I am on the brink of a new work related project. And at first glance there is no real issue with it. I com to this conclusion because of a few factors:

  1. i am currently looking for work
  2. the projects tech-stack perfectly fits my tech stack
  3. i was able to talk to the people involved in the project
  4. the payment is okay-ish
  5. there is a perspective of future projects with that client

This combination of facts makes it impossible for me to ignore it. But there is something that makes my spidersense tingling. Nothing too big but it makes me be cautios of possible endeveaures. I think its my 4. point, but maybe not for the reasons you might initially think. The payment for my work is fixed. There is no more negotiation about that, so everything is alright… right?

To understand what might cause an issue here I have to explain how my contract is structured. I am employed at my own company, I get contracted by another agency to help with their clients, therefore the agency that contracts me has a contract with a client. Lets get this untangled one more time:

me(my company) -> agency -> client (<- this might be a problem)

So its really easy (but also a bit dumbed down for the sake of understanding). Ultimately I get paid by the client via the agency, therefore the client has a budget that is communicated to the agency and they look for people that fit the needed work description and will do it for the advertised money. This is a highly competitive field and I dont want to talk about how hard it currently is to get a client. This might be the topic of another entry.

Back to the issue that might (or might not) present itself. As I was talking to the people from the agency they mentioned that the client didnt want to buy QA Solutions from them, because he wants to test the solutions himself and that the current developer team is not using test driven approaches. Basically saying, they dont write tests as this would take too much time and would therefore be too expensive for the client. And here is my issue: the client said that testing is too expensive. The fact that there is little to no testing involved makes it clear that in the initial stages of this project the client was not briefed enough about the importance of testing or QA processes. The fact that the agency sold pure development time to cut costs rubs me the wrong way. They also cut down on meetings to save time to get more development done. This might sound great at first but also means that in a fully remote team the danger is higher for unneeded (re-)work of stuff because of missing communication.

Dont get me wrong here. I understand why people think cutting costs like the ones for testing or QA is inherently cheaper that having that from the beginning, but this also tells me that the client does not value quality of work the same way he values output and results. This is a typical standpoint of sales people or heavily agile solo devs. Just get it done. Move fast and break things. Usually I like this type of work, but lately I found myself to find my time better used creating proper solutions instead of hacky workarounds and things that “work, as long as you look at it the right way”. Maybe its the age, maybe its the experience. In the end I will take this job and they will pay me a lot less than my real value. I will be mad, I will curse and I hopefully wont have to argue about implementation details. Lets see what the future brings. I am excited for the new project and hope this will lead to more, even cooler, projects in the future.