51–60 of 200 posts
Relevant Hark! A Vagrant: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=206
I downvoted your post because it only contained a link to a web comic. If you had provided some of your own opinions on the blog post or why the comic was relevant to the blog post, I would have refrained. I like to explain my downvotes when the downvoted post is not an obvious troll.
But as with many things, the smart path is probably somewhere in between the two extremes...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jesus Christ, $50k to pick the company name?? You could launch a whole new product for that much.
$50k to pick a company name sounds pretty low for most companies. Names are important. Granted I reject the idea that you need to pay some high-falutin' corporation to name it ("Agilent", anyone?), but $50k to do some background searches, patent searches, general lawyer review? Doesn't seem too bad to me.
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…
In a way, lawyers are the QA team for the legal world. They know that the shit hitting the fan can potentially be very expensive, so they will go to extreme lengths to prevent any possibility of that happening. But just like you cannot rely on your QA team to prioritize features and bug fixes (because, really, who's going to click those 15 buttons in that precise order with that precise timing to trigger that bug), you cannot rely on a lawyer to determine your business plan.
Lawyers fill the role that lawyers fill. If you're an engineer, then you have to fill the engineer role.
What is that role? My father is a mechanical engineer, and he explained to me very early on just what it means to be an engineer. You see, an engineer could design a bridge that doesn't collapse and lasts for thousands of years, but that's not the engineer's job. 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 variables against each other to arrive at a solution.
If we're programmers, then we're saying that we can write down instructions in such a way that a computer can execute them and produce some output. If we're software engineers, then we're saying that we can balance features, schedule, bug fixes, test coverage, etc. and eventually ship it!
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…
"Unless their goal is simply revenge"
Revenge is bad for business.
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…
Not that I consider that strategy cost-effective in general. For one thing, it's bad PR. (Unless you're some kind of wizard that can spin it like, "we're principled and don't let bullies walk all over us. That's why we hold people to their promises")
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…
An additional upside for them is, it sets an example. If MegaCorp gains a reputation for being revenge-driven life ruiners, then future contractors will know the stakes are serious, and they'll be less likely to violate their contracts. Not that I consider that strategy cost-effective in general. For one thing, it's bad PR. (Unless you're some kind of wizard that can spin it like, "we're principled and don't let bull…