[plug] Anyone heard of Microworld?

[Chris Caston]

On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 11:27, sscott at iinet.net.au wrote:
> Quoting Kimberly Shelt <kim at linmagau.org>:
> 
> > I of course missed out on working for them for free :)
> 
> What a damn shame. Im sure you're really upset by that :)
> 
> This is one of my pet hates. The skills we have as individuals are valuable, 
> and we deserve to be paid well for what we do. Because something is easy for 
> you or becomes very natural, doesnt mean everyone can do it that easy.
> 
> I kinda blame uni students. Almost as a rule they completely undervalue what 
> they do because they think they lack experience, so they do stuff almost for 
> free and then because its not worth their while doing it long term, we end up 
> with a pile of unmaintained linux boxen/Access DBs/web sites etc city wide 
> that 'used to be done by some uni student' and the expectation is that 
> maintaining it is very cheap.
> 
> Your time is valuable, treat it as such.  Otherwise you do everyone a 
> disservice when someone running a business (with a premises and all the 
> associated costs) is missing out on work because the expectation is VB 
> programmers are worth $25 per hour or even worse.

Of course it's just capitalism. There are people that advertise in the
Quokka for $15ph (for call-out computer help) but perhaps they are just
kids and for them that's actually quite a decent amount of pocket money.

Obviously you need to differentiate yourself on level of service and the
development of your customer skills, professional expertise and
organisation skills. 

I plan ahead and ready myself for any situation using tools, hardware,
software resources and methodology. If I come across a situation that
shows me something I am lacking then I work in that area of operations
to overcome that weakness. 

I aim to be able to fix in 5-10mins what it takes the $25ph people 1-2
hours. That is one approach to delivering value for money. Another other
is fixing things in a way that ensures it isn't going to break again
down the track and if it does these days I'm back to fix it under
warranty.

I don't try and compete with larger companies but if people come and buy
a computer through me instead of from Abacus then it's all good.

regards,

Chris Caston
> 
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