Programmers Behaving Badly.

News & General Discussion
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I didn’t want to post this. But there comes a time where things get to a head, and it needs to be squeezed so all of the gunk can come out.

It’s been a pretty dismal few years in game development so far. It’s not a very pleasant journey. Idk if it’s just me, or… Maybe it’s the amount of things I try to do at once. Bad luck? Other factors? If I’m going to make a rough estimate on the overall performance of Unity Programmers (no names mentioned) out of 100, it’s say… Less than 30. Don’t get me wrong, some programmers are dedicated hard working people who can prove their work instead of ignoring the people who pay them.

Some ‘developers’ demand a payment. Fine, but why add assets & stuff I didn’t even ask for?! Ruins everything, and these people don’t even ask, they cheat. Charge money for time spent on things which are not even wanted or needed.

Some ‘developers’ demand a full payment, and then use any excuse necessary - to not prove any work has been done, for the time limit of the chance to refund to expire. Even though they set their own deadline, and then lie about it.

Some ‘developers’ get all upset when trying to get progress information out of them. To the extent where they will go to the extent of making a spam / harassment claim, bringing lawyers into small budget projects. If the programmer has a few hundred grand to pay the high court, why stress about the refund? It makes no sense.

Some ‘developers’ think people are so stupid, as to actually be afraid of them. Some of these people think they are like Gods, because they know a tiny but about Unity. Yet, they can’t even spend 20 seconds on proving they’re working by sending a screenshot (for over a year!)

Some ‘developers’ blame the artists for not understanding the Unity engine. Yet when they ‘update’ something, the game ‘breaks’… & nobody knows why. It’s a mystery!

Unity needs to get serious. There COULD be, project protection. Where at any time, the person paying for the ‘insert Unity job here’, can press a button and a screenshot of the damn progress is sent directly to the payee. None of this, obscure, lame excuses to not get a project done. Or flip an asset & re-sell it. If people’s money really means that little to you, then you don’t deserve the respect.

And if the law doesn’t care, then… The law doesn’t care. I guess this is how people get away with whatever they want. No oversight. No review. No actual protection.

And don’t get me started on contracts. They’re BS. Why even bother with any of this, if I have to go to a freaking lawyer, pay them to read a thing, before I can pay more money to actually start work. After I pay someone, it’s not as if my work is done. I have to then work for free until the final product or beta is done. It’s ridiculous. Even if we did go to court over the contract, how can ‘they’ (the ones who provide the contract) change the rules? They negate their own contract, and wonder why people get upset? Do these people really have any money to even go to court over something to trivial? Why waste the people’s time with game development, when there’s cases that need to get sorted?

And the rich people who can easily fund this stuff, do not want to - you know why? Because it’s too risky. And it takes too much time, apparently.

My advice to my old self:

Don’t trust any of them. Demand they do some work before you pay them, even if it means saying ‘bye bye’. The more people who do not pay them, will mean they will finally stop trying to rip people off and maybe do some real work for a change. Invest in something, or someone else.

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You pay freelancers upfront? Thats crazy dude. You always pay when work is delivered.

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I think you’re consistently finding bad personnel. Somewhere. Which means that you need to change your hiring process.

However.

This is not Unity’s problem. This is your problem. Unity, for now, is not a freelancing platform, even though there were some small steps in direction of adding freelancing services.

The point of contracts is outline developers responsibilities and YOUR responsibilities.
Also, technical tasks should be outlined in writing, in order to avoid misunderstanding which results in conflicts.

You’ll have hard time finding skilled people with this kind of attitude. Bad clients have tendency of running away with the work without paying, and developer generally doesn’t want that to happen.

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I come from the Enterprise business software world, never would I ask for money from a client upfront, thats just unprofessional

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Ok, fair enough. It’s not Unity’s problem. It’s mine for a whole range of reasons, I guess.
Programmers need to get serious then. Standards are all over the shop.

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Correct way of handling payment is escrow. This way freelancer will now for sure that employer actually has the money and is not going to run into sunset with a finished project.

If the employer refuses to use escrow, possible payment schemes are:

  1. Partial upfront payment. This is pretty much to prove that employer is trustworthy. 30% or 50% depending on amount of work.
  2. Hourly rate.
  3. Milestone-based payement.
  4. Weekly payment.

Basically, contractor needs a quick way to test that employer has the money and intends to pay for the work done. Those methods serve for the purpose.

There’s a problem of trust here.

I worked a lot as a freelancer, and by default you’re supposed to protect yourself from employer ripping you off by not paying. Bad employers can deal massive damage, up to tens of thousands USD - I saw plenty of people online complaining about getting ripped off this way. In this situation you can’t do squat, because the other party is happily sitting on another continent where your law has no power.

Also, “some work up front” sounds a lot like “Do this work for free as a test if you are worthy of privilege of working for us”. <— if the client tries something like that, they’re almost certainly a fraud and can go to hell. (Also see http://www.nospec.com/ ). I personally lost a week like that when I was younger, and I’m not falling for this kind of bullshit ever again.

The whole process of establishing initial trust is tedious, and resembles either some sort of mexican standoff:

Or “hostage/briefcase exchange” scene from the movies.

You have the finished project, and the employer has the money. When one side hands over the goods to the other side, the other side can run away without fullfilling their part of the deal.

After month or two of dealing with this nonsense, it is possible to relax a little, and handle payments in more relaxed moment.

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If we are allowed to make such kind of generalizations about such a large group of people like ‘Unity programmers’ or even just ‘programmers’, based on our personal experiences of just a few of their members, we can draw whatever conclusions we like about anyone.

And if for whatever reason, the developers you’ve worked with have been in fact deceitful, what made you think that they would be unable or unwilling to forge some fancy screenshots, if you require them as a ‘proof’ of their work?

