“But it won’t make it more fun” - Assholes, probably.
Not being an asshole will make you more money
281–290 of 314 posts
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#282I had a clients contract that had this in it: "Recover any and all actual, incidental and consequential damages to XYZ, including but not limited to actual or estimated loss of profits and sales and costs to cover, attorney’s fees and costs.." I wrote back: "Nice try but yeah, no. ;-) " (My lawyer fixed all these overreaches and they were a great client.) As an aside my lawyer told me that when you a drafting a contr…
If you are replying to clients like that then I am glad you have a lawyer.
Lawyers are good tool in our business. If someone gives me a one page "mutual NDA" I can handle it myself.
If I get 9 pages of "our standard contract" and I read it through, ask if I can make changes and if they say yes, I give it to my lawyer.
For that contract I actually wrote back this:
Who signs these “standard contracts”?
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#283Not being one will earn you more in the long run, if you can fend off all the axxholes who fare better at short-term gains.
Unfortunately, our economy is now based on high short-term gains, there's plenty of axxholes everywhere.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an American expatriate I'm always shocked or bemused by the US-centric comments I get from family. I live in East Asia, which is by no measure a cultural or technological backwater, and was surprised to hear my mother say, two days ago, "you must get YouTube over there...". For some more perspective, I'm the most successful member of my family (from a financial pov) and from the condo I live in to the car I drive,…
When I first moved to China ~10 years ago, I mentioned to whomever I was on the phone with back home that I needed to go grab some cash and that I might lose the call when I got in the lift. They asked where I planned to get money in the middle of the night, and were surprised to learn that ATM technology had indeed made it to "the Orient." These days most people just ask if I've eaten a dog.
Guess there's a time lag. I was in China 35 years ago when they didn't have ATMs or anything like that and the west did. Times change.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first moved to China ~10 years ago, I mentioned to whomever I was on the phone with back home that I needed to go grab some cash and that I might lose the call when I got in the lift. They asked where I planned to get money in the middle of the night, and were surprised to learn that ATM technology had indeed made it to "the Orient." These days most people just ask if I've eaten a dog.
Guess there's a time lag. I was in China 35 years ago when they didn't have ATMs or anything like that and the west did. Times change.
I obviously wasn't around back then, but even today the pace of modernization in China is astounding; I can only imagine what it must've been like in Deng Xiaoping's later years.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try anywhere in Northern Europe
Name one. Genuinely interested. Most legal systems are broken in some way to some extent. Unfair cases exist because people aren't perfect, make mistakes and/or have agendas.
Some legal systems are less biased towards people with more money than others. I think the ones in northern Europe tend towards that, but I don't have specific examples and wouldn't expect them to be totally fair either.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
We called him out on it, he sent a new version and we executed. On the big contract he tried several other small variants on this (going back and post-hoc altering wording that had been agreed, delaying things for no reason, just generally being an incredible pain in the ass to deal with in a million small ways) until we got a press release from the CEO of his (global) company saying how happy they were to work with…
Maybe his pay was based on how hard he screws it?
Maybe they made a cost/benefit analysis along the lines of "If we mess with 10 potential partners we may lose one or two, but the gains of completely fucking one over make it completely worth it".
It's something I probably wouldn't do because the risk is too high, but I wouldn't be quick to assume the contract manager decides on his behavior based on feelings towards new companies.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened after? FWIW My wife and I were negotiating a commercial lease and we always did a diff between what they send back and what we sent them in case they pulled something like that. It may not be malicious (i.e. they updated a wrong version). They had integrity and they didn't do pull any stunts.
We called him out on it, he sent a new version and we executed. On the big contract he tried several other small variants on this (going back and post-hoc altering wording that had been agreed, delaying things for no reason, just generally being an incredible pain in the ass to deal with in a million small ways) until we got a press release from the CEO of his (global) company saying how happy they were to work with…
How much did you call them out? Did you escalate, as in "We really want to partner with you, but your legal guy is super hard to work with, can you have a talk with him"?
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#289A few years ago I started a company, then raised money through convertible notes. By the time the notes were due (2 years), we weren't ready to raise a round yet, so all investors extended their notes. All except one. The investor that didn't want to extend the note was also the CEO of the company that was our largest client, so not only did he call his note, he also ended his company's contract, making a huge hole i…
Isn't this a one-sided story, though? Maybe that person believes you didn't make good use of the money (i.e: diverted company funds for your own gain) which is way you weren't able to pay him back.
He might be an evil ass-hole but also he might be thinking that he is the one getting screwed here.
Re: Not being an asshole will make you more money
#290Kinda off topic but other side of the coin, befriending the asshole: At my first job there was this grizzly old engineer who was known for being pretty surly, but knew the code base almost as if by memory, and the behavior of the code. He was bothered by anything and everything and really just wanted to run out the clock and go home and work in his wood shop. I was in support and nobody wanted to go to him for help,…
I don't think he is an asshole but rather a not very social person. He can't deal too much with people. (the wood shop thing) But once you figured out how to become his friend, it didn't bother him to help you out.