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When I was a student I took a work-from-home job manually generating HTML pages for an online furnishing shop. They somehow had a successful web presence but al

• treehau5 9y ago
  > I learned something that day, though I'm not sure what. Get paid for your output, and not your time?
  • afandian 9y ago
    No, I knew that before, hence negotiating up-front. That's what caused my surprise.
  • doingmyting 9y ago
    People pay for perceived value. Emphasis on perceived.
  • bittercynic 9y ago
    Sibling comment by doingmyting seems like a valid contribution to me. Anyone know why it's dead?
    • andrewflnr 9y ago
      Their comment history seems ok, too. Oddly, their dead comments are not chronologically contiguous.
• mikeash 9y ago
  I think you learned not to tell people how the sausage is made.
  • setq 9y ago
    This sums it up nicely. Also, if it's easy and you've done it a million times, charge an inflated fixed price. If it's new territory, charge by the hour. Edit: before I forget, if you let them know how it's done then you need to charge for the several times they won't come back again afterwards.
  • 6stringmerc 9y ago
    Bingo. Besides, people are scared by humans capable of doing tasks much faster than previously thought. When in doubt, sandbag! See also: the scene in the film "Big" when grown-up Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks) gets the lecture from a Co-Worker (Jon Lovitz) to slow down his data entry as to not get everybody fired by going at a leisurely pace.
    • afandian 9y ago
      The weird thing is, this was a very small business who hit the jackpot of high Google ratings. They weren't a heaving bureaucratic business.
• kelnos 9y ago
  > I learned something that day, though I'm not sure what. You learned that, despite the fact that you negotiated to be paid by output rather than time, the pay that the company was comfortable with was actually based on their impression of the time it would take to build each page. If they had known you could automate it, they likely would have expected you to agree to a lower per-page fee. I don't think you did anything wrong, but I don't blame them for being annoyed. Essentially you were a shrewd negotiator, and "won" that interaction, and _that_ was annoying. But yeah, as a sibling said: don't tell people how the sausage is made. If it's clear up front they're paying for the sausage, and not for the time it takes you to make it, I'd say you're ethically in the clear.
  • afandian 9y ago
    True, I saw an efficiency and exploited it, so in a way I 'won'. And I was taking a bet myself, as I didn't know the precise details of the job before taking it and just how much I could automate it. But they didn't logically 'lose' anything, business-wise, they got exactly what they asked for. I suppose what I learned is that it's humans who run a business, and humans aren't always logical and act based on feelings.
    • devopsproject 9y ago
      You learned about "value" They had a difficult problem (from their perspective) and they saw you easily solve it. This changed the "value" of your work in their minds. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
    • obmelvin 9y ago
      I think you 'winning' was exactly the reason they didn't particularly like it. In you agreeing to charge by page and not time, they very well may have thought they were having you. In the sense that they believed it to be a slow process and by you not charging per time they were getting a deal by possibly paying less if you were slow.
    • bitJericho 9y ago
• winter_blue 9y ago
  > I learned something that day, though I'm not sure what. You learned that people get sour with jealousy and annoyed when you can produce the same output / unit of work, at a fraction of the time that it takes them?
  • afandian 9y ago
    It goes further than that. I offered to show them how to automate the job (it's not like I had a promising career making HTML pages to sell furniture) and they didn't take it because presumably it bruised their pride. Even though it was strongly in their interests.
    • WalterBright 9y ago
      > because presumably it bruised their pride. Even though it was strongly in their interests. We all do that. For example, I'll hold onto a bad investment because selling it means admitting I screwed up. It's a tendency we all have to fight.
      • danielharrison 9y ago
        Not everyone has this bias. I think it comes down to how logically or emotionally driven the individual is.
        • fragmede 9y ago
          Sometimes it is the most intelligent and logical people that have that bias the worst because they believe themselves immune to emotion.
        • WalterBright 9y ago
          > Not everyone has this bias. Are you sure about that? As research in "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman shows, people exhibit the usual cognitive biases even while adamantly asserting they do not.
• gerbilly 9y ago
  You learned that people value effort over results. Here's a common situation from programming. A programmer, Steve, works long hours but writes sloppy code. Steve is often seen by management fixing critical issues in production, and 'saving the day'. Eventually Steve, leaves to work at a bigger company and is replaced by a new programmer, Dave, who is more methodical. Dave eventually cleans up the code and gets it to run smoothly. The problems in production go away, and Dave can work at a leisurely pace. Management will typically think to themselves: Dave is pretty good but that guy Steve was a real rockstar! Humans are biased to like stories. The story of Steve slaying software dragons[1] is just way more compelling than the boring tale of Dave watching a machine smoothly do its work. When that company hired you to work for them, a subtext of that arrangement is that you were both going to go on a quest together. I believe this to be a deeply embedded bias in human thinking, and that it explains part of why they were miffed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
  • undersuit 9y ago
    So how much does adding drama to my work routine help my compensation rate?
