I had a graphic designer split in the middle of a project. Left me to try to finish a website on my own! You just could not get any more annoyed than me! I got the job finished but I was just wondering what other horror stories there might be out there.

Care to share your nightmare.

We outsourced a company to do some programming for us on one of our site. They didn't split or anything, but they didn't do any work either. After fighting them and their lies for a few weeks we finally got our refund. Definitely a huge hassle and waste of time.

__________________
The Merchant Account Blog | The Ecommerce Blog

That only happened to you once? Consider yourself lucky.

First off, I should explain that, although I consider myself to be a very good designer, I don't consider myself to be a great designer. My forté is ASP-based web programming, especially as it pertains to database-driven websites.

Now...in 2003, I experienced a growth in my business as an indy to the point where I felt I wanted to hire other people on a freelance/contract basis to take on some of my workload, eventually moving myself into a sort of "sales" role whereby I would deal with the client directly (meetings, etc.) and pass that information on to the designers and programmers. I arranged for this part-time in 2004.

Here are some of the things that happened to me when I did so (warning: contains swearing within context of emails and conversations):

• I had an online application form that I had developed so that I could quickly and easily review any resumes/portfolios/etc. in my email. I made it very clear that if someone wanted to be hired, not to call, fax,email via regular means or snail mail. 70% of the people who wanted to work for me couldn't even do that.
  
• Two gentlemen did actually go through the process of filling out the form correctly. However, I had no interest in using them whatsoever, and I did make it clear that I would contact only those I was interested in bringing on board.
  
  A week later, the same two gentlemen showed up at the front door of my house. At the time, I had a 15-year-old 5-pound poodle in the last stages of her life. She barked once at the two, since they were strangers, and then went back to sleep. These two looked at her like she was the hound keeping the gates of Hell and were scared to death of her!
  
  When they got over their little shaking fit, one of them spoke: "Hello there, Mr. Adam Web Design. We come to you because we filled out your online application form and are more than qualified to work for your company. We know we can do a wonderful job for you. But what type of work is it again?"
  
• I was insulted not once, not twice, but three times on application forms by people who honestly believed I'd get in touch with them because they could make me feel two feet tall. Yes, I'll respond really well to "ur site sucks and I could do a way better job, and if u hire me, Ill show you." (Side note: I don't know who "Ill" is and how "Ill" can show me.)
  
• I had a company named A4Media from Malaysia contact me with regard to how they could "come to Canada and improve my office workshits". This one amused me because on their website, they'd repeated the phrase. Sadly, I can't show you the side because *GASP* they're no longer in business.
  
• I hired one gentleman as a programmer that I suspected was lying to me about his abilities; however, having had no other alternative, I gave this guy a shot. I gave him a VERY small job to do; a browser-based upload using the ASPUpload component. The form itself was already built; all he had to do was integrate the upload portion with the form and update the database accordingly. For those of you who don't know, ASPUpload is a stunningly easy upload component to work with, with most tasks requiring at MOST 3 or 4 lines of code.
  
  Right off the bat...the gentleman complained that the coding was "all wrong" and "didn't meet recognized ASP coding standards". First of all, the original code was developed back in 2000 by two former programmers who worked on Windows 95 (yeah, I know, Win95 sucks, but you'd think they'd know a little something about programming in a Windows environment if they were hired by Microsoft). Second, I've been working with ASP for five years and...well...there are no real recognized ASP coding standards. I've developed my own over the course of time, but there is no governing body a la the W3C that establishes these sorts of things.
  
  To a certain extent I will acknowledge that he was right. The code itself, being 4 years old at the time, was somewhat archaic. But it still functioned and there really wasn't a need to touch the existing code; it just needed to be added to. However, having looked at the code briefly myself, I had told him upfront that this was the case and he said this was okay.
  
  Anyway...the story continues. I don't hear from the gentleman for about a week, and then he comes back claiming he's made a "Hotmail-like interface that will greatly improve the user-friendliness and efficiency of the upload application in question." So I was like...okay, I'll have a look at it.
  
  The gentleman had added exactly 4 lines of code. 4 lines. He never touched the existing code that bothered him so much. He just added 4 lines. Naturally, nothing did what it was supposed to, so I told him I was unhappy. It was then that he decided to tell me that "if you want it working the way you originally intended, I'm going to have to charge you double, because I've already spent twice as long as I expected getting this to work for you."
  
  I'm just glad I picked a small job and not a full website for the gentleman to work on. That would have been bad. Fortuntaely, I had a clause in my employment contract stating that if I wasn't reasonably satisfied with the work (bugs do happen, but as long as they're fixed, I'm okay with that), I didn't have to pay for it. So from a financial standpoint, I wasn't out any money.
  
• When I made my first post onto a job discussion board, I was not-so-politely informed by one of the individuals who seems to frequent it that one of my policies was "funny". I had a rule that I didn't want to see anyone using a WYSIWYG editor, such as FrontPage.
  
