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I think you are taking the article a touch too literally. It's not telling you to give consultants made up tasks to find out how they reply, it's telling your to listen to consultants responses when you give them difficult but not impossible tasks. The story about orange juice is just a nice example to make it easy to understand.

Agreed, if the point is to listen carefully and understand if someone else is truly processing what you are saying, but not agreed if it means making things up for the sake of "testing" someone. Sometimes people make up tests or crises in dating as well, just to "test" the other person; you should carefully consider a person in the circumstances you find yourself in, and should find activities where things come out naturally; but who wants to find out that their significant other made up difficult things to test them?

My point is more about how do you equate the level of difficulty of 700 glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice to software or anything else? At what point are you just a lying?

I've been consulting for 20 years and most clients I come across that subscribe to this idea that they are the only one with anything at stake here are the WORST clients. They are the ones that make you pass all these tests and jump through all of these hoops only to realize that they're so unorganized and dysfunctional that they can't even manage their own projects.

I see the point, I just think it's horrible advice, especially in this new world where everyone thinks they're some startup CEO that's so brave for laying it all on the line they can act like this with complete disregard of the experience the other person brings to the table. If you are constantly running into issues with consultants/contractors/vendors not producing, there's a good chance that you're the problem.

I'm confused as to why you're reacting so hostilely.

> My point is more about how do you equate the level of difficulty of 700 glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice to software or anything else? At what point are you just a lying?

Who's equating the difficulty of the contrived example to anything else? Beyond equating them both as something that's difficult but not impossible?

I don't know your background but I'd imagine you might be able to understand, or know, that migrating a company, or even a small group or a single person, from one software system to another is often a difficult project. I can certainly appreciate the advice to immediately dismiss anyone from consideration for helping me with such a project if they tell me that the migration is either 'impossible' or 'easy'.

I'm not hostile, I just don't see the point in this. Funny enough, I googled "The Orange Juice Test" and found this explanation that makes a ton of sense:

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Even though this rule of thumb is very simple, it is very important and as always, has two perspectives that need to be considered, one of the recipient and another of the provider.

Service recipient perspective: A service recipient looks for some one who is knowledgeable about the request and shows enough signs of comprehension of the subject area/ domain. A provider who says that a request is not possible doesn't get the business. So is some one who says he/she/their organization will get it done, without getting in to the details. The person who is most likely to be given the business is some one who gets into the details and can quote a price and give reasons for the price. Of course giving details for the price quoted is not a guarantee to get the business, as the price may be too high for the service recipient.

Service provider perspective:This is about two things

#1 Knowing one's subject/domain well: The story may be about preparing fresh orange juice. But in real life, it is applicable for any work that we do. You the reader may be a developer, team lead, software engineer or a project manager. When some one asks whether an activity or a task can be done, you must be proficient enough about the subject to provide a correct response.

#2 Knowing the real cost and willing to quote the same: This is also about knowing the price of the service to be provided, being honest enough to quote it and also deliver the service provided at the cost promised. This strictly means no cheating ( doing the equivalent of promising fresh orange juice and delivering bottled juice or promising a large glass and delivering a small one). While people may think that quoting the actual cost will drive away prospective customers, truth is that genuine customers who require the service appreciate honest and transparent response.

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I guess my frustration boils down to the fact that intercom's blog used to be fantastic and this feels like a weak article. All filler and then two measly sentences to explain it all:

The key idea here is to propose a task you know to be extremely difficult but possible, and then measure the candidate’s reaction. If they are defeatist (“That can’t be done!“) or deluded (“I’d code that in a weekend“) then that’s what you’d be hiring.

I guess my hostility (I call it passion ;) ) is that there's not a lot of actionable advice to take from this article. The other article I found was basically the same but with a lot more meat around the point.

Link to other article I found: http://mysticmundane.blogspot.com/2012/05/orange-juice-test-...

I'm not keen on the orange juice analogy either but I do agree with the gist of it.

You ask if a certain task or project can be accomplished and the people who say yes without any hint of a problem are almost certain to be the people who let you down.

The guy who asks for more information and, maybe, presents you with reasons why your project isn't so simple as you thought is much more likely to deliver.

This also gets to the fact that one of the top priorities (for the PM) is to minimize risk and that entails knowing/learning the options. Someone that can identify the risks and costs as well as recommend a better solution or present other options is providing a lot of value and building a lot of trust.

I think what's annoying many here is not that they disagree with you. It's that they agree with you but don't like his strategy for finding out if the counterpart is this way. Putting people through tests is not negotiating, and it sounds like he thinks it is.

Look at it from a hotel manager's perspective. Let's say he normally is willing to negotiate, so he'd want to say "That is difficult because of X - would you consider Y instead?" But he's also wise enough to see he is being tested, and is this is triggering all types of alarms in his head. He's had his own repertoire of bad clients, and so instead of negotiating, he'll put him through his own tests. He'll just say "No" and see if the client is willing to negotiate or is adamant, and see if the client fails the test.

