness” lessons from BigT.
Thank you mister juior mod, for putting me in my place.
I AM being blunt. The OP himself mentioned that he would have to pay an order of magnitude more to actually hire someone to do this work for him. Instead, he’s on rent-a-coder because it’s cheap. It’s cheap because most of the smart people who are actually pretty skilled at what they do all go somewhere else, and you’re left with a lot of people who have no other options but to take small projects. Or people in countries with economies vastly different from our own, but also with cultural differences that make his kinds of frustrations pretty common.
The OP effectively wants to be able to get thrift store prices on brand new merchandise regularly, and without a lot of effort. I’m saying it’s not going to be that easy. People get great deals at thrift stores, and with persistance (as shown by the OP) you can get good deals on a regular basis. But shopping at a thrift store is never going to be as easy as shopping a department store, where you can walk in and be reasonably sure there will be a product that fits your need in a specific section.
So crazyjoe, you’re saying that when I go to a fast food place, I shouldn’t expect to get the items I ordered, because poor people just can’t be expected to do things right? Or if I owned that restaurant and hire minimum wage workers, I shouldn’t expect them to follow orders and prepare the food according to the recipe?
Stupid poor people!
Bearing in mind that many of the coders on rent-a-coder come from countries with lower costs of living, are you also saying people from developing compainies just can’t be expected to do their jobs?
Damn good for nothing furriners!
[Moderator Note]Keep this stuff in The BBQ Pit where it belongs.
The rest of you-dial it back 6 notches, or I’ll shut the thread down.[/Moderator Note]
crazyjoe, what’s your suggestion, then?
We’ve had several contract coders state that they wouldn’t take jobs this small, as it’s not worth their while. Are you expecting Roland to pay someone for a week of time in order to get two hours of work? That’s ridiculous.
It’s also ludicrous to expect someone to hire a full-time, high-dollar, multi-skilled professional to work a couple hours each month.
He’s willing to pay whatever the coders ask, so it’s not like he’s trying to screw people over.
Just what would you suggest he should do to get these occasional tiny coding jobs done? If there’s better places to find coders willing to take very small jobs for appropriately small pricetags, I’d bet he’d be willing to try there - so toss your suggestions in the ring.
I’ve had projects where I had to fulfill a process requirement rather than an end result requirement. It’s a very common situation when you’re working with existing, proprietary systems. This is not something outlandish he’s requesting.
Roland Orzibal, I think you’ve had some good suggestions. A note right up front that you’re buying a PROCESS, not an outcome, and that alternate methods reaching the same end result are unacceptable. I would toss in a brief comment that this is required in order to mesh with existing proprietary systems, which you can’t discuss due to NDA.
[aside]Is it just me, or is anyone else thinking that several posters here are a little hostile over this concept, maybe because they’ve had some personal problems with lack of reading comprehension? 
[/aside]
I think the issue is not that anyone thinks what he’s doing is “wrong”. It’s a supply and demand system, people can choose to work or not at the prices he sets. If there’s a hungry Bangladeshi coder willing to do work to very detailed process specification for the price of two beers that’s his choice.
The issue is that it just seems (to me, and I think others) to be silly and a large degree, bad form, to be whining and complaining about inadequate attention to detail by desperate foreign coders whom you are paying almost nothing. It’s just … eesh… it kind of makes you embarrassed to be from a prosperous county where their work product can be had for virtually nothing, and we’re lecturing them on not being attentive to our needs. The whole process just smells borderline exploitative even if they are deciding to take the work.
Then your quarrel is with the RAC site in general, astro, not with me. I already pay high-percentage bonuses to those whose bids are far below expectations; beyond that, I’m not sure what you’d want me to do. As I’ve pointed out and you’ve repeated yourself, they set their own prices, so it seems to me that the only way I could avoid exploiting these poor beleaguered souls would be by not hiring them at all, instead paying substantially more to a fellow prosperous-countryman who quite probably needs it less, thus leaving people like that Bangladeshi man with $0 instead of $20. I really don’t see where that would give me the moral high ground.
As for the “silly and bad form” part, yes, silly me, I expect people who voluntarily contract business with me at a self-determined compensatory rate to actually live up to their end of a deal that was clearly and thoroughly explained to them before they ever decided to bid on it in the first place. What a typical arrogant and exploitative American capitalist I must be, but again, I’m not really seeing a reasonable alternative, unless you’re saying that PatriotGrrrl’s sarcastic comment about not expecting poor people to be able to get anything right has merit.
From reading the response so far, I gather that RAC and ODesk are not held in high regard. In general, though, any kind of technician or professional doesn’t like being told in excruciating detail how to do what they’re supposed to do. You wouldn’t tell a mechanic which wrench to use in fixing your car; I imagine any mechanic worth his salt would find another job pronto if the service manager said, “Our goal is complete customer satisfaction, so now you have to ask the customer how they think you should fix his car, and then do that, and only that”.
That said, you’re certainly not out of line in requiring that a piece of code has to work and play well with some other component of your system, but if you don’t adequately explain and describe this circumstance, it’s going to be pretty difficult for the coder to work up appropriate test cases.