Originally posted by Kanye
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I don't think I've wasted my breath arguing with anyone on a contract (as distinct from flagging up issues and resolving disagreements constructively). There's simply no point.
The nearest I've ever come to blowing up on anyone in a contract was a few years back when there was a third-party supplier playing silly buggers on a Dynamics CRM implementation I was working on. I had my own bespoke code to get right, and it had to interface with some work this guy's company had already provided to the client. He'd pulled a fast one and not handed over the source code to the client, and there was no documentation. So, I asked the ClientCo manager to request the source code from them, and was assured this would be forthcoming following their conversation.
Next day, they phoned the office "to speak to me about my request". I could see at fifty paces I was about to have a pointless conversation with a total chancer that was at it. Sure enough, he proceeded to try and tell me that I should use Reflector to analyse the compiled DLLs he'd installed, instead of him just complying with the request to provide the source code that he'd already agreed to with ClientCo management. Clearly this wasn't suitable, as all the variable names and comments get obfuscated and removed when you take a piece of compiled code and try to reverse-engineer it back into the original source. So, I told him not to be ridiculous, that I wasn't being paid to reverse engineer and reconstruct code he'd already been paid for, and to get me the original source code as he'd been instructed to do without further delay or I'd have to raise it with ClientCo again as a blocker for me. It appeared within the day.
It's not worth losing your rag when people don't listen or try it on (which I find happens more in permie roles than in contracts). In contracts, those footing the bills value your input more for the simple reason they're paying more for it, so you find situations like the one above tend to get cleared up very quickly. In a permie role, a similar situation might drag on for many months if weak managers misguidedly try and fail to please everyone.
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