[LRUG] Hiring a pair rather than an individual contractor

[Najaf Ali]

There are lots of different types of client: some want staff augmentation
a.k.a. you are for all intents and purposes an employee but we can fire
you/you can leave at any time and that's expected[0]. Others just want a
solution to a business problem and aren't that fussed about who's at the
keyboard doing the implementing. There are plenty of shades of grey in
between.

Recently my clients (while being technical) are tending more towards the
latter than the former, and some have said explicitly that as long as I
take all responsibility for deliverables then they don't mind who does the
work of building the software. That responsibility on my part is a given,
and for a more junior hire it means I'm going to be spending a lot of time
code reviewing and mentoring (but I'm doing that now anyway, just
haphazardly and for basically anyone who asks). I probably wouldn't have
attempted to hire an intern unless I'd had that conversation with a few of
my clients first.

For me right now I've got more inbound work than I can deliver on my own
and I'm confident I could get someone up to speed to do the work after a
couple of months, so bringing on an intern seems like the natural next step
(though we'll see how that plan works out). I'm not sure how appropriate it
would be for a contract role where you're dropped into a project and
expected to function as part of an existing dev team.

[0]: Though in practice, in this market this is more like "there are no
senior people who want to go permanent, so we'll just hire contractors in
perpetuity because we have no choice".


On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Damon Davison <damon at allolex.net> wrote:

> On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 8:19, Hakan Şenol Ensari wrote:
>
> My 2 pence: You could abstract this from your client and simply quote them
> a higher daily rate if you are convinced you will deliver more in total?
> Unless client is technical, they could not care less about whether you
> pair, use a standing desk, or wear sunglasses when working.
>
> This sounds perfectly reasonable to me. You can find a way to make it
> clear to your client that they get an extra set of hands for much of the
> coding work. It definitely seems like something that would add value in the
> eyes of (nearly) any client.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>


-- 
Ali, http://happybearsoftware.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20131218/8bedbd8d/attachment-0003.html>