Jonathan Tullett

I’ve made two mistakes in my freelance work in the last four months, both for the same client.

Mistake 1:
Background: The systems administrator who replaced me in my previous position isn’t doing a very good job. He interviewed well, and appeared to know his stuff, but he’s not putting it into practice. In addition to that, changes are being implemented without much thought into what effect that’ll have on services. The result of this is frequent, and sometimes lengthy, site outages. As the firm provides real-time LSE order book information to investors, this is a real problem.

As a result, the management have asked me to take a look at their systems and do a health report to highlight any problems and give them an idea on what the SA is doing.

I quoted with the idea that it would take about 10 hours to do the report, from investigating all the systems to find problems to presenting the finished article. In all, it’s taken nearly double that. Annoyingly, as it was quoted as piece work (rather than hourly), I lose out, so not only did doing the work eat into my evenings and weekends, but I effectively got paid half what I was expecting.

Mistake 2:
The SA was going away for a week in September, I was asked to cover for him in case of emergency – remotely. Note that at this point, the above report hadn’t been completed, so I had no idea about the state of the systems. I agree to this, on an hourly rate basis, not expecting too many problems – after all, I interviewed the SA, he seemed competent.

What a mistake that was! The Tuesday after he left, they had catastrophic hardware failure which resulted in the death of their main database server (peak write queries/second average: 2000). In addition to this, there was also no spare, powerful enough, hardware to restore backups to. Fun.

To cut a very long story short, the problem was resolved, there were no further unplanned outages after the initial failure, and the management were happy with my actions.

However, I was not happy. Similar to the first mistake, I’d taken the job on the expectation that it wouldn’t take up much time but I actually spent all evening, every evening, working on this stuff. Not what I want to be doing when I have a family to spend time with.

It’s things like this which make me seriously reconsider whether I want to be doing freelance work at all, or at least make me think I should be much choosier about which jobs I undertake.