Clients asking for the impossible

[Kjelt]

Actually a lot of people are doing things like this by not documenting their code properly 

[miguelvp]

What is overpay? Maybe we all (normal working engineers) get underpaid.
I don't see why a lawyer fresh out of university can charge their clients $250 an hour and EE's get $40 start salary an hour. There are things wrong in this world and I love to see at least one guy holding the long end of the rope.

Simple, If you are employed by a company they have to make money out of you to be profitable, so yes we (all that work for a company) are all underpaid.

Sure you can do it on your own, but in most cases you won't get the job unless you are an IT consultant for a small project. For a large project you need a team and companies can provide that. And because they are the ones that get the jobs, they can decide how much to pay you so the profit margin is good for the company, giving stability to their employees, etc..

Consulting is a choice but risky until you have an established clientele.

And @mojo-chan it really doesn't work that way if you work for a serious company that does peer reviews. And even if you work for smaller companies, your reputation will precede you.

But you do what you think is right

[miguelvp]

Actually a lot of people are doing things like this by not documenting their code properly 

I've worked on many legacy code from third party vendors or ex-employees. If they saw my changes they will think they wrote them themselves. And code is documentation btw, at least it is to me.

[madires]

I've worked on many legacy code from third party vendors or ex-employees. If they saw my changes they will think they wrote them themselves. And code is documentation btw, at least it is to me.

... like for a complex calculation a former colleague has done by writing 20 pages of math to find the formula and simplify it. Your boss asks you to add just a tiny parameter to that and you got only the code