When I get home, my wife sees the smile on my face and asks "How'd the meeting go?"

"Terrible! All you need to know is that at some point, my partner stood up and rips off a 20 minute mother of all non-sequiturs that began with 'America is the world's greatest social experiment.' It was a disaster, but hilarious."

"I don't think we got the job. They probably think we're idiots."

It was funny, but couldn't laugh too hard because I was broke. If I didn't need the money, I wouldn't have agreed to participate in such a bizarre setup in the first place.

I was resigned to write it off as a bad experience that yielded a funny story, but to my surprise, we did get the job!

2/5

#stories #freelance

My job was to build a prototype of something resembling Apple's CarPlay. Only one problem: I had never so much as done a simple one page mobile app. I had a few weeks to fix that so I go nuts learning.

I make progress, but the UI designs I received were awful. Luckily, I have some front-end design skills. I improve their terrible designs until everything is smooth. This is shaping up to be the perfect gig for me to prove myself and start landing good jobs.

I get the prototypes done in time and despite it being my first ever attempt at doing a mobile app, it was quite good. I couldn't wait to show the Germans that they scored some serious under the radar talent.

We return for our follow-up meeting. I pop in my USB drive into their conference PC. The lights dim, the projector turns on, and my app runs flawlessly. It does everything they asked for, except better.

When the lights come back on, there is total silence. I'm beaming about my work, but then I realize they are PISSED.

3/5

"What is this? This isn't what we asked for!"

The designs and specs that they gave me were garbage so I took liberties to fix their mistakes. Instead of being grateful that someone over-delivered, they were livid.

My job was to do *exactly* as told. I was part of a rigid process and because I didn't stay in my lane, their whole project was now off course. They give me one week to fix my fuck up.

It was the worst feeling. I put in tons of my own time to make something better because I wanted to impress. It gets rejected and now I'm working for free to make something I hate.

So I get to work crippling the app and we return in a week to deliver the downgraded app exactly to specification. The lights dim. I do my demo again. This time the app can't play some formats. It stutters and freezes. The UI is confusing and dead ends in weird places.

When the lights come back on, I see the Germans are satisfied. They graciously thank me for my hard work, escort me to the door, and I never hear from them again.

4/5

Working for that German company was such a confusing and demoralizing experience. I got punished for doing a better job than they had asked for. What the hell was that all about?

After talking to people, I later realized what I had gotten myself into. My original feeling that they thought we were idiots was actually not far off the mark.

They didn't hire us because they saw talent. They hired us for the exact opposite reason. They hired us because we didn’t impress them.

The year was 2010 and self taught freelance developers were still uncommon. It’d be another half decade before the gig economy would be the gig economy. My rough qualities that might have scared other clients away likely helped us land this one.

We were explicitly chosen to build a flawed prototype that their internal design team could use as comparison when presenting their own designs. They wanted someone to build a strawman they could beat up, not a viable competing design.

5/5

#freelance #stories