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Key is to set the price. If the job is a hassle, you're not charging enough. That will also filter out bozos. Sometimes people really do have extreme requiremen

Key is to set the price. If the job is a hassle, you're not charging enough. That will also filter out bozos. Sometimes people really do have extreme requirements. And when they do, they're willing to pay 10x for it. Agreed though, this particular customer disqualified himself as soon as he said he wont pay if the server goes down. He should have offered a big bonus if the move succeeds without downtime.

noobermin 6y ago
This is probably the best compromise. Sure if you're moving a server with, idk, top secret government spy files or something then you charge 10x or some multiple. But that would obviously be the exception. The vast majority of these people are just self-entitled dipshits who have an inflated notion of self-worth. See my comment elsewhere on "the customer is always right."
derefr 6y ago
> Key is to set the price. If the job is a hassle, you're not charging enough. That will also filter out bozos. Sure. Just, there are some verticals where charging a "positive-ROI" amount gets you no business at all, because all the potential clients in that vertical are businesses that operate on such razor-thin margins that they don't actually have the cash-flow to pay for the extreme requirements they also have. They've been getting along until now purely by begging/tricking/manipulating people into doing negative-ROI one-off tasks for them. If forced to get contract all the services they need out on the free market, their business would cease to exist. (Therefore, you say, they should cease to exist. I'm not arguing!)
- rdslw 6y ago
  > there are some verticals where charging a "positive-ROI" amount gets you no business at all, if you do, you're just selling dollar bill for 80c. You may drink growth-kool-aid, or someday-monopoly-hope or VC-subsidizes-business. In the end, somebody pays for it either from stupidity or hope.
  - derefr 6y ago
    To be clear (and I realize this wasn't quite clear), I wasn't talking about pure monetary ROI, but rather "return" in terms of satisfaction of your preferences. I.e., a job paying a lot of money is "return" on investment; but so is a job that pays a lot of experience, or satisfaction. Meanwhile, a job that takes a lot of time to do requires a larger "investment" (in terms of the set of BATNA jobs you could otherwise be doing with your skills); but so do jobs that don't take very long, but are more physically demanding/emotionally draining, or where the client keeps jerking you around by changing the requirements. If working the job makes your utility go up (i.e. makes your life better), it's a positive-ROI job. If it makes your life worse, it's a negative-ROI job. So, let me restate: in some verticals, while the clients do pay a livable time-and-materials wage for the region and experience level... they expect far more labor (and far more highly-skilled labor) for their dollar than that dollar "should" be able to get them, such that the net utility from anyone taking that job is negative, even if they're "making money." These businesses get by mostly on exploiting young IT ingenues who don't yet realize their worth, and so are willing to give a try to e.g. "program a social-networking app" for $2000; or to e.g. "set up a PXE Linux automatic memory-testing boot env and Windows system-image deployment pipeline" for $300. (These are both things I naively got myself into when I was younger. Amusingly, I was in over my head on the social-networking app, but managed to complete the hardware qualification+deployment env just fine. And my only major obstacle for the social-networking app, was that the client insisted that it needed to be hosted on some free ISP hosting they had, and thus needed to be written in PHP4. Which I didn't even complain about... it was just a language I wasn't very familiar with, so I tried to learn it while working. Sigh.) In other words, these companies try to get newbies to do senior-level work, paying only newbie costs. Sometimes, surprisingly, that works! And they survive entirely because it sometimes works. It's basically the "my nephew knows computers, he can certainly repair mine" mindset applied to corporate planning.
- spydum 6y ago
  Evidenced precisely by all these ransomware attacks where victims have to pay up because they didn't invest in backup resources (maybe they had some tapes, but didn't find the staff or process to test any of it.. because they haven't needed them so far).
kenhwang 6y ago
When I did consulting, we always got unreasonable but technically not impossible asks like this. We never "fired" the customer, because that's just bad business and customer service. What we did instead was tell them their options, our recommendation, and "appropriate" billing estimates. Your job is to consult them to the best of your ability, not stop them from bad decisions despite your advice. So, 1 hour billed for 5 minutes of downtime, or 40 if you want absolutely none. Happy to do either, but highly recommend the former. 99% of people pick the cheaper recommended option. In this case, I would've tried to put the server on WiFi which would seem like less a hassle for me. Equipment acquisition cost billed to the customer.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > Your job is to consult them to the best of your ability, not stop them from bad decisions despite your advice. If you offer a client an option with a 1% chance of a very bad outcome and they understand and accept the risk, sure. But if they have not understood and accepted the risk? Implementing something you already know the client misunderstands ain't always a smart move.
  - HeavyStorm 6y ago
    That's consulting for you.
    - kenhwang 6y ago
      Yep. Then it's either extra billable hours for you to fix the mistake you knew was going to happen, and/or the lawyers get involved and point out the mistake being requested in whatever statement of work. Even better if you called out the exact failure scenario in the risks section that you suspect they didn't read. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if they listen/understand or not, as long as you documented telling them or it makes it into some legal document and they still pay the bill.
Dylan16807 6y ago
> Agreed though, this particular customer disqualified himself as soon as he said he wont pay if the server goes down. He should have offered a big bonus if the move succeeds without downtime. I don't know, that sounds too close to encouraging the attitude of "it's not worth it, I'll just take my normal pay". 10x vs. 0x is a significantly stronger incentive than 10x vs. 1x.

