Re: DB developing

I'm determinig categories of projects to refer to Lyle. In this thread, I've
found I can add all those projects with deeply nested Withs. They go right
in there along with the DAPs and ADPs with ADO.

And, to someone who posted that the same is true for any nesting, I
disagree -- it's the same only if the nesting omits part of the definition
or statement. It could have been worse I suppose... each level of nesting
could be applied to the earlier levels so there would be, potentially, a
long string of omitted names for you to go back and figure it out.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP


"David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns97C15F0BA7683f99a49ed1d0c49c5bbb2@xxxxxxxxxxxx
"Larry Linson" <bouncer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
WeP8g.9022$Fh.5138@trnddc02:">news:WeP8g.9022$Fh.5138@trnddc02:

Yes, I've gotten those typical recruiter calls: "Have a great
opportunity for you... 95% done; just finish it and create a few
reports, about a week or two."

If you dig deep enough, you'll find the facts:

Requirements: in the head of some user manager, often a
ditzy one;
always one with "no spare time for talking about the database
again"; or worse, in a user committee who weren't able to agree
sufficiently to write anything down. Usable % done - 0%.

Design: embodied only in the completed portion of database
itself,
if any. Usable % done - 0%.

Implementation: in the head of the last developer who fled
screaming
into the night: 50%. in the garbage can: 40%; in the database
without a single comment and with meaningless labels and variable
names, and created without a design: 5% - Usable % done - 0%.

Time to completion: most probable estimate: infinite,
because you'll
never be able to extract anything but a vague, hand-waving
description from that ditzy user manager or committee.

Time before you flee screaming into the night like the
previous
several developers: depends on your constitution and how gladly
you suffer fools, but you won't even be well-started on getting
the Requirements in the stated one or two weeks. Depending on the
nervousness of whoever's holding the customer purse-strings, you
may be unceremoniously dumped for "exceeding the recruiter's
estimate" long before your patience runs out.

Rate the recruiter is willing to pay you: up to $10 - 15
per hour.
I mean, what do you expect for someone with no more experience and
no better credentials than you bring to the table.

Rate the recruiter is charging the customer: $100 - $150
per hour,
or more. I mean, what do they expect for the "Top Access Guy/Gal
in this Area"

Brilliant post, Larry.

It's not at all far off from the real world at all, not even really
exaggerated.

When these kinds of things cross my desk, I just tell them something
like "$XX/hour, 18-100 hours." This usually scares the bad ones away
as they can't imagine committing to the larger number.

The usual situation is that someone describes the process as "really
simple and straightforward," not because it *is* simple and
straightforward (they are in no position to judge), but because they
*want* it to be simple and straightforward, and that's what they
want to pay for it.

Here's how one of those went. I'd seen a posting on a non-Access
list:

I need someone to help develop a small MS access project. Need a
project rate, so contact me via email with a resume and experience
with MS Access as well as availability this week and I will
provide details of the project.

Without a detailed spec, I do not quote project rates.

My rate is $70/hour.

===
My next reply was:

Thank you! Well, a chamber of commerce has asked me to basically
develop a complete Access form whereby one can:

1. Enter contact information
a. Normal fields include (but is not limited to) Company name,
Contact 1, contact 2, contact 3, address, phone, email, website,
membership date (for each contact), event participation (for each
contact), notes, board member/officer year (for each contact) --
I WILL SEND YOU ALL THE FIELDS WHEN WE ARE READY. b. Other more
advanced fields are drop downs which need to be editable by
another form to include options for membership status, business
type 2. Search information to display a report or print address
labels: a. By all fields using either one or many of the options

Let me know what the cost and the date this could be completed.

Well, that's not even close to being detailed enough to put a fixed
price on it. I'd estimate it as 12-36 hours, but can't get any more
specific about that unless there's more specific information,
including the schema, any outside dependencies, any compatibility
issues (do they want to do Word mail merges? will they be sending
files in a particular format to a mailing house, etc.).

I'm mostly available but have a few duties to accomplish in the next
couple of weeks, but I work from home and can easily move things
around in my work schedule to accommodate a project that's on the
fast track.

Mailing lists sound very easy. But they aren't. There are a whole
host of issues that most people don't consider, and that I've been
through many times and know are stumbling blocks. Here are some:

1. existing data -- is there any? Is it clean? Does it have dead
addresses in it? Is it in a normalized format?

2. is the mailed entity in all cases an individual, or is it
sometimes and organization and sometimes a person at an
organization? Are there multiple people being mailed at a single
address?

3. phone numbers and addresses: how normalized should this be? How
useful is normalization to them for what they are going to be using
it for? Is it going to serve as their main phone book/address book?
If so, phone numbers and addresses should be normalized to make
lookups accurate and efficient.

4. do you need historical membership information? Or just the most
recent? If so, the membership date has to go in a separate table,
rather than just being a field in the member record.

5. what exactly gets tracked in the events table? How many events
are involved? Are they recurring or ad hoc?

6. besides labels, what reports do they need? Phone book printout?
Address book printout? Event attendance? Membership?

7. how do they handle membership? Does everybody expire once a year?
What do they do with lapsed members? Do they need to generate
reminders for mailing to the members who are renewing?

That's just a few that occur to me off the top of my head.

I did a simple membership/event tracking app for a client last year
(I note that I forgot about it when I last updated my resume), and
the biggest problem I had with the project was getting the client to
decide what they wanted to do. It wasn't a matter of them
understanding the options, but the problem was that they couldn't
make decisions. They also had about 3K records in their legacy
membership list, and they needed to do a data cleanup before they
could start using the new application (it wouldn't have mattered if
the data were messy, but they wanted it cleaned up first), and they
ended up splitting up the list editing among volunteers using Excel
spreadsheets, and I ended up having to program an import routine to
take the Excel spreadsheets and process them against the existing
data records. This seemed trivial in the beginning, but ended up
taking up a great deal of time.

So, before I can say anything useful about the actual price, lots of
issues need to be resolved.

If you'd like me to meet with the client to iron these things out,
that's fine. That makes it much easier for me to get a feel for what
target we're aiming at. But, if you want to handle all the client
interaction, that's fine, too.

===
And that resulted in this:

You wrote:
That would be too much.

With such a nebulous project description, it's impossible for me to
quote anything that doesn't include a huge CYA factor. Anyone with
any experience in this kind of thing will tell you the same thing.

If you hire someone cheap and what your client ends up with never
really works properly, I'm still available to fix it -- much of my
work is precisely that, fixing up failed Access development
projects.

Good luck finding someone competent for less than what I quoted.

===

I was perfectly happy not to get the job, as it was clearly a case
of someone who hadn't a clue what the hell was going on.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/


.

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