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Sure, but they didn't hire a plumber to fix their bathroom. They hired a plumber to spend 40 hours a week maintaining all the plumbing in a building. If you dis

Sure, but they didn't hire a plumber to fix their bathroom. They hired a plumber to spend 40 hours a week maintaining all the plumbing in a building. If you discover this plumber is only spending 20 hours fixing the most pressing issues, then instead of resolving lower priority issues or backlogged maintenance they instead went across the street to handle their most pressing issues, your naturally going to be upset. If you want to work on a per-project basis there are plenty such consulting gigs out there, but with salaried work the general understanding is you are buying a chunk of someone's time rather than specific projects.

akomtu 4y ago
You may hire a good plumbers to do what you're describing, but he is going to bill you for each repair separately, and will be incentivized to find as many issues as possible. That's going to be very expensive. Greedy owners would try to reduce the cost by writing a fixed monthly rate into the contract, and would cry later when the contract attracts a cheap slacker who pretends to be competent.
- Volundr 4y ago
  Many large buildings maintain full-time maintenance people on a salary basis. For your smaller general office parks these are usually generalists, but for your larger skyscrapers, data-centers, etc you absolutely can and do see electricians, plumbers, etc working on a regular salary. No they do not bill per-repair in this situation.
  - akomtu 4y ago
    That's a team of cheap slackers who do just enough to keep the water running. It's against their interests to find more work for themselves. You may try to force them by adding personal liability for failures they neglected to prevent, but that's going to have the opposite effect: now only cheap and dumb slackers would sign up. The contract we're discussing is like the impossible ladder: it has many cool properties, but it can't exist in reality.
    - Volundr 4y ago
      That flies in the face of my direct experience working with these people, but sure let's take your assumption at face value. By this logic everyone on salary in any career must be a cheap, dumb slacker, after all there is no difference between accounting on salary, plumbing on salary, writing software on salary or working in a warehouse on salary. The exact same logic applies. Or maybe, just maybe doing plumbing on salary has the exact same set of tradeoffs as doing any other job on salary and people choose either for different reasons.

akomtu 4y ago

You may hire a good plumbers to do what you're describing, but he is going to bill you for each repair separately, and will be incentivized to find as many issues as possible. That's going to be very expensive. Greedy owners would try to reduce the cost by writing a fixed monthly rate into the contract, and would cry later when the contract attracts a cheap slacker who pretends to be competent.

Volundr 4y ago
Many large buildings maintain full-time maintenance people on a salary basis. For your smaller general office parks these are usually generalists, but for your larger skyscrapers, data-centers, etc you absolutely can and do see electricians, plumbers, etc working on a regular salary. No they do not bill per-repair in this situation.
- akomtu 4y ago
  That's a team of cheap slackers who do just enough to keep the water running. It's against their interests to find more work for themselves. You may try to force them by adding personal liability for failures they neglected to prevent, but that's going to have the opposite effect: now only cheap and dumb slackers would sign up. The contract we're discussing is like the impossible ladder: it has many cool properties, but it can't exist in reality.
  - Volundr 4y ago
    That flies in the face of my direct experience working with these people, but sure let's take your assumption at face value. By this logic everyone on salary in any career must be a cheap, dumb slacker, after all there is no difference between accounting on salary, plumbing on salary, writing software on salary or working in a warehouse on salary. The exact same logic applies. Or maybe, just maybe doing plumbing on salary has the exact same set of tradeoffs as doing any other job on salary and people choose either for different reasons.