Contracting

Following an interesting thread on careers in Max/MSP, I came across a link to Joshs Rules of Database Contracting. I particularly like these ones:

• Ask Not Whats Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait.
• Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g cutting the time by 20% will require doubling the budget. Cutting the budget by 30% will quadruple the amount of time.
• All Estimates are Optimistic: new application development will take three times as long as you expect, and cost twice as much. Or vice-versa.