What merlyn said + it can eat away at your self-esteem if you do excellent work for a client and see it thrown away in the surreal but not entirely uncommon idiom brian_d_foy describes. Being paid to do nothing, or even being paid to do a bad job in spite of offering good work instead, is not good for one's psychology. These kinds of clients should be avoided if you can't massage them, as it were, out of that tack.

But it's not being paid to do nothing... Obviously the customer expects you to work. They expect to see you looking at code, they might even expect to see milestones being reached. What the customer does not want is anything in production to be changed. I've worked under these conditions, and what your mother says about psychology is an understatement. This sort of work can make you seriously depressed, even if the money is great. Perhaps there are certain kinds of people who can take this, but I won't work under those conditions again, whatever the money.


- Boldra

The way the arrangement was worded meant that the client only paid for the hours I wasn't doing anything else that benefitted my employer. As soon as I started doing some analysis for another tender we were making, for example, the client stopped paying.

Consequently, being an ethical kind of person, I diligently earnt money for my bosses by doing crosswords, figuring out how to do sudoku, writing a program to do sudoku for me, reading books (some technical, most not) learning ant (vile), learning perl (much much nicer), and painting my front room (with the laptop under the dust covers, and the email alert sound turned right up).

Sadly, the paint we'd chosen didn't cover very well, so it took four coats. But I was probably the best paid decorator on the planet for a couple of days.

And when that contract finally ended, I resigned and went elsewhere, partly because they were being bought out by a company that wanted to take them in a completely different direction, and partly because I wanted to actually change something again...