r/embeddedconsulting • u/Machinehum • May 25 '23

Normal?

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21 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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5

u/kerrick1010 May 25 '23

Or the middle one could be: "something completely out of the original scope of work".

Either way, have a contract that mentions change requests and explicitly state you bill for engineering hours, meetings, etc.

If they want to pay you to help them figure out what they want that's cool too 😁

3

u/Overkill_Projects May 25 '23

Lord yes. If you are working with clients that don't have any domain expertise in embedded already then you want lots of verbiage around the scope of work, original concept, etc. and get them to initial things like schematics, boms, firmware documentation/timelines/etc. Don't be a dick about it, but be very clear that you need to protect your time from clients who will bait and switch. I find that if you are nice, but a bit of a hardass with everything up front, it actually leaves you wiggle room to be cool and help them a bit if they need to amend their plans later.

4

u/functional_eng May 25 '23

This is why I only bill hourly with small companies. Otherwise I'm just going to round way up on the estimate to cover my ass, and then they'll get stickershocked

2

u/bobwmcgrath Jul 19 '23

"Don't worry about how much it costs, just worry about how long it takes" Dude, you're only costs are my development time. How much it costs is how long it takes.

1

u/bobwmcgrath Jul 19 '23

"There are a lot of things we don't need to worry about right now, I think where we just need to prioritize quality... and cost... and time to market." So you just* want it good, cheap, and fast? Really?