I've had a reddit account for the better part of a decade, but have only recently (in the past year or so, and only because reddit start sending me digest-style listings of things I might be interested in, which resulted in me reading more across the board(s)) actually started taking part in posting things on various subreddits… After reading some of the items on here, it's made me wonder if I should post my own story as a contractor…
I was doing freelance work for a company with a very nice product idea for about 2 years solid, as a front-end engineer… They had an original product that had an admin management dashboard, and then a secondary launch attempt of trying to update said admin management dashboard, which flopped, and then they decided they wanted to try a React.js re-launch of said admin management dashboard, and a buddy of mine that had previously worked with me (as his paired front-end engineer) at a previous engineer, recommended me as a resource for them to get that work done on the side, since their own dedicated front-end resources were light-to-non-existent.
Fast forward 2 years: I've consolidated both of their prior products under a unified new admin dashboard, updated the look/feel/behavior under a much more intuitive and more responsive front-end, and have been receiving regular paychecks from them…
Part of the contract I signed with them as a contractor stipulated that invoices should be submitted within 10 days of the close of a 2-week period, and that this was “a material component of this contract”… Despite that, there were occasional situations where, a) due to either personal issues that ate up time and caused me to not submit invoices on time, or, b) aggressive timelines to meet goals for their organization that necessitated me putting in hours outside of my billable allotment (I was capped at 30 hours a week, but routinely worked more than that, and could only bill for a max of 30 to them), I submitted invoices outside of a 10-day period, and every late invoice was paid once it was received, on a Net30 timeline…
Towards the end, I was in the middle of a home sale where I lived, a home purchase in a new region, a home renovation in the previous area in order to get the place in an ideal state for marketing, and then some renovations on the new home to get it up to our own wants and needs, on top of my day job, and on top of keeping up to speed on my side-contract's work needs, invoicing fell behind… It fell behind by a few months…
When I finally submitted everything at once, I assumed that a Net30 expectation was unrealistic, because I'd submitted multiple months worth of invoices all at once… I gave them roughly 2 months of leeway on those, before I started pinging them about it… I heard nothing… In all of the time that I'd neglected to send in invoices, I never heard anything from anybody about threats of nonpayment, and in fact, I kept attending regular check-in calls and keeping people up to date as expected.
After a month or 2 of pinging them for a status update on any of the recently-submitted invoices, to find out why they weren't being paid out, I finally got a meeting invite to go over a status update on them. During that meeting, the VP thanked me for my dedication to the company for the prior 2 years, and for everything I'd gotten done for them. He them told me that he was authorized on behalf of the company, to settle for roughly 1/3 of my outstanding invoices, and asked if I had any questions.
The obvious question was why he was looking to settle for 1/3 of my invoices, and not pay them all, and his cohort on the call, the head of their contracting division, told me that because, per the wording of my contract, “timely submission of invoices is a material factor”, they were not required to pay me for any invoices that had been submitted outside of the 10-day window specified in the contract…
In my head, to myself, I'd assumed that the fact that they'd previously paid me out on late invoices, that should waive that specific aspect of said contract, as it was an established precedent that even on late invoices, I could probably expect to be paid *later*, but I could expect to be *paid*. A brief consultation with a legal person online bore out a similar expectation. I've heard of a lot of reasons that people may want to withhold payments from contractors, such as shoddy labor or whatever, but I've never heard the excuse that “the bill came late, so we don't have to pay it”…
I'm constrained, by the terms of my contract, to seeking legal representation in a narrow area of Virginia (Circuit Court of Fairfax County, Virginia or the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division), and did a consultation with a law firm there, which basically told me that they sympathized with my plight, but that a company could also bleed me to the point of court costs through them, that the cost-benefit ratio would eventually swing to zero, and all I would be doing is costing myself stress and money for recovering losses that were, in the end, just not worth it.
This company used me long enough until they finally had 2 other front-end engineers ready to pick up where I left off… I spent the last 2 months of my service to them, in good faith, ramping their engineers up on how the whole project was laid out, where to find things, certain dev patterns that were employed for extensibility (they were not React devs, and it took some teaching), and to me, it seems like they just got to the point where they finally had their own employees ready to take over with me, and so then asked themselves “how can we dump this guy for the least expense possible?” and found this loophole in our contract to screw me over, despite having acted against that same loophole themselves in the past…
I don't want to fight a losing war against a company with more resources them I have, but at the same time, they stiffed me for $41k, which I could absolutely use… Any advice out there, from contractors in similar situations in the past, or legal experts, other than just forgetting about it? Forgetting about it is what I'd previously talked myself into, but damn it's hard, knowing how much they got away with, and being able to keep my code and profit off of it.