4 ms·

The problem, apparently, is, that even in the largest software installations there are a lot of snowflakes to be taken into account (your "very large customer")

The problem, apparently, is, that even in the largest software installations there are a lot of snowflakes to be taken into account (your "very large customer").

doctor_eval 4y ago
Yeah, as engineers we want to say "well tell them we can't do it". But in reality, if the customer represents 25% of your income and they are dead set on getting their way, what you are really saying is that we should lose the customer - which translates to, "we have to sack a quarter of our team". (I had a CEO who used to use exactly this analogy with us).
- chasd00 4y ago
  > "well tell them we can't do it". hah yeah i've tried that a couple times over the years, it never worked. Another aggravating thing i ran into is in the industry i was working in (pharmacy) prices are calculated using a contracted formula. The pharmacy (my system) calculates a price and then sends the rx to the insurance company. They calculate using the same formula (hopefully) and if their result matches or comes out greater than what we calculated then they pay the invoice. However, if their calculation came up less than what we sent they'd pay their amount. It was a cat and mouse game constantly. Well one very large insurance carrier had a bug in their system that under the right conditions would come up a dollar short for a very common rx. I understood what was happening and called and called and bugged them to fix the issue. Finally, they just ended up saying "we're not going to change the system. end of story.". It blew my mind, I was right out of college and too naïve to consider they'd just flat out refuse to fix the bug.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    I actually saw something similar in telco, where a carrier was rounding charges to the cent, but charging in fractions of a cent. So for example a CDR might be worth $0.001 but my customer was being charged $0.01. My customer complained, but in this case they prevailed because the contract said nothing about rounding. This can be really significant. They ended up having to compute the charges and send the carrier a bill for the difference. It was worth tens of thousands of dollars per month.

The problem, apparently, is, that even in the largest software installations there are a lot of snowflakes to be taken into account (your "very large customer").

doctor_eval 4y ago

Yeah, as engineers we want to say "well tell them we can't do it". But in reality, if the customer represents 25% of your income and they are dead set on getting their way, what you are really saying is that we should lose the customer - which translates to, "we have to sack a quarter of our team". (I had a CEO who used to use exactly this analogy with us).

chasd00 4y ago
> "well tell them we can't do it". hah yeah i've tried that a couple times over the years, it never worked. Another aggravating thing i ran into is in the industry i was working in (pharmacy) prices are calculated using a contracted formula. The pharmacy (my system) calculates a price and then sends the rx to the insurance company. They calculate using the same formula (hopefully) and if their result matches or comes out greater than what we calculated then they pay the invoice. However, if their calculation came up less than what we sent they'd pay their amount. It was a cat and mouse game constantly. Well one very large insurance carrier had a bug in their system that under the right conditions would come up a dollar short for a very common rx. I understood what was happening and called and called and bugged them to fix the issue. Finally, they just ended up saying "we're not going to change the system. end of story.". It blew my mind, I was right out of college and too naïve to consider they'd just flat out refuse to fix the bug.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I actually saw something similar in telco, where a carrier was rounding charges to the cent, but charging in fractions of a cent. So for example a CDR might be worth $0.001 but my customer was being charged $0.01. My customer complained, but in this case they prevailed because the contract said nothing about rounding. This can be really significant. They ended up having to compute the charges and send the carrier a bill for the difference. It was worth tens of thousands of dollars per month.