    • BeetleB 9y ago
      Sadly, it helps. The guy in my former group who complained a lot and would push back to the management heavily was the one the manager respected the most. The problem is: His complaints were often ridiculous and did not have merit - no one was fooled by them - not even the manager who usually ignored his complaints. But his behavior (regardless of the content) was used unintentionally as a measure of how engaged the employee is and how much he cared about the work (complete BS - the employee was a good friend of mine and I knew him well). This isn't just my view of the world. The manager essentially told me this. Now of course, he was a pretty poor manager, but I do believe that unless a manager actively guards against these kinds of judgments, they will be the default.
      • sprafa 9y ago
• skolos 9y ago
  This reminds me one study that I've read sometime ago (sorry my google-fu is not good enough and I cannot find link to it) - when people call locksmith and get inexperienced technician that takes an hour to do the job they felt the charge was reasonable and justified. If they get experienced technician that does same job within 10 minutes, people feel ripped off when they pay same money as in the first case.
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    It wasn't a study; it was a guy who talked to a locksmith recounting their conversation.
• TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  There are two and a half competing forces in companies. The first is the pursuit of profit. The second is the maintenance of hierarchy and status. (In more humane companies the half force is an explicit dedication to benign personal and social improvement of all participants. But let's ignore that for now.) Many companies are willing to sacrifice profits in order to maintain hierarchy. Aside from the bugs, which are questionable, the only "crime" in any of these stories is lèse-majesté - the narcissistic wounding of someone who considers themselves a superior in the implied hierarchy. People with authoritarian tendencies tend to consider this a far more serious crime than petty theft. Being more competent, better informed, and more efficient should be a positive attribute, not a social challenge. But it's incredibly hard to set up a corporate culture which is a genuine performant meritocracy where status depends entirely on competence and ability. Most companies are a very long way from this ideal. Many have an explicitly feudal mindset, where innovation and competence in underlings is not only threatening, it's terrifying.
• kefka 9y ago
  What you learned, is if you develop the automation, do NOT tell others that you did. And in your case, you should have implemented a time-delay from page-generation to page-creation, to make it look like you did it. Ive automated a portion of my job. It does require me having to type my OTP token, but I can build more and more with my private stack. It also means I can do less and still do more.
• wfunction 9y ago
  They were annoyed at you because you exploited an information asymmetry between the two of you (which is how long the job would actually take).
  • s73ver 9y ago
    And they didn't attempt to exploit an information asymmetry when hiring them?
    • wfunction 9y ago
      I don't know, but I was just explaining why they're annoyed, not whether they should be annoyed.
      • hasenj 9y ago
        They thought they were playing him, and got about when they learned that in fact he was the one playing them.
• moron4hire 9y ago
  Honestly, clients should have to pay more for the same amount of work done in less time.
• jason_s 9y ago
  there's that anecdote (apocryphal?) of Steinmetz at GE: [1] (grrr yes it looks like it is apocryphal [2]; I wish people were more honest and careful about where they get their information and what they do or don't know ) ---- In the early years of this century, Steinmetz was brought to General Electric's facilities in Schenectady, New York. GE had encountered a performance problem with one of their huge electrical generators and had been absolutely unable to correct it. Steinmetz, a genius in his understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, was brought in as a consultant -- not a very common occurrence in those days, as it would be now. Steinmetz also found the problem difficult to diagnose, but for some days he closeted himself with the generator, its engineering drawings, paper and pencil. At the end of this period, he emerged, confident that he knew how to correct the problem. After he departed, GE's engineers found a large "X" marked with chalk on the side of the generator casing. There also was a note instructing them to cut the casing open at that location and remove so many turns of wire from the stator. The generator would then function properly. And indeed it did. Steinmetz was asked what his fee would be. Having no idea in the world what was appropriate, he replied with the absolutely unheard of answer that his fee was $1000. Stunned, the GE bureaucracy then required him to submit a formally itemized invoice. They soon received it. It included two items: 1. Marking chalk "X" on side of generator: $1. 2. Knowing where to mark chalk "X": $999. [1] http://news.mit.edu/1999/vestspeech http://news.mit.edu/1999/vestspeech [2] http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]