One common trend of discussion in any software project is why would a customer pay for support to the developer programmer. Here we would like to make things clear.
The Lazy Programmer
One of our programming philosophy is to create really stable and highly user customizable business applications. The reason of course is because we hate to answer customer support calls or visit client sites and even do program modifications. So because we are lazy, we tend to produce better and quality applications to minimize maintenance headaches. In fact, we try to create one source for applications genre that will fit the needs across a wide market audience, with parameter options to enable or disable features not needed by some clients. This makes the design process longer and coding more difficult. This all because we are lazy. So the next time I will interview a programmer applicant my first question would be “Are you lazy?”, if yes then you’re hired!
The Forgetful Me
I have been programming for the past twenty years, I have had created different applications ranging from general accounting, payroll, lending management, memorial park and real estate development. And I have countless clients most of them I have forgotten (or at least not stored in my recent memory pages) until I would received a call from them. The call would usually sound strange and why not if you haven’t heard from them after say 5 or 10 years. See that’s how stable our programs are. Anyway, the call would proceed with name recalls, and my quite deep sense of pride that they still use my program created a year after college. The call would usually end with my advice to buy a new hard disk or, not to use the USB printer they just bought.
Quality Kills
If quality makes our customers happy, it makes the programmers pocket empty, unless the sales guy can sold a thousand copy of our creation. Remember we are data architects and code experts not marketing geniuses. Bill Gates become one of the richest guy in this planet not because of his object oriented knowledge but because of his business strategies.
Support Phobia
During our product demos or presentations we prepare sales pitch to convince our prospects our products are stable and needs practically zero support from us. But even before we can open our mouth, the manager first question would always be “Are you not going abroad, just like the plight of the rest of the local programmers?” and the last question will be “Will you still be available to maintain and support the program?”. These are really valid questions you can’t not just ignore. And I would always answer with a smile, “Ninety five percent of my classmates have already luxurious cars and houses with spacious lawns for only 3 months stay in the US, but If you’ll give me this project I would have second thoughts”. Of course you can already interpolate whether I got those projects or not, knowing that I am still in this country today. But the point is most managers realized that they need support in case something happened to the program in not so near future. A few business owners would think that they can do away with programmers completely.
Is Support Expensive
Okay, this is the important part, I will try to explain here how to determine the most appropriate support cost and the possible support options one can arrange with a software developer or a programmer like me.
Support cost may range from zero, by not availing support, to the monthly rate of a good programmer by hiring him. It’s that simple and here are the implications.
If you will not pay for support, then you should realize that the programmer is not obligated to give you support, you will be of less priority compared to those who are willing and the programmer has the freedom to explore other revenue options and this usually going abroad.
If you hire the programmer, then expect to pay him not the beginners salary but that of a experienced programmer after all you commissioned him to do the project because of this. Double a beginner’s salary or one-fourth of the project cost is a fair enough pay. Remember once you hire this guy you can already assign him to develop projects all for you!
But it is not always easy to hire a good programmer, based on your offer he will do quick calculations and earning potential comparison not to mention that programmers easily get bored in the office.
There are other support options in between this range based the level of service you may require.
Level Of Service Agreement
If you decide not to hire the developer, you can get support that would fit your budget, this is by defining the maximum support incidents and the response time you may be willing to wait.
For a given support fee you can agree to set the maximum of free support incidents per month, beyond this you will be billed per incident. If you can wait for another 24 or 48 hours before your problems will be solved then the support could be cheaper compared to a response time of 4 hours.
Again if you want instant response time, hire the guy.
Shared Support
Usually the programmer or developer will offer you a very reasonable maintenance or support fee, this is basically based on the idea that you are not the only customer they are supporting, that means you shared the support cost among clients of similar needs. The programmer is usually fine with this.
Insurance Service
Initially the customers will enter into a support agreement for the first couple of years. But after they will start to question “we haven’t encountered any major problems so far so we don’t need your support anymore, we’d rather terminate the agreement”, this is short of saying “we don’t need you anymore”. And this hurts, this is of course sounds familiar love stories, hello, goodbye and the breakup. But the only difference is that in our scenario the relationship is not base on love but on risk and assurance.
You realized you have the risk of losing your business data or system downtime due to broken programs, that’s why we entered into a support agreement to assure you that we will fix your system and recover valuable data when you need it.
This is of course similar to the insurance agreement, you pay for a monthly or annual premium and in return you will get benefits or the assured amount in case of disability or death. Just because you are still alive doesn’t mean that you are wasting your premiums, take note that you are paying for the assurance not for the service.
Technology Firemen
One quick question, “What do firemen do when not responding to a fire alarm?”. Of course they are playing table tennis, cards or chess! Not offense to my friend who is a chief fireman (with engineering and law degree). Anyway they do also have regular trainings and community assistance programs. But the point is, just because there is no fire, the firemen will receive no compensation. Who will gonna feed there family and provide for their education? Somebody has to pay for it otherwise all firemen will resign and look for another job or maybe pursue to become the next Filipino chess grandmaster. Again, we are paying the firemen salary so that they will stay as firemen for our security, so that they will not look for another job or go abroad, to fight fire is just secondary. Would you like to be in a community with no firemen? Can you sleep at night?
Programmers in a way are like firemen, they are our technology firemen, you pay for support for them to stay as programmers and not to look for lucrative jobs abroad. You pay them enough money so that they can say no to temptations from international call centers, or from Microsoft or from SM. Somebody has to pay for it, for individual programmers the customers will have to pay for it. For the employed their employer but of course the employer will pas the cost to the customer, some as a separate support cost others built in the project cost.
Again you have the option to pay for it or not! But don’t blame the programmers if they are migrating away from our country.
But then again would you like to see houses burning with no help in sight, would you like to invest in computer software systems with no Technology Firemen?