OP, I hope you aren't rethinking it. You'd certainly be justified in doing so, but I think it would be a mistake. There are most definitely people out there that fit your description:

> I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with different policies.

I've worked with many of them. I myself try to live that way as well, often costing myself non-trivial time and money to ensure that my client gets what I sold them.

Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it.

I have also worked with several honest people who were motivated to do their best, in the most effective way.

Actually almost everyone I ever worked with was like that.

All the exceptions were agency/consulting people.

Their job is bleeding people dry. Period.

Thanks!

Yeah, I agree. This experience hasn't affected how much I try to defend myself from dishonest employees/contractors. I think the prevalence of dishonest/malicious people is so low and screening is so costly/ineffective that it's not worth it.

>Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it.

Yes, 100% agree. When someone tells me, "I've put so many controls in place to make sure you can't do X," it's so adversarial that my first though is, "I'd really love to find a way to do X." But if they tell me, "I'm trusting you not to do X because that will cause Y negative consequence for me," then I'm inclined to honor that request because it doesn't feel like we're adversaries.

I dont think anyone is suggesting you micromanage your consultants, that is obviously the wrong approach and defeats the purpose of hiring consultants.

This is a bussiness arrangement. Normally this works by you saying some things you want over some timeframe, and letting them work on it.

The part of this story where things go off the rails, is that by the middle of it, it was clear the agency wasn't delivering on their deliverables or really making progress. Most people would make some sort of change at that point, either terminate or set modified expectations - definitely not blindly give more money.

Its really not about trust, its about whether or not they do the job. There could be many reasons why the job doesn't get done, many might not be malicious - but these people aren't your friends. You are buying something from them, if they dont have the goods, then they dont have the goods and its not a sign of lack of trust to move on.

>Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000?

Honestly, no. I think I certainly made mistakes on this project, but I don't think trusting devs to use their time effectively was the problem.

>>you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope,

>This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn't up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time & materials it's much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn't work the hours they billed for.

The problem is that agencies know that, so if I approach competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost. They don't want to take a risk on some small client demanding the moon before they'll release payment.

I'm sure there are desperate agencies who will agree to contracts that put them in a weak position, but I expect their work will be lower quality than the agencies that protect themselves.

> so if I approach competent agencies demanding a milestone-based contract for $7-15k, they'd just tell me to get lost

Yep, exactly that.

And, for a dev agency (I'm not as familiar with how design would want to structure this), you'd either need _very_ detailed and specific requirements before we consider quoting the project, or we're going to need an up-front discovery phase (that will run a few thousand dollars anyway) to produce those detailed requirements and specifications, before we can even give a quote.

Fixed bid projects do feel like they create much more of an adversarial relationship than a collaborative one for working on a project, and when we make fixed bids we _definitely_ price a lot of the risk into the bid (and we're up front about that).

If a contractor told me to "get lost" over a $15k contract for a three-page rework + redesign; I'd just respond "gladly".

That is a dead simple ask and something that could easily be handled by one front-end dev + one designer in 1-2 weeks of half-time work. That easily covers their salaries (in LA, at least) + 30-50% overhead. You would probably pad that out to a month for other jobs + unknowables; but I would be absolutely shocked if an agency quoted anyone any more time than that for such a basic and trivial task. For a first time contract, that's a pretty good deal to entice word of mouth referrals + potential future work.

This isn't work that needs discovery or intricate scoping. It's basic work that anyone with web development experience can scope out and that a shop focused on that definitely has extensive experience on. Better than that, if you review his original scope guidelines, he makes it clear he specifically doesn't want any more work done than those three pages. All of the complicated work (logo redo + rebranding) he was talked into by the agency, along with random things like additional color palettes, extended page attributes, etc.

Well, I was talking about dev work rather than design work.

A 3 page build for a marketing website is probably very well scoped for the dev work (if the designs are done).

If the designs _aren’t_ done, though, and the fixed bid includes the client signing off on the visual look and feel, then… that’s not a tightly scoped requirement.

Could we do the dev in that budget? Almost certainly, I cannot imagine it taking longer than that for a handful of marketing pages.

Will I sign a fixed bid contract, if I don’t have a design and requires the client to sign off on the final look and feel in order to be complete? No, that would be insane.

> and the fixed bid includes the client signing off on the visual look and feel

He came to them specifically because he liked other work they had done and wanted something similar. Are there still vagaries between integration and specific brand tweaks? Sure. But don't pretend this is a major corporate rebrand or anything. The only discovery is his tastes.

If it's that big of a worry: make visual sign-off milestone one. Add a 10-15% upfront deposit and you both will know in a week or so whether it's right to move on with minimal loss to both parties.

Either way, he'd be much better off than 6mos+ of work at 450% of his original budget.

> He came to them specifically because he liked other work they had done and wanted something similar.

Right, but, for the third time, I was providing my input for a dev agency (not design agency) perspective. I was generally providing another perspective of input on fixed bid contracts.

I’m sure you can make fixed bid projects work with design agencies, and I agree that it will ensure the risk remains with the agency (but also that it’s possible that you end up spending more than with a carefully managed T&M project.

But, again, I’m not an expert at working with design agencies, and I’m not making any recommendations about the best way to work with a design agency.

I'm on a T&M contract right now where we are having the stupidest of disputes.

T&M with a SOW full of deliverables. Client asks us to do a ton of work outside of scope. We inform the client it's out of scope, but that we are happy to perform the work as part of the T&M. Can't get anyone to push through a CR "because it's T&M so it doesn't matter." Client has been paying all along. Getting to the end, client doesn't want to sign off on completion of the project because we didn't do the SOW deliverables (per our previous alignment). They already paid so I don't actually care if they sign off on the work, but it's stupid for everyone involved.

My favorite protection for this kind of situation is having a Single Point of Contact clause, that basically says: "ultimately, we take direction from X person and only X person".

This helps in a couple of different ways. Occasionally, you'll get conflicting requests or instructions from a client. When that happens, I usually just push it to the single point of contact and ask how they want to proceed.

But it also helps in the scenario you outlined, because I make sure any approvals for "outside the scope of SOW work" gets approved to be worked by the single point of contact, along with any relevant disclaimers about total project budget and estimate.

Then, when you come to time to evaluate the project progress the single point of contact has clear language that they've approved with whatever associated cost warnings.