For about a week prior to writing this, I'd been mulling over an exchange with a rich Capitalist. Every time I think about it, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the inescapable feeling that a lot of what he wrote might be right, unfortunately. However, I hope he's wrong. I don't think it's that simple, though. I don't think it's a clear case of right and wrong. Maybe we're both wrong. I can't tell.
"It's a dangerous garden,
Swamped with simpletons,
A bad jangle of dirty silver,
The nuts and bolts of a pipe-bomb wedding.
The parade is over."
— aKing; Cutthroat Tongue and Razor; The Red-blooded Years
I was waiting for the right time to finish writing this post and publish it, but I don't think there ever will be one, mostly because it is distasteful/unpleasant. However, reading Sir Gerard the 1st's post about the Big Quit reminded me that I had this sitting in my drafts (for the last six months, no less!) and might as well publish it. Here, then, is a recount of our exchange:
Me: Hi John. I hope you're well and past your battle with COVID.
I hate to have to ask for help, and especially to beg for financial aid. However, I'm in a really bad way (most likely going to have my assets repossessed at the end of the month and get evicted, which means I'll be unable to work) because my client's refusing to pay until I make yet more changes. As it is, I'm selling myself short and have already been screwed on the deal. I need to get the job done, get paid and cut them loose since I've got to get onto another job for someone who's waiting for me to start on his project. (That's the price of doing business for friends and family, though ...)
Is there any chance that I can borrow $15 to $20 from you to tide me over until I've got the money that's owed to me? I'm sorry to find myself in a position where I'm even asking, but I don't know to whom else to turn.
John: Sure, I can loan you $20! What's your PayPal address?
Me: Thanks, John. I really appreciate that. [PayPal address redacted.]
John: $20 sent. :) Glad to help.
Me: Thank you very much. I received it this morning. I had a look at your website as well. I see the image on your "writing" page is missing/not displaying. You might want to contact your developer about that.
John: OK. Ty!!
Me: I know an excellent one, though, if you're ever in need of one (or know someone who is). Very reasonable priced, too. 😋
Me, a few hours later: I swear that Fate and The Lady are toying with me (except that I don't believe in them). Literally hours after I asked you for help, people started messaging me regarding working on projects for them. I'm now going as fast/frenetically as I can to secure potentially six people's business, so I might not even need to cash that $20 I asked for. Hopefully, I'm going to be seriously busy next month and this could be my upswing and getting back on my feet. I cannot afford to stuff this up.
John: Hey, that's GREAT!!!!!! <hearty applause!> But hang on to the $20 tab and see what happens. :)
Here's a general tip for you as a freelancer: You should spend 10-15 hours a week doing things that will prime the pump and keep your calendar filled. The type of activities you do can be many and varied, but you should get your name out there in ways that support your business identity. (The stuff you write about crypto should be looked at as a hobby in this regard, as it won't do anything to support your business of doing web stuff.)
Also, see what you can do to build a good business identity and even a business plan. (They confuse me, too, so don't feel you're alone in that.) But I only twigged to a good business identity about 10 years ago and I'm sorry I missed a lot of opportunity in the years before that. Ah, well, such is life. :)
Me: Thank you. I'll try to absorb that advice and take it to heart. My first priority, though, is to get some sleep. Then, tomorrow, I'll mission like mad to get my ducks in a row, if not singing a tune as well.
John: SLEEP is always good. We can talk more about how to market yourself later. I have some specific suggestions I can pass on. (I may have these written up already; I'm pretty sure I mention this stuff in a speech I do.) Go sleep! I'll ttyt! :)
John, about a day later: Here's the blurb. It's from a speech I do called "Seeding the Clouds: 24 Ways to Make It Rain on Yourself Even During a Dry Spell."
A number of years ago, Home Office Computing magazine did a study to find out what successful consultants did versus unsuccessful consultants (where “successful” was defined as “those consultants making at least 2x as much as the unsuccessful consultants”). They found that the successful consultants wrote articles, got referrals, and did public speaking, while the unsuccessful consultants depended on advertising, cold calls, and mailings.