As others have said, paying all the money upfront to contractors is a terrible idea, and like programming, proper management of any software project takes skills of its own kind.

If you think all such problem would go away if only Unity includes such a screenshot feature, and blame them as unprofessional for not having done it already, I have to suspect that you have very little idea of how to manage a software project, and in that case, the only unprofessional person could be yourself.

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Please note that I have no connection to the OP :wink:

I’d like to flip this on its head and say that “some” people who hire developers (be it Unity, or anything else) to do a job consistently swap and change the parameters of the original scope (by small amounts at first so you bend a little) so much that as a contractor you invariably end up earning a lot less because the job goes on for longer.

Now you can argue that the contract should be renegotiated etc but a lot of the time you are trying to keep the person or company sweet for repeat business so you end up biting the bullet.

I agree its a tough act to find decent personal (as we’ve found on one of our projects) but it can sometimes be equally difficult to not get the piss taken out of you by those that hire you.

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Serious programmers are serious, but judging by your post you have a problem with your hiring process and repeatedly hire wannabes, beginners and generally insecure people.

I don’t recall running into your posts in job offering section, so I don’t know where you find those guys.

That’s just how I see it. No offense intended.

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You want to find a good coder? It’s quite simple actually. Find someone who can’t afford to have a ruined reputation. Somebody who is known in this community by most, someone who’s worked on such popular games who’s still freelancing. Somebody like that is not only more trustworthy, but cant afford to have a bad reputation.

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Yeah, that’s my impression too.

@Developah , can you tell us what your hiring process actually is?

Also, as @neginfinity says, a huge part of getting agreements on paper is that it gets both sides to explicitly agree to a fixed thing. If you’re not doing that, or if you’re doing it badly, then you’re likely turning good, serious developers away before you even contact them because they’ve seen the other side of this and are exactly as willing to do it again as you are.

Similarly, I’ve had people complain to me about programmers but then fail to communicate any sort of concrete detail about the thing they want made. How are we meant to build something they can’t even describe properly? Of course we can do that, but it’s going to take a lot of explorative development… which costs just as much per hour as any other kind of development.

Or start with a small, low-risk job to see how it goes. If it goes well, do something a bit larger. If it’s shaky, get someone else.

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It simply comes down to doing research on people before hiring them, there’s no excuse for it.

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Well, it’s been a while since I posted. Hardly surprising you missed my post. That doesn’t matter anyway. The people I hired, had examples. They seemed trustworthy. I didn’t just hire anyone - although I guess I can only trust people who I actually meet in real life.
I do not mind hiring wannabes or beginners (because let’s be realistic, most of us are, I am technically still a beginner. What should I do, quit?). I have already hired beginners, etc and they are actually doing better then someone who charges over 2k upfront, for a ‘professional job’ (because that’s how the professionals apparently operate - is charge upfront - that’s what ‘they’ told me), with no proof of work for over a year. A year.
So idk, maybe there needs to be a new thread about how programmers should conduct themselves online, how they charge money before or after - and why. Then I could review them right from that. Probably make it mandatory for all programmers. Instead of basically being, an unknown.

With that being said, I do not charge upfront for my work. Most of the time it’s free.

Well, now I’ll have to research them - without crossing the line - and ending up getting a harassment charge. Oh great. :confused:

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The amount someone charges does not make them “professional”. Also, if someone has no evidence of work for over a year then that’s a pretty huge red flag.

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Why thank you, expert of the universe. ??

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If the project is big you need to split the payments offcourse. I invoice my customer every month, but the enterprise world is alot different from the gaming world. I have yet to order such a big workload from a freelancer yet, but I think I would go with the fixed price with mile stone model. I will outsource level design soon for our game, I can report back if that model worked

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That was either a fraud or a very overconfident wannabe.

Honestly, when I encounter those kind of stories I always wonder what the hell are people thinking while patiently waiting for a year and receiving nothing… or where the hell did they find those kind of “contractors”.

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That’s how I normally operate. 1/2 payment or less 1st, and then proceed with development and grow from there. The fact that I paid full, I expected much better results. There was a time where they offered to send screenshots. They never did. It was always put off with an excuse, and I trusted them. Well, that ended today. Unless there is something sent soon, I have no reason to believe any work has been done.

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Different businesses have different rules and I think the small studio and hobbyist game development business is a lot closer to recording studios than enterprise. There’s some good advice on proaudiofiles that in my opinion applies just as much to freelance game developers.

I’d certainly expect new clients to pay a deposit with further payments at key deliverable / progress points as appropriate. The problem with the enterprise model is that large companies delaying payment to small firms can give cash flow issues and in the worst case bankruptcy, and as the enterprise would then pay cents on the dollar there’s actually a financial benefit to them to withhold payment if they think a supplier is near bankrupt.

Working on a cash positive basis reduces the risk to small businesses and reduces expenses as there is no loan interest to pay on living expenses over the work period. Compared to paying a deposit, so if for any reason the work gets cancelled (failure on my behalf to reach the first progress point being the only reason a refund would be given) I wouldn’t be worse off, it’s the enterprise model which seems more unprofessional to me.

But yeah, full payment in advance is for off the shelf products, not bespoke work. I would think asking for full payment in advance for development work was unprofessional, but not a deposit, that’s just a different business model than enterprise.

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-_-
Stating the obvious here, but the point of partial payment is to prove that employer is serious and lessen damages in case employer runs away without paying.

If they demand full upfront payment, this is odd (in software world, anyway), and if they have no reputation to uphold, they have no reason to finish their work once you paid. So that’s a red flag.

Use an escrow next time. Preferably one with an arbitration service.

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