Typical Programmer accurately captures the bizarre world of programmer interviews, giving names to the patterns we’ve seen time and again. As noted, “People love to talk about themselves, so no matter what kind of interview you find yourself in try to get the interviewers to do most of the talking.”
Jason Kester at Expat Software notes five ways to guarantee you won’t get the job in How to Fail at Freelancing, in 5 Easy Steps.
In short, don’t respond in a disingenuous manner. If you don’t demonstrate care or concern at the proposal stage, why should anyone think you’ll act differently if you get the job? The pressure to act fast and underbid fuel this kind of environment. Unfortunately, many clients respond to it, only to be disappointed by the delivered product. Jason gives advice how to create a thoughtful bid that just might land you the gig.
Charging for a service in the “everything should be free” web world can often be a difficult task. Paul Farnell breaks it down and makes it sound sensible in How to Price Your Web Application.
Usually for web applications the costs involved are fairly minimal. It doesn’t make sense to use what’s called “cost plus” pricing — setting your prices X% higher than it costs you to deliver the service. Instead, some things can be justifiably more expensive because of the value they add, or the time they save. In our case the target customers are web designers. They might charge in the region of $30-80/hour. A Litmus account will cost them about $50/month, so as long as we’re saving them more than an hour of time each month, it’s definitely a worthwhile purchase.
