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This seems like such a narrow viewpoint. Consider a business problem -- like a misconfiguration of an Amazon S3 bucket -- that is needlessly costing a company a

This seems like such a narrow viewpoint. Consider a business problem -- like a misconfiguration of an Amazon S3 bucket -- that is needlessly costing a company an extra $30k per month. Say you don't have the expertise on your team and hire an expert for 1 hour @ $20,000/hour to fix it. It would be well worth it to stop the bleeding.

Ididntdothis 6y ago
This example sounds a little like the examples to justify torture because they guy you have caught knows how to defuse the ticking bomb. Sounds good but never happens in reality.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  other than torture is immoral and paying someone for expertise is sensible this analogy is spot on. I agree that 20000 for one hour is pretty unlikely but 10,000 a day for 2 days seems like it might happen.
- tomp 6y ago
  This is business, not saving human lives. Remember, whenever a company pays you something, you're leaving money on the table - they're still making a profit overall, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this! Same goes with buying, of course - any car discount you fail to negotiate, is profit for the dealership.
- giantDinosaur 6y ago
  It's perhaps uncommon for such values with respect to S3 bucket engineering experts, but I've come up against many problems where paying an expert $600 an hour to solve something within a day would have saved thousands. The real problem is picking an expert who'll actually have it solved quickly, while avoiding the consultants who will drag out a day of work into multiple days/weeks, or leave you with working but deficient solutions. Difficult!
- exdsq 6y ago
  I actually organised this once (not torture, paying a large amount for an hour or twos work). I was made tech manager at a startup and that included the on-site infrastructure where we had ~10 support agents taking calls for our main client. We were having VoIP issues (dropped calls) due to a misconfigured router/switch and I just couldn't solve it after spending a week investigating (I was ~2 years into my career with very little sysadmin experience). I hired a contractor to remotely fix it at £375 an hour (took two hours) and was entirely worth it. P.S. It was an inflated amount to get an immediate fix based on his daily rate knowing it'd only take an hour or two - not because sysadmins working on ~30 person networks reguarly earn ~£3k a day.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  A better example would be a broken hard drive change.If you have no valuable data,you could just bin in and buy a new one,so such a service would only be able to charge $50or so for labour.Now,if the hard drive contained some valuable info,i.e. technical drawings with no copies outside it,etc.,then you suddenly need to hire a data recovery company,which, depending on how difficult the task is, could charge you thousands if not more. Here's a good example when it's worth paying tons of money for some otherwise absurd things: www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bitcoin-value-james-howells-newport-landfill-hard-drive-campbell-simpson-laszlo-hanyecz-a8091371.html%3famp

Ididntdothis 6y ago

This example sounds a little like the examples to justify torture because they guy you have caught knows how to defuse the ticking bomb. Sounds good but never happens in reality.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
other than torture is immoral and paying someone for expertise is sensible this analogy is spot on. I agree that 20000 for one hour is pretty unlikely but 10,000 a day for 2 days seems like it might happen.
tomp 6y ago
This is business, not saving human lives. Remember, whenever a company pays you something, you're leaving money on the table - they're still making a profit overall, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this! Same goes with buying, of course - any car discount you fail to negotiate, is profit for the dealership.
giantDinosaur 6y ago
It's perhaps uncommon for such values with respect to S3 bucket engineering experts, but I've come up against many problems where paying an expert $600 an hour to solve something within a day would have saved thousands. The real problem is picking an expert who'll actually have it solved quickly, while avoiding the consultants who will drag out a day of work into multiple days/weeks, or leave you with working but deficient solutions. Difficult!
exdsq 6y ago
I actually organised this once (not torture, paying a large amount for an hour or twos work). I was made tech manager at a startup and that included the on-site infrastructure where we had ~10 support agents taking calls for our main client. We were having VoIP issues (dropped calls) due to a misconfigured router/switch and I just couldn't solve it after spending a week investigating (I was ~2 years into my career with very little sysadmin experience). I hired a contractor to remotely fix it at £375 an hour (took two hours) and was entirely worth it. P.S. It was an inflated amount to get an immediate fix based on his daily rate knowing it'd only take an hour or two - not because sysadmins working on ~30 person networks reguarly earn ~£3k a day.
cosmodisk 6y ago
A better example would be a broken hard drive change.If you have no valuable data,you could just bin in and buy a new one,so such a service would only be able to charge $50or so for labour.Now,if the hard drive contained some valuable info,i.e. technical drawings with no copies outside it,etc.,then you suddenly need to hire a data recovery company,which, depending on how difficult the task is, could charge you thousands if not more. Here's a good example when it's worth paying tons of money for some otherwise absurd things: www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bitcoin-value-james-howells-newport-landfill-hard-drive-campbell-simpson-laszlo-hanyecz-a8091371.html%3famp