My first quote and my natural modesty

I hadn't done any paid jobs before. Sometimes I helped my brother by writing JavaScript for his websites, and we sorted out the money between ourselves, by the hour, without much thought about what it was worth.

Recently my first real job came along, a program for showing a magazine. It takes a folder of scanned pages and shows them as pages you can turn, and not by clicking “next”, but by grabbing the page by the corner and slowly pulling it until it flips over.

I knew how to build it, the hard part was what to charge. I talked to my boss at work about how to price it, and when I told him my rate, he said I shouldn't spoil the market and named a figure I shouldn't go below.

With my natural modesty I quoted that rate, thinking it was too much, and surprisingly it turned out to be fine. I think I was more surprised than the client :-)

The program worked out, by the way. I don't know if there's a lesson in it, but it mattered to me.