It's expensive. Really expensive. I remember a major bank calling me and my buddy's 2-man consultancy team and telling me they had spent a small fortune on whatever the top-level access to MS developers is, to get some outdated MS COM component to interface with .NET, and MS had failed.

(We charged ~$20K and estimated two weeks. We had it working in two hours.)

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Robin_Message 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

I gotta ask, did you spend a week sucking your teeth after that, or did you hand it to them and say "hey, you're paying for expertise and we got it to you faster than we estimated"?

	▲	orthoxerox 8 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The correct way is the send the customer the almost-final version and wait for the bug report. This way you show how quickly you can tackle the problem but don't make the task look too easy.
	▲	qingcharles 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, exactly a week. There was no way we could send it immediately, despite the fact it was ethically dubious to hold back.

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markus_zhang 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds pretty challenging. Could you please elaborate on your experience?

	▲	qingcharles 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		This was back in 2004 (?), so too long ago to remember the details. I remember the phone call though because the chap that called us said he been told we never used the word "impossible."