Speaking in public is not something that everyone does well or easily and even for those as like it, it takes a little practice to be good at it. The biggest obstacle, however, is usually fear: more than half of the American public would literally rather DIE than speak in public. This is because humans are herd animals and, when you’re separated from the herd and the herd is looking at you, your brain stem is screaming at you that you’re about to become food. The way to overcome this is remind yourself that it is relatively rare these days for a speaker to be killed and eaten by their audience.
Me:
" ... when you’re separated from the herd and the herd is looking at you, your brain stem is screaming at you that you’re about to become food. The way to overcome this is remind yourself that it is relatively rare these days for a speaker to be killed and eaten by their audience."
😂😁 Thanks, John. I appreciate that (and all the advice you've given me prior). That stated, there are some women on this site [Fartloaf] to whom I wouldn't object if they did decide to eat me. The truth be told, I'd definitely like for some of them to be so inclined. Killing me first, though, definitely not. #justSaying
John: :D :D Well, put like that, ummmm.... yeah. :)
Me: Right now, my life's ambition is to do well enough for myself that I amass more wealth than I know what to do with it. The reason being that if that happens, I could just buy a ticket and be on the next plane any time a woman I fancy (and whom fancies me, because there are a few) drops an "if you want it, come and get it" type of comment to me. If you're going to work the kink cube to your advantage, distance can't be a limiting factor. Me, a week later: PayPal has only now just made the money available to me. It's still going to take another three days for my bank to process the transaction. If that had been crypto, it would have taken hours to a day, not days.
John: And so? It's [crypto] still gambling. Dunning-Krugerrands. I think you need to find a better bank, because mine doesn't do that kind of thing when I transfer money to people in other countries.
Making that kind of money is a perfectly worthy goal. :)
Me:
"And so? It's still gambling. Dunning-Krugerrands."
Not if one's using stablecoins like USDC (soft-pegged to the US dollar).
The bank I'm with is one of the better ones in the country. Others can take up to ten working days.
John: Wow. That's not so good.
Me: Oh, you don't know the half of my fight with one of them when I was trying to get hold of a huge sum of money that was due to me.
On the subject of money, I've been in discussion with someone who wants me to build his company's Website. He mistook my daily rate for hourly and was perfectly happy to pay that. LoL. I could have swindled him, but it wouldn't have been right.
John: I'm sorry; you really said "No, I'll only charge you 1/8th of what you were willing to pay freely and without duress?" I think you don't understand how business works.
Me: I think you don't understand how my moral compass works. I understand how business works: Rug someone as hard as you can for a quick buck and hang the consequences, as long as you've got another sucker to fleece, waiting in the wings.
John: I do understand how your moral compass works very well. I've seen it before in other chronically impoverished people who remained that way, some of them for years. But no, you REALLY don't understand how business works. This is a person who, without any sign of arm-twisting, was willing and happy to pay you 8x what you normally charge. They would have valued what you did for them and obviously felt they were getting a bargain from you because there was NO HAGGLING on their part. Value would be given for value received and, since much of the value is subjective rather than objective, having the customer remain happy is important. But you were home free there. :)
If your goal is to be really under-priced — and we have the evidence right here, in that someone thought your daily rate was so low that it was an hourly rate — you could always give it away even cheaper. Or free. The problem is that there's no lower limit because your opinion of what to charge is not based in any reality save for your own perceptions.
Are you going to take advantage of this customer? Deliver shitty quality regardless of what they're paying you? I'm sure you wouldn't do that. But pricing things reasonably doesn't mean that you're going to rip people off; it means that you're saying "This is how much it'll cost you to get this list of deliverables. If you like it, sign here." If they do of their own free will, that's laissez-faire capitalism. Conversely, if you want to give this away for next to nothing, you can, but you're leaving money on the table for no good reason.
So, given that we now have experimental data to show that you're pricing things wrong, you may want to start doing it right. I can guarantee that you'll be impoverished until you do.
Me: You know, John, sometimes it is very difficult to be angry with you, given that you are almost invariably right (and perhaps that is what incites me to anger).
"... your opinion of what to charge is not based in any reality save for your own perceptions."
False. My opinion of what to charge is based on what I have previously been paid when earning a salary.
"Are you going to take advantage of this customer? Deliver shitty quality regardless of what they're paying you? I'm sure you wouldn't do that."
You're right about that, because it would be immoral, give me a bad name and close the door to any further opportunities to do business (either with him or anyone else on this site or in his circle).
