Wedge

I just had an amusing aside drawn to my attention.

I did a project several years ago which attracted a little attention in certain quarters and I got some kudos out of it in consequence. Long story, rather not dredge the names up because some of it is a touch embarrassing. But it's relevant because a few months after I wound down my involvement with it, one of the people I had worked with was putting out a contract for tender.

Now, this would have been mid-late 2009 or so that this happened, and I applied knowing full well that the person concerned liked my previous work, so I totalled up what I thought it would have cost me to build in terms of time/labour, and knowing that I was building it on top of SMF, as part of my pitch I explained how I'd build it and why it would save some serious time and effort (and SMF 2.0 was a strong base, the amount of customised code was substantial but not unmaintainably so) and submitted the bid. IIRC, I pitched it at about $3000 to build. It was a big job, because of all the fun requirements that went into it but that I didn't think $3k was unreasonable for the work load and support that would come into it - that would be for all the base dev (2 months full time, my estimate was) plus a year's support and extensions were generally free in that time.

About a week later, I heard that he'd picked a programmer and work began. Scroll forward to 2012. There's been at least three separate attempts to launch said site, one of which actually got as far as beta (the first alpha was August 2010, the first beta June 2011) - but they're rewinding that. There's been at least 4 'rock star programmers', all of which have been dispensed with, and by all accounts, starting over AGAIN.

I can't help but turn a wry smile. Yes, $3k is a lot of money, but that was for the 2 months I was predicting as a build time (even on top of SMF) but he'd have gotten the site launched by now. Probably would have gotten it launched back in 2009, too. But that's how things go, I guess.