All the best practices and ALT.NET goodness is really a waste of time if you can’t convince the decision makers of its value.

I think Steve is right as well, but it may be a long time before there are enough people who need to make money at the end of the day see the benefits (opportunity costs missed) by seeking a better way.

When dealing with business people, it always needs to be quantified in dollars. So we need to present it to them in this way: Here is what I am asking, here is what I am going to save you at the end of the day.

A little OT but a lot of good salary negotiation sites say to hold off on salary discussion until you have your potential employer at a point where they feel they need to hire you.

I have used this tutorial among others for both my wife and I and it has been fantastic and has worked well: http://www.quintcareers.com/salary_negotiation_tutorial.html

Good idea! I had an idea somewhat similar to that and floated it around to folks, but the general consensus of people I talked with and look up to was that this is a losing proposition and puts you in a bad spot of having to justify everything you do.

If you’re (all of us) confident that you can do this and even have a proven track record, there’s no reason to compromise or make deals. We should just come in and say what the truth is and how they can save loads of time and money and increase their quality and lower their change pain and it’s going to only cost them the low, low salary or hourly rate of $XYZ.

The compromise proposition will be seen as a weakness and lack of confidence in the business folks’ eyes (and rightfully so).

I think Steve is right. We need to just get the word out, try to establish the facts and proof of what we claim and then only deal with people who are seeking a better way rather than trying to force people who are stuck in their current process

Right now I can see you are looking for X. I have more to offer and you may not immediately see that value.
So here is what I propose we do:
I will come in and work for you at $$ and once you see that I am a problem preventer (or that I have proven myself) we will discuss bumping it up to $$$. We will do that review within a year of hire. After I have been here six months we will put a date on it and review my progress at that point. Fair enough?

If they cannot see that already (becuase they already have acknowledged the reality of precisely the value proposition you are espousing) then you need to move on to an employer who does.

“Hey, I know you were looking to hire X but since I’m not X, let me explain to you why you really need Y.”, is an extremely difficult sale in an interview — its hard enough if you are already an existing hire (presumably with the cred already via proven performance) but its nigh-impossible as an unknown in an interview context.

Every project I’ve ever been on (well, except a few side projects) needed to be done ASAP, the same as what you said.

But it’s not OK to just do whatever it takes to get the job done unless it’s a disposable app that is never used after the deadline (i.e. Conference Registration sites, etc).

Because as soon as the first deadline comes and goes, the developers breath a sigh of relief and the business users come back and say something to the effect of, “Ok! Great, you guys did a great job and did that in 3 months. Now we need 2x the features in 2 months. Since you guys are so awesome, it won’t be a problem!”

I’ve also had that happen on all but a few projects.

So when I hear ‘we have to have this NOW NOW NOW’, I try to direct the conversation to, “What does your schedule look like for the next 18 months? What demos, what conferences, what etc, etc, etc, do you have that we should be aware of for planning”

If you’re just looking to make it through to the next deadline, you’ve already set yourself up for failure.

Everyone needs to stop looking directly down and look towards the horizon. It’s hard in a panic situation, but that’s what I mean by problem preventer: It’s up to us to look further out and not just at the next deadline.

We *must* be thinking big picture and strategically and not just hurrying up the next release because we only harm the business users when we do that. All that money you might have saved this release just cost them 10x on the next release. What have we solved then?