"But pricing things reasonably doesn't mean that you're going to rip people off ..."
That's exactly why I charge what I charge.
Capitalism is a system, built on greed and exploitation, that robs the poor of the fruits of their labour and feeds them to the corpulent rich. That is all it is and has ever been. You can dress it up or down however you like, but doing so doesn't make it less ugly.
"... you're leaving money on the table for no good reason."
Again, false. Not being greedy, not taking my potential customer for a joy ride, not being LoPSoD if I get paid before the job is done, is a good reason as far as I'm concerned.
If my choice is between impoverished and in the right or conning my way out of dire straits and into material wealth, I'll take impoverished. At the end of the day, it will likely cost me less in mental anguish. At least, I hope so. I don't expect you to understand that, given the country and culture from which you come (or so I assume, anyway).
John: I've been in this business a very long time. Yup, I know I'm right about this stuff. Shoot, people come to me from around the world to get my opinion on this. :)
Your comment about "My opinion of what to charge is based on what I have previously been paid when earning a salary" just means that you've been fucked over in the past. You know better now. Don't fuck yourself; there's no fun in it.
"That's exactly why I charge what I charge. Capitalism is a system, built on greed and exploitation, that robs the poor of the fruits of their labour and feeds them to the corpulent rich. That is all it is and has ever been. You can dress it up or down however you like, but doing so doesn't make it less ugly."
Um, no! While it's very true that this can and has and does happen in Capitalism with people of low moral character, it's not inevitable. Capitalism is a method of exchanging your goods/services/products for some other medium of exchange. There is nothing inherently wrong about this.
But consider: you're doing capitalism now. The only thing is that you're just doing it for a mere beaker of piss for wages. There's no moral difference between what you're doing and someone who charges a real hourly rate — which, let's be clear, you're not! — it's just that you're doing the robbing the poor of the fruits of their labour and feeding them to the corpulent rich all on your own! Faaaaaaaaahk, talk about full-service, eh? What a guy! You can deliver a bargain and fuck yourself over at no extra charge!
Even more to the point, you're doing Capitalism now, like I said [sic]. There's no difference in your [sic] and someone who charges 10x/hour for what you do. By your definition, you're being just as evil and greedy even at $6-8/hour. So, with that in mind, why don't you be morally pure and charge nothing for this? Then you're taking advantage of nobody but yourself. Oh, well, you may want to eat. But, shit, what is mere eating when compared to lofty moral principles, hey? But don't kid yourself that you're not as much of a Capitalist as anyone else. The only difference is the price. (If you're going to say "But I'm not like those other Capitalists!" stop right there and tell me at what specific price the moral decay is supposed to set in because I'd really like to know.)
Like I say [sic], I've met this attitude many times before. You're not the first nor even the dozenth. I used to hear from people in the mid-80s that "hacker ethic! code should be free!" and they had Really Shitty Lives while doing things for other people that they could've charged 8-10x what they were charging and gotten it happily. No, instead, they were miserably poor for a very long time and other people took advantage of them for years because they were too fucking stupid to see it. One of them had a truly great product that he could've sold at a very reasonable price and still made enough to buy a fairly large house in Seattle in them days and the market would've eaten it up but, nope, "code should be free!" and he kept working for a company that paid him minimum wage (around $6 hour in the mid-80s) to do brilliant things for them that they then made money on. I think he ended up losing a lot of his teeth because he couldn't afford dental care with what they were paying him. He lived in his mother's basement for a very long time, too, because he couldn't afford to get out on his own.
I've seen this all play out before many, many times over the last 40+ years. And what you need to know is it does not end well for you. You've got some very bad scripts that are counterproductive.
TL;DR: You can charge more for your services and you can still be moral, work to deliver quality, and make your clients happy, but if you're charging them anything at all, you're a Capitalist and you need to deal with the disconnect in your values.
Me: Well, fuck. I don't agree with you and am inclined to tell you exactly what you can do with yourself, but that won't get me anywhere. If I do end up getting paid more than I consider my work to be worth, I'd like to put it aside for safekeeping so that I can do some good with it, to offset the fact that I took it (doing the wrong thing for the right reasons). However, I know myself well enough to know that I lack the discipline to do that, am very bad with finances and will likely squander it if I don't entrust it to someone else. As to where I draw the line: I ask for only what I need to keep food on my table, a roof over my head and fuel in my car's tank. Taking more than that doesn't sit well with me. I've been paid more than I felt my labour was worth. It made me very unhappy (particularly since my spending expanded to meet my income and I didn't manage to scale it back so I could put aside the excess).
