Pricing Opportunities

Taking a look back through bookmarks of potentially "blogworthy" material this morning, I came across a short post I'd forgotten about regarding why highly skilled and talented people can be a hard sell when courted to work on projects proposed by others. In particular, the following two bullet points stood out to me:

• People ... often dramatically underestimate the amount of development work, or the complexity of it.
• There's an opportunity cost to working on someone else's idea...

I could have understandably been accused of "scorning opportunity" a few times upon realizing that some project or other entailed some combination of (a) much more work than was apparent to the person making the pitch, and (b) the fact that this work would keep me away from other, better opportunities.

Not all opportunities are equal, and some can actually be detrimental to one's objectives even if they would look great to almost anyone else. It takes experience in a field before the full payoffs and costs of an opportunity become, as Daniel Tanner puts it, "blindingly obvious".

If opportunity knocks, should you answer? It depends.

-- CAV