There's no such thing as a company temporarily being in dire straits. These kind of companies are always in dire straits and crisis - it's a business tactic to not deliver and not pay. Just stay away, whether you're a customer, a contractor, an employee or if they want to be your customer.
What being ripped off taught me
31–40 of 247 posts
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#32The fact that this is so many words makes me worry the author underappreciated the main lesson: risk exposure.
When you go out of pocket - you are out of pocket and the risk is all yours. If that one thing was different then all the remaining risk is on the client - they don't want to do version contr - ok cool you still get paid.
Usually when you have to pay in to get paid out (outside of a direct investment scenario) it's a scam. The people who fall for the Nigeria Prince thing are operating the same way.
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#33He says "trust your gut" about 12 times, but the whole lead up has 0 mention that he was worried he would not get paid. His only gut feelings seemed to be around tech issues.
Yes, I guess also trust the situation when it looks completely wrong. your gut is not lying when it sees that as well
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#34No longer a contractor but I used to offer a 10-15% discount for paying upfront. Almost every client took this deal. Earned a little less but never lost sleep over payments.
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#35> End clients can’t tell the difference between these bozos and me. I don’t know what to do with that information but it feels bad.
this is only getting worse with ai.
all the artifacts of good work are there but none of the depth.
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#36Be paid or don't work. I am so deadly serious - do not continue working if your invoices are late. You don't have to be a jerk about it, just explain to your primary contact that you need to be paid and you pick up tools again when the money has arrived. BUT it is on YOU to properly negotiate reasonable payment terms. And if you don;t know or don't trust the client then require payment in advance until a stronger com…
> Do not be afraid to lose business from companies that are squeamish about paying you - in fact actively avoid such companies. My boss said that the ones who have negotiated the best deals are the ones that are late paying, complain about just about every bill and will write angry letters when my boss index adjust pricing. He said it taught him to never offer a really good deal for a regular customer (ie where the u…
I'm not sure that's the best takeaway here, in that it gets the causation wrong. It's not the deal that made the customer bad, it's that the bad customer insisted on getting a deal, whereas a good customer usually knows what quality costs and is prepared to pay.
The takeaway here is probably that the fix isn't just "never discount", but it's to screen for the kind of customer who treats a good deal as an invitation to strengthen the relationship.
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#37That doesn’t really sound like “being ripped off,” as opposed to “betting on a lame horse.”
The people behind this were irresponsible, childish, and exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They weren’t really hardline crooks. Crooks are probably a lot more organized.
I have gotten myself invested with similar crowds. There’s usually a charismatic spokesperson, leading the chaos.
They likely didn’t plan to rip him off, but paying him wasn’t really something they thought about. Real crooks put lots of planning into taking money.
> Multiple very junior developers were touching (binary, TouchDesigner) code and deploying straight to production via thumb drive, with zero version control. In fact, they didn’t know what version control was.
I suspect many startups fit that description. If they survive, then they usually pull themselves up by the bootstraps, eventually. Many of them collapse, taking everything with them.
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#38I was owed billable hours from Stanford University but refused to do any further work until the outstanding invoice was paid. Their accounts payable department didn't want to, so I had to tell the client "sorry" and walked away. It's really weird because I didn't have a problem in the near past then and was even an FTE at one point. I'm unwilling to work for free or for imaginary, low liquidation preference equity of a worthless startup.
Ordinarily, I would sign master agreements and set PO terms up-front. Typically, the better customers would agree to very strict requirements / objectives for a particular time period for a specific price. Any deviations would require negotiation. Hourly is fine too but there must be regular milestone deliveries so that there's demonstrable value for money being conveyed rather than an appearance of a milking-oriented consultant. Expectations must always be managed.
Re: What being ripped off taught me
#39> I missed the month of May with my 2-year-old kid. My wife cared for a 2-year-old alone. The weirdest part to me, receive a call and just get up and go? Priorities? Did you write this blog post from the doghouse?
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Re: What being ripped off taught me
#40Sometimes you just have to get scammed to be able to recognize scams. Seems obvious to outsiders, but can be hard to see when you're in it.
Some favorites:
- No way they would actually screw me over! We're buds/they got me tiger balm/they paid some/I did them a solid
- Thin veneer of safe fallbacks that doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Legal or other 'repercussions'
- Endless delays and excuses (though it's usually too late by this point)