I’ve been casually reading posts here since 2004 and this is the first time I felt compelled to comment. Kindred spirits, I suppose.

I think the most outrageous, ignorant, and confused proposal I’ve received was to design and implement a social media gateway – a software client that would integrate the APIs of several social media services and would have a generic API for adding your own social media services. This was pitched to me as a “simple” project that would be sold to businesses to help them “get on” social media services. When I declined to participate I cited several flaws with this project not the least of which is that it would be impossibly complex due to the constant updating of those kinds of services. I’m not an application developer or well versed in social media, but it bears noting that a business needs to know what, if anything, that kind of marketing is going to do for them and what metrics of success or failure exist. I explained using a common retail model that if, for example, I owned a shoe store I might tweet coupons to people who followed me as a reward for reading me tweet about how excited I was to use twitter. I could measure the success of this kind of thing by watching sales of shoes within a period of time of these tweets. Blank. Stare. I was able to suppress my sense of indignity when I was told I must not know how to accomplish this task and that someone else is probably more skilled than me. Bullet: dodged.

Oh, and there would be no compensation.

So when the uninformed and unwashed masses approach me with these kinds of projects I immediately lampoon them. Sometimes it is an easy thing like the project has already been completed by someone else and better. Other times I have to dig deep and assassinate someone’s hopes and dreams for making a quick buck.

The OnStar comment is hilarious – I know two OnStar architects

Ha. Tell them you live in the present and cash in hand is what talks ;-)

@ Kim Johnsson:

So basically he invented OnStar minus the infrastructure that actually makes that service work.

@ Matt Doar:

And without even blinking they respond: “This thing is going to be huge. Once it takes off, I can even double that rate. Triple even. I can’t pay you that much now but this is a huge opportunity for you!”

Then if you keep insisting they offer you a 40% of the future profits or something like that.

@ Vacri:

Damn you Firefox inline spellchecker! You have failed me for the last time!

Uh… ‘coming’ and ‘cumming’ are distinct concepts. One shouldn’t really be referring to the latter as ‘difficult work’, or at least realise it’s probably not prudent to do so in public…

I always look very serious and say “yes, it’s just a matter of ones and zeroes and putting them in the right order”. Then tell them your hourly rate.

+1! This is so true.

I remember a friend from high school (totally a business type) dropping by a few years ago with this BRILLIANT idea. Long story short, he basically wanted a car alarm connected to a cellphone and a GPS receiver, so that when it was activated it would text our highly sophisticated call centre and somehow allow us to continuously track the car. Piece of cake, right? Just needs some soldering and some codes. This was obviously gonna be set up for mass production within a couple of months. The team included him… and me. I ended up just signing a badly designed NDA to make him go away. He never talked about it again =P

So I have this great idea…