Recently a friend of mine bought a designer laptop bag. The bag was expensive (quite) but since it was extremely attractive, in my opinion was worth every penny spent. Post the purchase we got into a discussion on why this bag and anything designer expensive. My response was that this bag has been made using the best quality leather and has been hand stitched entirely and hence the extra cost. A Ferrari is not expensive because of it specifications but because of its limited production and the entire machine is assembled by hand and the upholstery is hand stitched. These added man hours is what raises the cost of the product. At this he pointed out that our industry (IT) in that sense should be very well-paying considering that anything that we do is entirely done by hand. If you are a custom software developer it can easily be assumed that whatever you do is exclusive to the current project and almost exclusively done by human beings. There is minimal automation in terms of deciding, writing and checking the logic. Obviously we use tools that make our job easier but they are equivalent to the screwdriver a mechanic uses at Ferrari. You might have the top of the line pneumatic screwdriver it would still require a human being to operate. Just like a fine craftsman finishes the interiors of a super car with care and caution, so does a developer when he is transferring an idea from plan to execution. Yet the market today pays easily for the cars and designer bags and still want to haggle with the software developer over is hourly rates. They would want you to justify your rates and would not want to accept the estimate that you have provided. They would question you take more time than you had originally estimated and then get fussy about paying you for the extra time even though they got the specs changed in the process.
I think it is because they do not receive any tangible item at the end seeing which they can get the satisfaction of quality like they would have gotten from a luxury bag. They do not see the great quality of work that you have put in the back-end of the application in terms of technology, coding standards or algorithms. They are usually trying to relate the cost of the service with the end product face that they see. And with that approach posting a Facebook post requires only one textarea and a button and some (!!) coding at the back. I am not saying that all the clients are like that but we all know at least one such person. At this point it is the responsibility of the developer to be transparent about his dealing and most importantly educate his clients about the value of work that has been put in. The client will most likely never see the thousands of lines of code that you write to make one feature work and will never know that it took so much effort, so it is important that you make him aware of it. The client should respect your service and the work delivered and for that to happen it is important that he knows its true value.
I tweet here : @akhilrex
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I have helped many startups in building their products and I would be happy to have a chat with you about your idea. Catch me on twitter at @akhilrex
