In my humble opinion, you can't be objective if you sell your services. If someone calls you, then he trusts in you (for your past results or by chance). But you can't know everything and therefore your choices won't be objective.

I saw this post when I originally read the thread Loyalty, Personal gain or Professional Integrity and wasn't happy with it. I wanted to continue the discussion, but start a different thread. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that this is a discussion on the merits of a position, and is not meant to offend fellow Monk valdez.

I disagree with the thesis that if you sell a service, you cannot be objective. While it is not possible to know everything, it is possible to know enough about a range of topics to be able to pick a suitable technology for a particular client.

Here's an example I came across recently: I was talking to a broker who was interested in setting up a hockey pool web site for some friends. He was familiar with MySQL and had access to a server but wasn't that much of a programmer. He described the site layout to me a little, and I concluded with "If I were doing it I'd use Perl, but it sounds like it is simple enough for you to use PHP".

He had heard of Perl and was scared. I explained in lofty tones :) that, yes, Perl could be a difficult language, but for this particular application PHP would be more suitable since the site design was fairly simple and that the application was web-based.

I could have sold him on the merits of Perl and urged him to try the language, but in this case, it just didn't make sense.

I think you have to be objective if you are going to sell your services -- if you always prescribe one solution, no matter what the problem, you're going to get a reputation for that. Not every problem is a nail.

--t. alex
but my friends call me T.

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