do you charge for your services?
Discussion
billb said:
right helped out friend of a friend with his pc which took 2 home visits and a couple of hours. would you have charged them lots? prob is in IT pcworld do things for £30 etc and if a new pc costs £300 is hard to charge over £100? in the end got £40 but it was a token amount and soooo not worth my while. If i was to do it again could I get away with more. It just pisses me off seeing as i had to pay £95 + vat per half hour for a plumber recentely and yet as a qualified IT person am expected to help out for peanuts? maybe i should just say no! do you charge if so how much?
What I've never figured out, is that there are loads of people who apparently cant operate their computer, but they won't pay you to help them, like you were a plumber.With family it's easy, never accept any money. Eventually they feel guilty that they can't even pay you peanuts, and they would eventually rather figure it out themselves than go through the guilt complex. For the payee, the money merely clears a guilty concience.
This is just it though. If you know anything about IT, you end up suffering the foibles of people who can't really be bothered to figure it out, but deep down know they can if they have to! Combined with that most IT people are too suggestible. Deep down they are nerdy social outcasts, because they spent too much time on their computers as kids.
So then, that is the reason that small scale IT services only pays peanuts.
Edited by dilbert on Thursday 4th October 16:09
Family/close friends = no charge. Anyone else = I'll fix your computer whilst you mow my lawn - no takers so far - but on the plus side I've not spent my evenings fixing virus/malware/p*rn riddle PC's.
Can't wait for someone to take me up on the offer - back garden has become a bit of a jungle :-)
Can't wait for someone to take me up on the offer - back garden has become a bit of a jungle :-)
mb450 said:
Family/close friends = no charge. Anyone else = I'll fix your computer whilst you mow my lawn - no takers so far - but on the plus side I've not spent my evenings fixing virus/malware/p*rn riddle PC's.
Can't wait for someone to take me up on the offer - back garden has become a bit of a jungle :-)
I'll do your lawn if you panel beat my SpamAssassin install back in to shape? Can't wait for someone to take me up on the offer - back garden has become a bit of a jungle :-)
I never used to charge but people started taking the piss and word would get round, I could litterally spend most evenings and weekends fixing peoples computers.
I found when I introduced a £50 per hour charge I got my life back. The way I see it they are not only paying for my time but my knowledge, if I have to sit reading MS crap constantly because they change it every five minutes and you can't be arsed then you can bloody well pay for it
I found when I introduced a £50 per hour charge I got my life back. The way I see it they are not only paying for my time but my knowledge, if I have to sit reading MS crap constantly because they change it every five minutes and you can't be arsed then you can bloody well pay for it
dilbert said:
most IT people are too suggestible. Deep down they are nerdy social outcasts, because they spent too much time on their computers as kids.
When I was a kid, there weren't any such thing as computers. Or rather there were, but they were people. And when I was a teenager, computers were huge, grey, crackle-finish enamel things that lived in air conditioned sanctums. The first machine I used was an ICL 1901 in about 1970. I never saw it. We put our punched cards in the post and a week later the output came back. In the post. We made damn sure there were no compilation errors.Oh, and the world's richest man is a "nerdy social outcast".
I learnt not to fix folks anything as it's just not worth the hassle.
I found that I was constantly building PC's for people and installing all the software n such purely for the cost of the components, and then providing free tech support for ever (I recall my sister playing hell that the PC I built her needed a new PSU and that I should come round and swap it out for free, the machine was over 7 years old)! When I was an electronic engineer folk were always dropping bits of Hi-Fi n such for me to fix, they'd expect me to be able to fix it without replacing any components (or if I did I had to have them in stock!) and to fix it in an evening, otherwise they'd piss n moan that I was actually shit at my job! Afterwards they'd bung me a £fiver and expect me to be happy about it! As I know cars (a little) I started getting pestered to fix/upgrade them, just got silly.
As I've never asked anyone for anything in my life it's only fair IMO.
I found that I was constantly building PC's for people and installing all the software n such purely for the cost of the components, and then providing free tech support for ever (I recall my sister playing hell that the PC I built her needed a new PSU and that I should come round and swap it out for free, the machine was over 7 years old)! When I was an electronic engineer folk were always dropping bits of Hi-Fi n such for me to fix, they'd expect me to be able to fix it without replacing any components (or if I did I had to have them in stock!) and to fix it in an evening, otherwise they'd piss n moan that I was actually shit at my job! Afterwards they'd bung me a £fiver and expect me to be happy about it! As I know cars (a little) I started getting pestered to fix/upgrade them, just got silly.
As I've never asked anyone for anything in my life it's only fair IMO.
mb450 said:
Ahhh - that's normally what my MySQL server says
Really? Never had much issue beating MySQL in to shape for low RAM situations, drop the cache down to say 1MB, turn the number of listeners down and a few other kicks here n' there and it'll behave.Won't the be worlds fastest install of MySQL, but it'll work... rather than try and swap itself in to oblivion
If you're doing this yourself, I heartily recommend the #9 hammer for such a job.
qube_TA said:
I learnt not to fix folks anything as it's just not worth the hassle.
Same here for the most part. As you say, you build a PC for someone and instantly you the never ending warranty on it. I've punted 90% of my 'customers' as it were to Dell; because well, they weren't paying me jack so they can deal with 'Bob'. TheLearner said:
Really? Never had much issue beating MySQL in to shape for low RAM situations, drop the cache down to say 1MB, turn the number of listeners down and a few other kicks here n' there and it'll behave.
Won't the be worlds fastest install of MySQL, but it'll work... rather than try and swap itself in to oblivion
Ahh it's not a little MySQL server setup and performance is a must. Currently it's a 8 data-node MySQL Cluster (each with 32GB of RAM) and 16 mysql api nodes so it's all in memory and it's well on it's way to 32GB :-(Won't the be worlds fastest install of MySQL, but it'll work... rather than try and swap itself in to oblivion
Nice and quick though - until it does actually run out of ram then.....oh dear....time to get a bigger boat.
Edited by mb450 on Friday 5th October 17:42
mb450 said:
TheLearner said:
Really? Never had much issue beating MySQL in to shape for low RAM situations, drop the cache down to say 1MB, turn the number of listeners down and a few other kicks here n' there and it'll behave.
Won't the be worlds fastest install of MySQL, but it'll work... rather than try and swap itself in to oblivion
Ahh it's not a little MySQL server setup and performance is a must. Currently it's a 8 data-node MySQL Cluster (each with 32GB of RAM) and 16 mysql api nodes so it's all in memory and it's well on it's way to 32GB :-(Won't the be worlds fastest install of MySQL, but it'll work... rather than try and swap itself in to oblivion
Nice and quick though - until it does actually run out of ram then.....oh dear....time to get a bigger boat.
Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff