What being ripped off taught me • Hacker News Board

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#71

Post by mikepurvis » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #36

magicalhippo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> strengthen the relationship

This is really the key. The "deal" has to have something for both parties. The vendor gets some kind of lock-in, prepayment, guarantee of future business, whatever it is, and in exchange the purchaser gets a discount.

The discount doesn't just come out of nowhere.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#72

Post by post-it » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

normie3000 wrote: post #47

ian_d wrote: post #43

Evergreen advice from the design side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U (Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me)

Watched a couple of times, but I don't fully understand the message in this video. Can someone ELI5?

The message is to have a contract and insist on being paid according to the contract, and refuse further work until you get paid.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#73

Post by notquitebuddy » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

freediddy wrote: post #63

When you walk into a shitshow like this, the first thing you do is secure your payments. Anyone who is in such bad shape like how OP described it means that they are desperate, and desperate people will do and say anything to get help. It is most likely going to not pay anyone so you need to make sure you're paid above and beyond anything else otherwise walk.

You forgot the middleground where there are thousands of laid off people who can do your exact job and undercut you etc.

These founders hire/fire through hundreds of us, they don't give a shit.

If you say 1 thing they don't like they go to the next.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#74

Post by awongh » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #11

Be 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…

I feel like it's easy in hindsight to say some tough sounding advice in the form of "be a hard-ass", but idk, I feel like there are plenty of real life cases that contradict this advice- taking a chance on a referral to work on something you find interesting. Of course the big-money clients will be fine with a hard-line stance and they have money to pay at the end, but that work tends to be less interesting.

OTOH, one other clear subtext of the story is the "savior" attitude of a lot of tech people, who think that, if they weren't using version control before, think, "oh, I'll just tell them about this great thing, and because it's much better they will definitely listen to me and implement it - it's only logical". But the harsh reality is that "better" things won't affect an org that went along that far and dug themselves that deep.

Never underestimate an org's ability to shoot itself in the foot, even if you think you know better. That includes getting your money from them.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#75

Post by jancsika » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

> The faith was that if they could’t pay, they’d let me know because I was actively digging their asses out of a hole they’d dug, and doing so tirelessly and professionally, without complaint.

I get what the author is saying here. But it's a bad idea to treat one's work team with deep communal devotion in this way, as if they are a kind of dysfunctional family-- or, in the author's case, apparently higher in status than real family.

Doing this without proper remuneration creates a market distortion, and that is bad for capitalism.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#76

Post by b8 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

There's not any incentives to pay you when they're in China and there's no legal recourse from the US. Even in the US suing is often times not worth it economically and getting someone to pay after a win is painful too if they don't just file bankruptcy. Escrow or upfront only is the best way to go.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#77

Post by FabHK » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

post-it wrote: post #22

rwmj wrote: post #15

What's an "AR bus"? How can augmented reality windows work on a bus unless you are (a) tracking the passenger's head and (b) there's only one passenger?

Screens outside the windows (not on the windows) can provide parallax, no need to track heads. However, in this case: > They were attempting to pull off AR effects on the transparent OLED windows of the bus without accounting for lens distortion, field of view, parallax, occlusion, etc., and were frustrated and mystified when things didn’t appear to line up. They were completely naive to what depth and scale cues are…

Can you elaborate? It seems to me that unless the screens are that far outside that they are where the target object is, two people that are offset laterally wrt the target object would have to be displayed something that's offset on the screen.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#78

Post by fmx » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

eckesicle wrote: post #21

We’ve also learned this lesson the hard way. These are now the clauses we require in every project we do: - Payment is due X days after receipt of invoice, or immediately after the consultant has addressed any quality issues, whichever is sooner - Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply t…

> Ironically, the good clients pay within 2-3 days normally, and the difficult ones are very “long tail”.

Why ironically? Isn't that exactly what you'd expect?

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#79

Post by doctorhandshake » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #37

That 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…

I think you’re right and it’s fair to reframe this that way, in that in a certain sense, despite my naivety, I was the adult in the room and should have seen what they couldn’t.

But then given what I’ve learned since I think I can say with some certainty that this particular group saw the writing on the wall and were willing to use the skilled labor and time of an endless army of cannon fodder to try to staunch the bleeding or take one more long shot at getting final payment, and doing so without the agreement or awareness of the people they enlisted to the risk they were participating in.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#80

Post by ProllyInfamous » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #11

Be 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…

>Be paid or don't work.

As an electrician currently self-stopped (for both non-payment & absenteeism, two months no contact, so far) I'm not budging. When you didn't show up for our last two on-site meetups (and still haven't contacted), I thought about filing a lien... but decided to just keep you from having tenants (by not finishing AC/water/electric). You'll get around to it..?

When I told this LLC/owner "you obviously aren't in a rush because you obviously aren't visiting the jobsite/me" I sort of expected him to show within a few days. Then a few weeks. And now we're entering a few months.

You have weeks of my punchlists (unresolved to do), I have weeks of questions (what do you want?) and you won't even do simple things like turning on power/water.

Fuck you, pay me.

[•] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U>