  Someone caught on that one of my clients edits his pages with FrontPage and that I have a META tag placed accordingly, to keep the code from getting screwed up. The "someone" in question wasn't even a web designer and was just commenting to be a smartaleck.
  
  When I pointed out that the client edited pages himself with FrontPage and thus the tag needed to be there (it was clearly not a FrontPage-eqsue site), I was told that "Anybody who posts ad should be ready for critics". Why should anyone posting a "help wanted' ad have to expect any criticism whatsoever? It seems to me we're offering something.
  
• I had one gentlemen mystiously disappear on me after failing to complete a project. This was the third project that he failed to complete; however, the first two did involve ASP programming and he was a "designer" (or so he claimed) by trade, so I decided that in the interest of fairness, I'd give him a pure design project as a "last chance".
  
  This same gentleman wanted a domain registered and to use my server for his personal site. We agreed to register the domain name for $20 CDN and hosting for his site would be $5/month CDN, which would come out of the balance of whatever I owed him for that month for completed projects. Needless to say, he disappeared before I could collect on either from him.
  
  A few months passed by, and I received a call from my web host, Sectorlink. Apparently, my FTP server had been hacked into (no damage was done because it was caught immediately) and they wanted to switch my FTP server program to keep it from happening again. I agreed to this, so they proceeded to implement the change.
  
  This meant that I had to reestablish all the logins and passwords; fortunately, Sectorlink was able to export to a text files. I was in the process of doing so when I received a telephone call. Because I was busy rebuilding the logins/passwords, I let the call go to my voice message.
  
  Lo and behold, it was the missing (now ex-employee) who had "sent me two emails" which I did not respond to because he believed that the FTP username and password had been changed for his hosting account (note: the changeover had taken, up until that point, approx. 1 hour, so naturally there were no emails). He proceeded to threaten me and tell me he demanded a call back "immediately" because he "found it rather funny" that his username and password were changed.
  
  (Note: I do realize I'm somewhat at fault for keeping the hosting account alive, even though it had been unpaid for, and I had failed to realize it until this point. However, I simply had far more pressing issues on my mind than a $5/month account which wasn't using up much if any resource anyway.)
  
  Anyway, I decided to just ignore the call. I don't respond to anyone who talks down or threatens me.
  
  Another month passed by, and I received a second voicemail from the ex-employee. He had advised me that he had contacted "his attorney" and that he "would advise me to resolve it with him, or contact my attorney" (I thought this was very nice of him, giving me such valuable advice and information like that!)
  
  The "attorney" turned out to be an injury lawyer from a very small town in Southwestern Ontario, and naturally had no training or understanding of the web design industry. He proceeded to tell me that I was blocking his client's business and that I would be sued if I didn't restore access to the site immediately.
  
  Naturally, his client failed to inform him that I was now owed for 6 months' worth of hosting, plus a domain name, so I was well within my rights to do what I was doing. I had also discovered in this time period that the "client" was using an under-development section of his allotted space to promote to my clients how he was solely responsible for the design/development of their sites (he called it "I did it myself!")
  
  The "client" had also emailed me in this same time period informing me of how he had done absolutely nothing wrong. He had also learned about the FTP server hack by this time, and decided to tell me how stupid I was for using a Windows 2000-based server. He would have applauded me if I'd used Linux.
  
  It should be noted that, having worked on my server twice before, he was well aware that it was a Win2K-based server upfront and had no issue with this at the time.
  
  He was also upset that he wasn't paid for the last project he did for me, despite not getting the work done (he even went so far as to voice his displeasure with not getting paid despite not getting the work done in the same sentence, which amused me to no end.)
  
  Anyway, when all this was brought to the attorney's attention, along with a proposal for a solution, the "client" backed down and the situation was resolved. However, it became a bit of a pain in the ass.
  
  Note: since this time, the ex-employee has decided to steal the text from the legal section of my website and use it on his own, including a typographical error. I find this rather amusing since he clearly thinks I'm an idiot. :)
  
• In the "last chance whatsoever" hiring round (I'd gone through 6, with exactly one guy that worked out as a designer somewhat from the 20 that I'd brought on board) I hired a programmer who did indicate at least a rudimentary level of ASP knowledge. (At the time of the interview, I figured out that if I asked questions about their programming style, subs, functions and whatnot, it would serve the dual purpose of letting them know they were dealing with a coder who wouldn't fall for a ripoff attempt, as well as finding out who was even going to try in the first place.)
  
  As it turns out, I still have no idea if he can actually do any programming. He was brought into a project where he was to do part of the self-administration section for the site.
  
  Now, in order to prepare a quote for a client, I would ask whoever I hired about the various tasks involved for a project and how long it would take them to do it. I'd even gotten to the point where I was breaking down the individual tasks of the project, typing them out in Word, and emailing them to the people working for me to fill in their anticipated hours. I felt, and still feel, that this should have been taken on by the people I was hiring since they were the ones actually doing the work. I'm sure if they were preparing quotes for other people, they'd have done the same type of thing (at least I'd hope they would). At the very least, I would have liked to have seen some proposed enhancements, other ideas, things like that for the projects. But...I got nothing.
  
