[consulting] Professionalism

[Fred Jones]

> 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!

Thanks everyone for the comments--some were quite interesting.

I would like to add that this firm was already hired and did a few
small jobs for this site, so the relationship already exists, as does
a bit of knowledge of the site. The page in question is indeed complex
and is more than just a node template. The other programmer broke it
down into a dozen tasks, including building special functionality.
Making the node template was just one step in the puzzle. His total
time was 15 hours for the full job.

Their total was 130 hours for the whole thing. They added that those
estimates may be conservative but they see no way it can be done in
less than 80 hours.

The *client* agreed that such an estimate is ridiculous.

F