Jason Haley was recommended to me by a professor at Harvard. Apparently, Haley used to be a teaching assistant for this professor. I needed someone with specific knowledge and expertise in ASP.Net programming. Haley assured me that he had 15 years of experience. His rate was $85 per hour, which I accepted. I drafted a contract, sent it to Haley, he signed it and returned it. He assured me that the project would take no more than 5-8 hours.
We discussed the project in detail, and I provided a detailed mock-up of what we needed to accomplish. Again, he said it would not take more than 5-8 hours. He began working on the project, and after the first week had passed, he sent me an updated hourly bill for 33 hours! I disputed these hours, and asked him why it was so inconsistent with his estimate. He agreed that the hours were too high, and offered to 'adjust' them down to 20 hours. I reluctantly agreed, and, in a sign of good faith, I offered 25 hours. He accepted and the work continued.
The next week, he sent me an elaborate list of things that needed to be done that would require an additional 33 hours of his time! I felt like I had no choice but to agree because the website he was working on was not (half-done, and half-broken). Then, the following week, he sent me an update, which included the work that he had completed. It was not even close to what we had discussed, and, even worse, the website no longer functioned as it had before he started working on it!
I sent him an email expressing my dissatisfaction, and instead of reacting in a professional manner, he told me that he no longer wished to do the project. He decided that the "ethical" thing to do would be to not charge me. However, he also left the website in a state of disorder, and the database no longer worked. I had to hire another team to fix all of his errors. The new developer that I hired charged me over $2,000 to fix the errors that Jason Haley Consulting created. Moreover, his unprofessional and incompetent manner cost me several valuable weeks of down time.