I'm not in the business so I can't say for sure. Sitting here, I find it to be a poor assumption to assume the client has the upper hand (because he has business to offer and money in hand) over the hotel manager - and this person comes off as assuming as much. Consider that the hotel manager may have other options, or that this type of a deal is a net negative for him (even if the hotel is well compensated for this, there are non-financial costs).

> the people who say yes without any hint of a problem are almost certain to be the people who let you down.

Idk, people ask, "CAN YOU MAKE THIS APP?", I always answer, "I can".

If someone asked me if I can build some robotic thing, I'd answer "I can".

If they asked me "Can you build X in Y Weeks?" then I need to know the project.

I have been able to do pretty much everything thrown at me. The biggest question is how long we have and specifying what we actually want.

But then they ask "Can you put 45 cases of cans onto a grocery store shelf per hour, for 6 hours straight, every weeknight between the hours of 10pm and 4am?"

"Possibly, can I see the details of this task?

I can work the hours, but I'm not sure the logistics and ergonomics of transporting that quantity of material."

If they ask simple questions, that might be a warning for you as well that they're in over their heads. It also seems to me that in this scenario, you'd be the subject matter expert and would need to set the right expectations so that everyone walks away happy in the end.

I can't tell you the # of agencies and consultants I've had to work with that said all the right things and turned out to be steaming piles of hot garbage when it came to delivering the work.

I found the test to be unpractical in that you need accurate prior knowledge of how difficult the task will be to the subject, which makes the whole situation weird.

If the hotel you are talking to is ready to make crazy things at crazy prices, they will answer “yes” to anything that can be solved by throwing money at the problem.

On the other hand, for hotels that don’t deal with lunatics, they will refuse to deal with you the moment they smell your problem is bullshit or unreasonable.

In the end, I’d think false positives would be extremely frequent with that approach.

Good point.

I worked one summer at a five-star hotel in a ski town in the rockies. At various times and for various clients (typically on short notice) we (1) hosted a banquet for a former U.S. president that involved locking down the hotel with the secret service, (2) drove 2 of the hotel's SUVs 100+ miles round trip to buy dozens upon dozens of suitcases for a member of the Saudi royal family, (3) turned a conference room into a fiber connected operations center for a team of high-frequency traders that was visiting from NYC for two weeks.

I am certain that the hotel manager would have told all of these guests that we would absolutely find a way to handle their requests, no problem. And we did. That is part of the reason they were at that particular hotel in the first place.

Having suffered at the hands of bad consultants, I'd definitely rather risk losing a good one if it increases the chances of me not working with a bad one again.

Ultimately, a consultant needs to pitch themselves to me if they want my money. Don't want to pitch because you're already established and don't feel like it's justified? That's absolutely your decision.

EDIT: this only applies to new consultants I've not worked with before. If I've worked with you before, I already know whether or not I want to work with you again. I don't need a filter like this.

Well, the other guy of the story wasn't even aware he had been tested. In the real world you probably use the real problem as the test if at all possible.

I'd probably charge them extra for it; there was a game dev consultant blog article on HN awhile ago where he charged them extra for calling him out for a ridiculous reason; same thing, if they are going to throw out phantom difficult projects, they obviously expect higher expertise, so charge them for the expertise.

I think the smug tone is getting to you. Like most surefire recipes for knowing things in advance this makes no real sense. But hey, at least they can smile over their cups or whatever

It's just sales mindset. You don't have to deal with it as a dev if you don't want to. Just get a job and enjoy a salary.

You need sales mindset, that is, the ability to navigate the landscape of people's fears and desires, particularly in a business context, when you're trying to make potentially life-changing deals. If you're doing super high-touch sales like this, then you're dealing with people that can take you from $X00,000 in revenue this year to $X,000,000.

That's why you do it. If you're not adding zeroes, don't bother.

You need to practice this if you're going into any sort of contracting or managing or senior engineering role.

You will have to estimate projects as a client or for a client or for yourself, it's critical to understand what may be done or not done within some amount of time/money.

Call it engineer mindset if you will. Figure out you're going on a death march before you're marching.

It's just a story.

There's a solid idea to it, judge a man by how upfront he is. The practical value though is close to 0. So the story shouldn't be judged as such. Read it as a fable but with human characters :).

Most people I worked with who started the conversation with "...but it's going to cost you" were basically preparing me to be overcharged and judging how open I am to it. And in hindsight they did. Maybe they also call it the orange juice test...

>a fable but with human characters

There's a word for that: parable.

Thanks, was looking for that :).

If you're going to tell a story to make a point, make sure the story is in sync with the point you are trying to tell. And definitely don't mess it up with a bad story. If you cannot construct a good narrative, just state the point outright.