It's not about the price, but the attitude. We agree on that much, but approach it from completely different perspectives.
Unfortunately, I'm in a bad way and have had to nearly double what I ask for. Maybe I should double it again, but 8-10x is excessive (even though I could), IMO.
In an ideal world, code should be free (but ours is not an ideal world, by any means; developers have needs to meet). It's just creating castles in the air, after all. Any human being with a keyboard, discipline, logic and time can learn to do it; there's nothing mysterious or special about it. However, we get paid like we're some sort of sorcerers wielding the powers of the Universe itself.
John: I'm sure you don't agree with me. Like I say, I've seen this far too many times to be surprised.
Me: If I had CS and EE degrees, was writing embedded firmware or CGIs in assembly and C, then maybe I'd understand being paid oodles; that shit is goddamn difficult to do properly. But I'm not; I'm using CSS, HTML, JS and PHP, have a shitty diploma not worth the card on which it is printed. A really shallow learning curve there, as the proliferation of DIY homepages on Geocities and Google Sites in the nineties by script-kiddy wannabes testified. John: I have a HS diploma and I'm making $150K/year and I'm about to get a bonus as well. Education is not the key. It's doing the job well that's the thing.
You really need to figure this out. You've got a bunch of weird ideas that are going to make you miserable and keep you impoverished for possibly a very long time, but it's your choice.
Me: You're not the first, second or third person to try very hard to convince me that having a conscience and scruples are liabilities that will leave me poor and struggling when I could easily take my clients for a ride and line my pockets without them being any the wiser. What's so wrong with wanting fair pay for honest work?
Just because someone doesn't know better, doesn't make it OK to exploit them.
John: I have a conscience and scruples. Shoot, I'm a retired priest. (I still practice, but I'm not obligated to anyone but myself: There are specific obligations when you become a priest that I've fulfilled and am able to retire from active service.) And note that you never answered the question of how there seems to be some kind of a threshold effect so that you can be a capitalist at $6/hour but it's somehow evil to charge, oh, $40. Me? I've paid $100 and been happy to do so.
There is nothing wrong with wanting fair pay for honest work. This is why >>I'm<< the one with money to give away and you're the one who's impoverished having to beg for money. Here's an example: I'm about to get an extra bonus at work just because I've done well. I figured it out: the EXTRA bonus would pay for a 2-br apartment in Jo-burg Central for 6 years. I qualified for this bonus by helping the people around me and helping the company to sell more product, and all the while I didn't kill baby seals, put plastic in the ocean, nor engaged in human trafficking. I did it by being good at what I do and helping the people I work with.
Like I said, I've run into this attitude before. It never ends well. Ever. I don't know if this is some weird perfectionism or a "deserving" issue or an utter lack of business knowledge or whatever, but it's going to lead you down the path of a really pathetic life and I do not recommend it. I would, however, recommend life coaching and therapy both: life coaching because you don't have a good plan for dealing with the world and therapy because you've got godsdamn weird scripts that are cognitively dissonant as I've pointed out. Until you get those sorted, you're never going to get anywhere and you're going to be busy being "right" about stupid things and making self-sacrifices that mean nothing. You can be all pure and shit and utterly impoverished. I'm going to keep being moral and upstanding and not doing things that are morally questionable and I'm going to be enjoying a life that means never having to balance my checkbook [sic] to figure out if I can afford steak.
Me: So you're a priest, eh? Ah, well, that explains a lot. A man of God is exempt from all his sins, right? That's why you feel no guilt for committing daylight robbery with the exorbitant prices you charge, because you'll always have the moral high ground. I see it now.
And yes, I did answer that question: "It's not about the price, but the attitude. We agree on that much, but approach it from completely different perspectives."
Take back your dirty silver, priest; I don't want it!
"When I hear that a man is religious, I conclude he is a rascal!” — David Hume
“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit — not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
— William S. Burroughs
Post thumbnail image: Photo by Jonathan Borba on Pexels
