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Fucking Sue Me (2011)

pud.com

141–150 of 200 posts

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#141
Bad idea. Anyone who is offering hostile contract terms is very likely to use them. Many of these terms are extremely expensive - such as non-compete or excessive confidentiality, forcing you to put your name and reputation on the line for shady business practices or excessive liability.

Even if they don't sue you, they may publicly call you unethical for signing terms and then breaking them, turining the tables on you to sue them. It is considered excusable if you are a very small guy who simply doesn't have any other choice, but if you are a bigger company building on reputation you will suffer from it.

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#142
post #130
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The job of an engineer is to take the cost of materials, the budget, the expected longevity of the bridge, the project schedule, the prevailing environmental and geological conditions of the siting, etc. and balance all of these different variable against each other to arrive at a solution I'm not a lawyer, but I would assume that a good lawyer adopts an analogous process: they take the value of the contract, the pr…

But lawyers working in private practice, or partners in firms with a lot of power, will presumably be willing to balance risk against reward, and try to optimize accordingly. Lawyers: please correct me if I'm assuming incorrectly here. I am not a lawyer, but you are certainly assuming incorrectly. It is a lawyer's job to not only get you a good contract, but also to maximize their billable hours. They do not gouge to…

I should have been more clear: I meant that just as engineers are optimizing the risk/reward ratio for themselves and their interests, lawyers are likewise balancing risk and reward and optimizing for their interests. Often those interests overlap with those of their client/employer -- but at times they don't, as you underline.

My only point what that good lawyers probably use the same process. Good engineers aren't the only ones with strong logic skills.

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#143

There's a simple reason why this works for small businesses: nobody sues a guy with no money. So if you're a sole proprietor scraping by and you piss off a giant company with lawyers enough that they want to file a lawsuit against you, well, what's the upside for them if they win? Tens of thousands of dollars in expenses on their side, and roughly zero dollars in recovered costs from the business they destroyed or th…

Someone with 500k and a few employed certainly has money. This story was sheer luck and is only showing off that.

I disagree he got lucky. "Pud" is brilliant. Isn't this the guy that created TinyLetter, Adbrite, F-company? This stuff is legendary.

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#145
After handling lots of contracts back and forth, my experience is that you avoid adding new conditions to a contract for a large company if you can, but you had better remove anything that you don't intend to actually comply with. As an independent contractor, I've had companies remove the insurance requirement, non-solicitation, any unusual IP ownership clauses, etc. and never lost a contract yet. I especially watch for clauses that affect my ability to do my normal business with other companies after this work is complete and anything that puts a weird reporting burden on myself. You'd be surprised what's hidden in the company's contract boilerplate text that even the company lawyers forgot about.

My overall goal when doing this is to ensure that when the work is done, the customer signs off and the checks stop coming, that I don't owe them anything more.

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With lawyers, if everything goes perfectly then they just did their job. If anything goes wrong they're entirely blamed for it. Since they are paid by the hour, there is an explicit incentive to spend as much time as possible to make sure everything goes perfectly. Typical agency problem. It's up to the client to tell the lawyers when they are done. Now, the very very best lawyers, the ones who have a waiting list of…

Part of the situation is that the output of a lawyer cannot be measured clearly. The same is true for programmers but more people seem to be okay with shoddy code than with shoddy contracts. If the consequences of bad code were equally drastic as those of shoddy contracts, I'd imagine a lot more time being spent on code quality.

Actually, where the consequences of bad code are known to be drastic, a lot more time is spent on code quality. I worked on factory software at AMD for a while in the late 90s and early 2000s. The adage around there was that if the fab was down, it cost us a million dollars an hour. So we had a ton of testing, red tape, bureaucracy, and so on as part of change management. We did major upgrades and such on the 4th of July or during Christmas week, because those were the only times when the fab was down for more than an hour at a time (the hour was once a week at the weekly shift meeting for fab workers, IIRC). In preparation for those upgrades, we had a system set up as a duplicate of the (very expensive) production hardware and we actually rounded up the whole team and did dress rehearsals of the upgrade process, with go/no-go decision times built into the schedule based on timing how long it would take us to roll back the whole massive database from backup in time to ensure there would be no unscheduled downtime.

We also had some folks who had come to the company from Lockheed. They helped upgrade our procedures, because as you might imagine, defense contractors are even more hardcore about all this than factory control systems. If you make a mistake in the embedded code inside a missile or airplane, things blow up (the wrong things!) and people die.

This is more or less the opposite of a typical startup, where velocity is normally far more important than creating sufficient failsafes against any possible error.

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#148

"Worry about that in 2 months," I can't help but cringe. I quit my former job at a startup because they owed me 7 months salary. I really believed in the projects and in the CEO but, in the end, he couldn't walk the talk. It's a real shame because the company had - and still has - TONS of potential, but management is appalling.

I cringed reading your post, how on earth does someone get themselves into a position where they are owed 7 months salary? What happened there? I hope you managed to collect in the end

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#149

As much as I admire the candor & spirit of this, at the same time, I'd hate to have the chance of being completely destroyed by the lawyers. Dodged a bullet in this case, but to me, the downside is not even close to worth the upside. $400k contract, but if things go horribly awry, their lawyers are coming after you for millions, and drag you through the mud. Not worth it, in my opinion.

I interpreted Pud's dad like this: "Fucking sue me" == "I'm 22, have no assets to speak of, and you're going to try and collect millions on me? Good luck." In Pud's particular case, it's easier to say this. If you're an established firm with hundreds of employees and millions in cashflow, not so much.

Exactly. When I was about 20, one of my partners emptied the bank account leaving us unable to make payroll/rent and finish some client jobs. Had several clients come angry demanding we finish or they'd sue us. My dad gave me the exact same advice. We'd try to find some way of finishing the job over a longer period of time, otherwise, hey, lose your deposit, and good luck suing me or my company that have zero assets. It worked fine.

Years later at a more successful startup, the "sue me" thing doesn't work so well, and a pretty major win depended on a simple "and/or" clause written with inverse logic.

Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)

#150
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. "Unless their goal is simply revenge" As they've implied in The Godfather, taking things personally is bad for business. Companies that make money do whatever is necessary to keep the flow going. Revenge is a detour to this process so unless they're trying to stifle competition or the like, destroying someone isn't worth it. Revenge is bad for business.

People who are in revenge mode don't care what's good for business. It makes them feel better and that matters more. In the case of suing former employees, it also sends a clear message to existing employees.

>In the case of suing former employees, it also sends a clear message to existing employees.

Yes, but I'm not sure "run" is the message an you want to send to your employees.

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