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Comment by mpnagle | Hacker News Reader

I just want to say, as someone who has dealt with a very challenging client -- who refused payment on 30-40 hours I put in to work, after weeks of being completely non-responsive before the client's deadline -- I can't say how much I appreciate hearing stories like this one. We didn't take the course to court -- we were two - three people and the contract was $10k as a whole, but it left me feeling very raw about contract work. I have to say for me, this is a great ad for this employer being a safe and employee-valuing place to work.

Thanks!

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Responding not to throw truisms at you; checking that I'm not crazy.

> I have to say for me, this is a great ad for this employer being a safe and employee-valuing place to work.

The employer is meant to shield his employees from this kind of stuff. i.e. this is a "normal" employer.

Even if the clients don't pay the employer, the employer pays its employees -- that's the arrangement and the risk taken when you own the business (alternatively stated, as an non-exec employee, you trade a premium on salary to not deal with risk).

Oh, yeah, I think that's true that part of the employer-employee contract is guaranteeing employees payment.

I guess I mean something a little different then. That it's really heartwarming to see an employer 'go to bat' for his team's work and his company. I was resonating with the experience of directly having freelanced with a client feeling 'out of control.' I was really caught off-guard by it and it felt (in hindsight a mistake) easy to give an inch and give another inch. There's something here -- maybe I can't put my finger on it -- in this blog post that makes me thing the author would be an incredible asset in putting down hard limits and boundaries when they need to be put down.

> That it's really heartwarming to see an employer 'go to bat' for his team's work and his company

He "went to bat" in court as to not risk a default judgment or additional monetary loss. Talking about how your consulting company went far out of scope and criticizing/belittling an ex-client in a blog post is kind of strange, in my opinion.

> I was resonating with the experience of directly having freelanced with a client feeling 'out of control.' I was really caught off-guard by it and it felt (in hindsight a mistake) easy to give an inch and give another inch

Yeah, that's really common. Sometimes it's a simple situation of communicating the time demand or cost of client asks and other times, it's employing a firm "no" or calculating if it's worth firing the client (never fun).

> There's something here -- maybe I can't put my finger on it -- in this blog post that makes me thing the author would be an incredible asset in putting down hard limits and boundaries when they need to be put down.

I made another post in the thread about this if you're interested[0], but it appears as if this was an issue because of the exact opposite -- contractual scope of work was not enforced and substantial additional work was performed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348353

This is exactly why I fight these things. Another commentator explained it much better than me:

lazaroclapp - "There is a fairly long school of thought in ethics that posits that it's an important thing for most people to sacrifice self-interest in the name of justice, since it deters injustice. Basically, if most people respond to frivolous lawsuits by fighting them instead of settling or accepting unjust outcomes (within feasibility, of course), then engaging on frivolous lawsuits becomes unrewarding, and even unethical people stop doing so. The same goes for other kinds of bullying behavior."

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