  But I digress. I had asked him how long it would take him for the various tasks I had laid out. He said 17 hours, which I accepted (I had a habit of not questioning anyone's hours, in the interest of trying to be as fair as possible to them...I know the stuff's hard, right?)
  
  Fast forward 4 weeks. The project is coming up to its due date, and the main section of the site is done by two others, one of which was screwing it up so badly that I had to keep checking/rechecking/three-checking/in some cases coding to fix it (it was just easier in the end). I gave the programmer a call and ask how he's doing with the admin section. He said he just finished it and that he'd like to get paid for it. I said, "okay, upload it to my server, I'll check it over, and if everything's working the way it's supposed to, I normally wait ten days but I'll cut you a cheque for it and you can come pick it up."
  
  Apparently, that was an unreasonable request. He refused to upload the admin section since I was a "liar" and "wouldn't pay him." Interesting theory, I thought.
  
  So...I told him again that I wasn't going to pay him unless I saw it working first. He again refused. At this point, I didn't really have a lot of time to mess around, so I simply said "it's the Friday night a long weekend, I can probably bang this off over the course of it, get it done myself on the Monday afternoon, and put the same money this guy wanted for the admin into my own pocket for the work."
  
  The bad news is that I was dead wrong in terms of how long it would take. The good news is that I was done, with error checking and debugging, by the Saturday afternoon. The 17 hours that the programmer had claimed it would take him for the tasks was reduced to 5 3/4 and everything worked perfectly (no bugs, no errors, no reports back since).
  
  So...I disabled the FTP access the programmer had to my server and informed him that the admin section had been done, uploaded, and that he had absolutely no money coming to him as a result. It was then that he informed me that he "felt that it was fair that you don't pay me for the work I didn't do."
  
  I was really glad that he felt that way. What a truly noble and honourable thought...not getting paid for work that you don't do. At least he wasn't as stupid as the guy who contacted his attorney with regard to the same thing.
  
• I had one of my employees soliciting clients behind my back. I found this out when one of them approached me with a "wonderful redesign offer" from the same employee. The funny thing was that I hired the gentleman as a programmer specifically, and he presented the client with a layout that he had clearly done in Front Page and looked ten times worse than the layout that the web designer for the project came up with.
  
• Partly as a last-ditch effort, I thought that perhaps the reason people were struggling to understand what I wanted is because I hadn't clearly laid out things such as the coding standards (both ASP and HTML), the graphic standards, etc. So, I not only created an include file for all projects containing functions and subs designed to make things such as form processing, date generation, validation, retrieving info from a database, etc. easier, but I had even created a PDF file with examples for them to refer to any time they wanted.
  
  I had six people working for me at this time. Of those six, exactly one had read it. It was an 8-page PDF that could have been covered in about 2 hours and saved everyone a ton of time, but apparently that didn't matter. I asked one guy who was working for me as a designer if he'd read it, and to his credit, he's the only one I hired that I knew would give me a straight answer.
  
  "Did you read the PDF I sent out?"
  "No."
  "Why not?"
  "I couldn't be bothered."
  
  What could I do?
  
  This was the point at which I decided to go back to being an independent designer/developer.
  
• In the year that I tried the hiring "experiment", I found that the sites new customers liked the best weren't the ones the people I hired were doing for me, but rather the ones I had initially developed as an indy that were 2 and now 3 years old. (Note: there's some nicer stuff coming in my portfolio that I've done recently, so stay tuned). This meant that, in the eyes of my clients, they're looking for "Adam" when they want work done, not "ADAM Web Design" the company.
  
• The pace at which I'm putting out projects and client work now, after some struggle, is a faster pace than when I had 6-8 people working for me.
  
• Up until the point at which I had begun to hire people, I had never lost a client. In the time in which I had people working for me, I lost 5. I haven't lost any since, and have found that people are more loyal to me for having stood up and changed things back when I discovered the error of my ways (something I'm very thankful for).

I don't consider myself without blame in this whole process. Obviously, I failed to figure out a hiring scheme that worked and probably kept at it a lot longer than I should have. But I felt I had to in order to make my business grow and reap the full benefits. Unfortunately, it just wasn't meant to be.

I feel that it was by far the biggest mistake I've made as a business owner, but I also feel it was one I had to make. You have to try stuff and see what works, but at least be aware of when it doesn't...and this didn't.

My best friend recently reminded me of something that I'd said back in 2002 when I first took on web design/development full-time: "I hope I never grow to the point where I have to hire people." I have a belief that 95% of the workforce is mismatched, underqualified, or disinterested in the jobs that they have, which is why they never move up in their chosen career paths and why there are many frightening tales of poor customer service/nightmare coworkers/etc. So I knew that I was going to have problems with the hiring process going in. But I don't think I could have ever envisioned the nightmare that it became. I'm just glad it's all done and over with, and it will be a long time, if at all, before I go back to hiring anyone.

__________________
Toronto Web Design | Search Engine Friendly, Standards-Compliant Layouts | Walk on my Path (my blog)