[consulting] Professionalism

Tue Nov 24 14:28:48 UTC 2009

Coming from the NYC area, I know most of the Drupal shops around here.  Now
I don't know which firm was contracted, but I can venture to guess, and if
I'm right on which firm it was, I wouldn't be too surprised by that quote,
coming from them.

Nancy's right.  In a lot of cases with larger companies, nothing is done by
a single person.  You're not hiring a consultant, you're hiring a company,
and every person on the team assigned to your project has billable hours.
For creating a node template, do they need a team of 4 people?  Probably
not, but if they can get away with billing you hours for 4 people, why
wouldn't they?  

I worked at a company a few years ago that contracted with a firm to develop
a module.  We would have weekly status update calls, where they would put 10
of their employees on a conference call with us.  And they would bill for
every person for that hour.  That was a $1000 hour, once a week.  At the
end, we got slapped with a 6 figure bill for a module that didn't even work.
My point is, is that it's not so uncommon for a company to try to get away
with taking advantage of clients if they can.  After all, you don't need to
contract with them, if you don't like it.  But since your regular developer
is too busy, they've kind of got you over a hump.

Working from PSD's is, in my opinion, the easiest way to theme.  It
basically gives you exactly what the client wants the node to look like.  I
prefer to have a clear view of what the client wants things to look like.
It takes the guess work out of theming.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration,

Michael Goldsmith
(732) 619-6865 - mobile
ixlr8 at comcast.net - email
http://www.platypustheory.com - website

-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Nancy Wichmann
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:02 AM
To: 'A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers'
Subject: Re: [consulting] Professionalism

Fred Jones wrote:
> hired a fancy NYC company ... custom node template, based on a PSD.

That seems pretty darned expensive to me. When I worked at IBM, nothing
could be done by one person. You had to have an account manager, project
manager, architect, QA, etc. Each had his/her own hours to bill, and none
would be as low as $100/hr. However, that still seems quite high to theme a
node, but I've never worked with a PSD. I've done several node type
templates and not even my first one when I had to learn took 33 hours. If
they have to do some hooks to make sure variables are available, it could
easily take more than 3 hours, but nowhere close to 33.

Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP 
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King,
Jr.

-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Fred Jones
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 7:09 AM
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
Subject: [consulting] Professionalism

I work with someone on a Drupal 6 site and he hired a fancy NYC
company (that charges well over $100 / hour) to do some more work on
the site. The client asked me to write up a certain job and include
some time estimates. Part of it is a custom node template, based on a
PSD. The site template remains the same--this node template is just to
customize the content section. OK, it may involve a *bit* of PHP for
special fields, but it's still just a node template.

I estimated 3 hours and the NYers 33 hours. They estimate over $3300
to make one node template!

I don't understand how they are able to have enough business and a
good enough reputation to be charging high prices if they don't know
what they're doing. Because they don't--33 hours for a node template
is silly I think. The other programmer we use could do it in 3 hours I
think (and he's less than $100). He's just busy...

F

PS: Thank you for listening to my rant. I feel better now. :)
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