Steven Brown

A few years ago I came into a project where the two previous developers had followed the same trend. Both were sitting on maintenance money. Essentially their workload on the project involved maintenance, data entry, tweaks, small changes. This work consumed all of the client’s budget and the site barely improved for several years. The client’s return on this project was diminishing and all seemed lost.

My primary goal for the project was to take this maintenance money and turn it into development money. After all, maintenance money may be great for me, it means a good steady income for pretty easy work, but eventually the client will see how little value they are receiving and start looking for ways to improve their situation. This usually means paying less, either to you, or to someone who will work for less, and there are plenty of script kiddies who are happy to work for almost nothing!

You are also saving the client money by allowing them to do it themselves, or by paying someone else less to do it.

Development pays better, so you can effectively make more money for the same amount of applied time. Even if you are charging a lot for maintenance eventually the client will wake up and the dream will be over.

Development helps build a business where maintenance just keeps it rolling along. A business that grows can usually afford to spend more on development, which means your income from that client should increase over time.

At the end of the day your job as a developer is to do yourself out of a job, you should be constantly looking at how to automate what you are doing or have the task be performed by someone else so you can focus on what you do best – development.