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The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

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Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#121

Post by roflyear »

logdap wrote: post #32
emodendroket wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess "the dangerously hot coffee that fused a customer's labia" does not have the same punch when trying to argue for tort reform.

That's a myth within a myth. The coffee was industry standard temperature, they still serve coffee that hot today (Wikipedia says as much.) The lawsuit was justified though, because the cup design was defective. It shouldn't have collapsed like it did.

Well, whatever the case - the coffee was hot enough to cause severe burns.

Why would anyone think it is OK to serve a drink so hot that it can cause severe burns?

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#122

Post by systems_glitch »

pxmpxm wrote: post #114
systems_glitch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time you get to drill and extract a stripped fastener on-site because you had a cheap tool in your box really ought to be the last day you spend on cheap tools! I'd imagine a personal injury would really reinforce that sentiment.

But harbor freight has all those deals though!

And now you've got a hardened screw extractor broken off inside your stripped out fastener :D

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#123

Post by roflyear »

codeisawesome wrote: post #115
treeman79 wrote: post #90

My dad was in purchasing for various aircraft manufacturers, including McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. It was literally his job to try and keep this nonsense under control. It was extremely frequent that the engineers would request some screw with hyper specific requirements and would end up costing dozens of dollars or so per screw. Even more for the specialized tooling that would go with it. From his perspective, the…

This sounds rather familiar, in Software :)

More software companies need this role. I tried to make this my role recently (with cloud services and whatever) and succeeded somewhat but not entirely.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#125

Post by dmix »

LadyCailin wrote: post #116
gretch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a more accurate analogy is that if you bought those 3 items and they did have proper itemized cost, but the whole package also had a $500 shipping charge. And then it’s not obvious how to distribute the shipping cost across each item. And in both situations it’s probably better to itemize by itself, though maybe some system didn’t allow for non tangible costs like “R&D”

If you itemize separately, then you can start to ask the important questions, like, “why is shipping $500”.

The excuse repeatedly here is that "it was easier/convenient (to merge it into a single line item)" or "its just an accounting artifact", as if that isn't a giant red flag all in itself. It's easy to ignore the $600... but if a hammer line-item could be 10x'd on vague R&D costs only the original accountant really understands... how is that better? That's a recipe for masking waste and never knowing why anything costs as much as it does, without expensive in-person interviews with the people involved.

Can't imagine what it's like trying to compete with companies engaging in this sort of practice. How could you possibly project costs? Why even bother? Just tell them it's a $1 hammer and make it up in R&D hidden away in "accounting artifacts".

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#126

Post by noizejoy »

unreal37 wrote: post #4

The so-called "real" explanation of the $600 hammer doesn't make the story any better. The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. Just because the extra $420 was "R&D expense" for something else, doesn't make the hammer any cheaper. Even in the most charitable explanation, this makes it impossible to know the real cost of anythin…

> If the contractor can lump all sorts of charges into the cost of the hammer (for unrelated projects), it's a way of hiding the true cost of anything.

You should have seen the massive number of very large enterprise IT projects in the late 1990s that were justified, approved, budgeted and accounted for under the famous Y2K umbrella.

Every reasonably smart business or IT manager figured out ways to connect their pet project to Y2K and after that the approvals were almost automatic.

Because what VP, CEO, board member or even shareholder dared to question the necessity of preventing the potentially catastrophic events if Y2K bugs weren’t properly eradicated.

It was pretty amazing times.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#127

Post by xapata »

unreal37 wrote: post #4

The so-called "real" explanation of the $600 hammer doesn't make the story any better. The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. Just because the extra $420 was "R&D expense" for something else, doesn't make the hammer any cheaper. Even in the most charitable explanation, this makes it impossible to know the real cost of anythin…

Sounds like any bureaucracy. The government doesn't have a monopoly on inefficiency.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#128

Post by NikolaNovak »

joshspankit wrote: post #87
NikolaNovak wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. What's the context or meaning of put up or shut up? Did you reply to right thread or did I inadvertently misrepresent anything? My point is that on all my projects for 25 years now, it's normal for many roles to need a significant amount of studying to become productive. That studying may involve project or client specific material such as design and architecture documents, functional specs, process a…

If they are indeed replying to you, I suspect they are coming from a freelance background where it’s sometimes beneficial to have a hard line in order to either get the project moving or drop the client (and move on to more serious ones)

Ah. If so I still think we don't understand each other.

It's not "we don't know what to do with you go read some books". It's "we have 80,000 time and labour business rules that are unique to our public sector organization and you should not code any business rules into our payroll system until you have a vague understanding of how we operate". That IS a serious client and a serious project and that study time IS serious. It's important. It's a success predictor. If you ignore it or are coxky and go "meh I've seen it all before " you'll make an expensive business error. Not necessarily a technical error, not a memory leak or suboptimal sql. But people will get paid wrong or your ledger will be wrong or another business impact.

Again, I may live in different it world than average active HN participant. But developers on my projects speak business to functional analysts. They understand payroll or Financials or hr or whatever in general, and also understand them in particular as it pertains to client. It's not wasted time or inefficiency. Not sure if I'm presenting my case well or persuading anybody - but I'm used to paying people to learn when they join projects, including senior niche experts :-)

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#129

Post by mberning »

Anyone that ever worked for a sufficiently large organization knows that $600 hammers are common, and in the grand scheme of things, one of the smallest grifts possible. I don't want to call it "corruption", but the scale of "questionable waste" within large enterprises and goverment agencies is absolutely breathtaking.

Re: The myth of the $600 hammer (1998)

#130

Post by emodendroket »

pxmpxm wrote: post #112
emodendroket wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess "the dangerously hot coffee that fused a customer's labia" does not have the same punch when trying to argue for tort reform.

Found the litigator...

I am not now nor have I ever been a lawyer.
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