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Windows & .NET Watch: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Economy


By Larry O'Brien
October 15, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Don’t Panic.

Sure, right now things are unpleasantly like being drunk (“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.” Douglas Adams, you are missed), but it looks like we’ve dodged the feared economic apocalypse. The ironically good news is that the software development industry faced its brutal introduction to the 21st century already, when it was our own industry that frothed over. Wages deteriorated, jobs migrated overseas, and complacency about skills and opportunities was replaced by a focus on quality and productivity. Right?

Although traditionally the steeper the economic drop, the steeper the recovery, most economists say that this recession will have an “L-” or “U-” shaped recovery, since so much household wealth has been lost. On the other hand, business technology has already languished for most of the past decade, and there seems to be a good deal of pressure from a “shadow inventory” of undeveloped applications. Windows 7 looks ready to deliver the upgrade cycle that Vista promised, and mobile applications have finally taken off as targets for mainstream development.

So although it’s scary out there and will continue to be, don’t freak out and turn in your C# compiler for a stake in some rare tulips. This too shall pass.

Neither a borrower nor lender be
As a contractor, I typically ask for a retainer when I first begin working with a customer, but I’ve always applied the retainer against the initial work and, over time, simply billed at the end of the month. This follows from my natural empathy to the customer’s viewpoint that a retainer that is just sitting in a bank account amounts to, at best, an interest-free loan and, at worst, has a taint of being money paid for non-existent work.

The natural consequence of “bill as you go” is that as a contractor, you’re extending credit to your customer. If, like me, you bill once a month, don’t expect to receive the payment for two weeks and then try to work things out before stopping work. You’ve got two months of your own time hanging out there. Even worse, if you pay subcontractors and pass through their billing, you might have as much as 10 weeks of obligations that are reliant on the good faith of your client.

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