noobermin 6y ago

This is probably the best compromise. Sure if you're moving a server with, idk, top secret government spy files or something then you charge 10x or some multiple. But that would obviously be the exception. The vast majority of these people are just self-entitled dipshits who have an inflated notion of self-worth. See my comment elsewhere on "the customer is always right."

derefr 6y ago

> Key is to set the price. If the job is a hassle, you're not charging enough. That will also filter out bozos. Sure. Just, there are some verticals where charging a "positive-ROI" amount gets you no business at all, because all the potential clients in that vertical are businesses that operate on such razor-thin margins that they don't actually have the cash-flow to pay for the extreme requirements they also have. They've been getting along until now purely by begging/tricking/manipulating people into doing negative-ROI one-off tasks for them. If forced to get contract all the services they need out on the free market, their business would cease to exist. (Therefore, you say, they should cease to exist. I'm not arguing!)

rdslw 6y ago
> there are some verticals where charging a "positive-ROI" amount gets you no business at all, if you do, you're just selling dollar bill for 80c. You may drink growth-kool-aid, or someday-monopoly-hope or VC-subsidizes-business. In the end, somebody pays for it either from stupidity or hope.
- derefr 6y ago
  To be clear (and I realize this wasn't quite clear), I wasn't talking about pure monetary ROI, but rather "return" in terms of satisfaction of your preferences. I.e., a job paying a lot of money is "return" on investment; but so is a job that pays a lot of experience, or satisfaction. Meanwhile, a job that takes a lot of time to do requires a larger "investment" (in terms of the set of BATNA jobs you could otherwise be doing with your skills); but so do jobs that don't take very long, but are more physically demanding/emotionally draining, or where the client keeps jerking you around by changing the requirements. If working the job makes your utility go up (i.e. makes your life better), it's a positive-ROI job. If it makes your life worse, it's a negative-ROI job. So, let me restate: in some verticals, while the clients do pay a livable time-and-materials wage for the region and experience level... they expect far more labor (and far more highly-skilled labor) for their dollar than that dollar "should" be able to get them, such that the net utility from anyone taking that job is negative, even if they're "making money." These businesses get by mostly on exploiting young IT ingenues who don't yet realize their worth, and so are willing to give a try to e.g. "program a social-networking app" for $2000; or to e.g. "set up a PXE Linux automatic memory-testing boot env and Windows system-image deployment pipeline" for $300. (These are both things I naively got myself into when I was younger. Amusingly, I was in over my head on the social-networking app, but managed to complete the hardware qualification+deployment env just fine. And my only major obstacle for the social-networking app, was that the client insisted that it needed to be hosted on some free ISP hosting they had, and thus needed to be written in PHP4. Which I didn't even complain about... it was just a language I wasn't very familiar with, so I tried to learn it while working. Sigh.) In other words, these companies try to get newbies to do senior-level work, paying only newbie costs. Sometimes, surprisingly, that works! And they survive entirely because it sometimes works. It's basically the "my nephew knows computers, he can certainly repair mine" mindset applied to corporate planning.
spydum 6y ago
Evidenced precisely by all these ransomware attacks where victims have to pay up because they didn't invest in backup resources (maybe they had some tapes, but didn't find the staff or process to test any of it.. because they haven't needed them so far).

kenhwang 6y ago

When I did consulting, we always got unreasonable but technically not impossible asks like this. We never "fired" the customer, because that's just bad business and customer service. What we did instead was tell them their options, our recommendation, and "appropriate" billing estimates. Your job is to consult them to the best of your ability, not stop them from bad decisions despite your advice. So, 1 hour billed for 5 minutes of downtime, or 40 if you want absolutely none. Happy to do either, but highly recommend the former. 99% of people pick the cheaper recommended option. In this case, I would've tried to put the server on WiFi which would seem like less a hassle for me. Equipment acquisition cost billed to the customer.

michaelt 6y ago
> Your job is to consult them to the best of your ability, not stop them from bad decisions despite your advice. If you offer a client an option with a 1% chance of a very bad outcome and they understand and accept the risk, sure. But if they have not understood and accepted the risk? Implementing something you already know the client misunderstands ain't always a smart move.
- HeavyStorm 6y ago
  That's consulting for you.
  - kenhwang 6y ago
    Yep. Then it's either extra billable hours for you to fix the mistake you knew was going to happen, and/or the lawyers get involved and point out the mistake being requested in whatever statement of work. Even better if you called out the exact failure scenario in the risks section that you suspect they didn't read. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if they listen/understand or not, as long as you documented telling them or it makes it into some legal document and they still pay the bill.

Dylan16807 6y ago

> Agreed though, this particular customer disqualified himself as soon as he said he wont pay if the server goes down. He should have offered a big bonus if the move succeeds without downtime. I don't know, that sounds too close to encouraging the attitude of "it's not worth it, I'll just take my normal pay". 10x vs. 0x is a significantly stronger incentive than 10x vs. 1x.