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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

Commenters here seem to read too much into the actual orange juice story and don't seem to get the actual point. I've worked in consultancy for a couple of years now and I've worked with sales people that say: "sure, we can do this", without having a clue and even asking an engineer. These projects, more often than not, run out of time and budget.

If I were the one on the hiring side, I'd be happy to be told that there might be a challenge in feature X and that they'd need to get more information to get a definitive answer. To me, that's what the article is about, not instantly wanting to give a definitive answer, but acknowledging that there may be some difficulties along the way.

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There's a job called "pre-sales engineer". I used to do it.

I went out with salespeople or joined their conference calls, and assessed:

- what the customer actually needed

- whether we could do that for them

- and if so, which products or services would work

Sometimes a pre-sales engineer provided technical credibility by talking to the customer's engineers and figuring out what they are doing. Other times, I provided technical credibility by saying that we didn't have a good solution for this project. Getting to No early prevents everyone wasting their time.

I've seen projects where there was a perverse inversion of this principle... after winning a relatively nebulous contract, our own PM would say "We can do that." without consulting the developers... surprise surprise, ended up late and over-budget.

I guess all this is really getting at is the need for critical thinking at all levels.

I've seen this years ago when incentive schemes were such that this made sense. Modern organizations I've seen pay sales and pre-sales engineers with some accelerated actual profit from the delivered product. This aligns incentives across the team. In fact, it over-aligns sometimes, because sales goes for low-balls they know the engineering team can deliver.

Low ball would be undercharging by at least half of the competitor. I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.

A shorter and smaller project is good from a sales perspective. You build trust with the client, you will continue the work with repeated contracts and increase price. It also avoids the lawsuits with massive projects having failed to deliver a thing in years.

Even with an engineer there, its difficult to foresee all possible problems that might arise. Though I guess it will be a lot more realistic than with just sales people.

(Saying that I just bought an new build apartment and speaking with the architects, we are far from the only industry to be late - we were comparing how similar projects end up in that respect).

I guess that this test is useful for managers who don't understand the details of the work that is required to accomplish the task. If you actually know what it takes to get the job done then you don't need an orange juice test; you can do proper due diligence by asking difficult domain-specific questions.

This article highlights the problem that managers today don't have sufficient domain knowledge to do their jobs properly so they're forced to rely on dumbed-down heuristics in order to make decisions.

The problem with such superficial approach is that there will always be people who know how to game it. There are a lot of people whose only talent is showing you exactly what you want to see.

Also, on the other end of the spectrum, such heuristics tend to unjustly filter out extreme performers/outliers. These kinds of dumbed-down heuristics are a big reason why our current economic system is so unfair and inefficient.

If you want to get to the meat, you have to crack through the shell first.

I don't really think you understood this idea.

Within the context of conference hosting, serving large glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice to that number of people WAS a difficult domain specific question.

He's less interested in the specifics of the answer to the question than he is in the thought process of the person answering it.

Did they immediately say yes without considering it? If so they're conning you. They haven't thought out the problem and acknowledged the difficulty, so they'll say yes to anything, even though they can't deliver.

Did they immediately say no, it's impossible? If so they're probably sub-par. They can't see a way to accomplish a difficult but achievable task.

The WHOLE point of the question is judging whether the other party actually understands the domain well enough to recognize when a task is difficult, and then follow up by acknowledging that and asking better questions (like: What's your budget for that? Because it will be hard).

The rest of your comment is spinning off into uselessness.

>I've worked in consultancy for a couple of years now and I've worked with sales people that say: "sure, we can do this", without having a clue and even asking an engineer. These projects, more often than not, run out of time and budget.

A lot of people here say this, and no doubt it is indeed a real problem. Yet none of the books I've read on negotiation ever suggested something as inane as the orange juice test. They all have sections or a chapter on "OK, now that you've got the deal, how are you going to ensure the counterpart follows through?"

The solution will depend on the situation. Some of it is your responsibility for monitoring. Some of it (probably a lot, actually) is putting penalties in the contract. Some of it is being proactive and exploring what constraints the other person may be under (Is he under-resourced? Are there other decision makers than him who can screw it up? Can he outline a plan so you can see potential flaws?).

But nowhere do they suggest playing opaque games.

You missed the point.

The test is about finding people who understand the nature of the work. It to sort out the bullshitters who will agree to anything and then deliver a terrible solution over 3 months late and over budget.

You can likely find examples in your everyday life. Pay attention next time you hear people talking about doing work. Who is the defeatist (it can't be done in 3 months), who is deluded (I can do that in a weekend), and who understands the right answer is somewhere in between (maybe we could do it if x)

> But nowhere do they suggest playing opaque games

My point was that it doesn't have to be an opaque game, the story just makes it seem that way. That's why I mentioned people reading too much into the story and not getting the point.

> They all have sections or a chapter on "OK, now that you've got the deal, how are you going to ensure the counterpart follows through?"

Sure, that's a valid way to approach this type of thing. It just means that in stead of spending most time on the actual project, you might be spending your time on managing the your supplier. If you can get around this by picking a supplier that makes a realistic bid, including a mention of possible issues, that might save a lot of headaches.

This is a choice in management strategy and I've experienced both types. I've also experienced that customers that do something like 'the orange juice test' are often better to work with and end up happier with the end result.

There's actually a huge issue in the Netherlands currently, where major consultancy firms make bids on projects the can't deliver. Multiple 8-9 figure government projects have ended that way and are now in litigation stages. This problem is both caused by the customer not knowing what they want and the supplier abusing that to get more hours in. Gotta make that sales target somehow!

>> "OK, now that you've got the deal, how are you going to ensure the counterpart follows through?"

As they say, you can’t squeeze blood [orange juice] from a stone.

If the counterpart is too incompetent to follow through no amount of negotiation will help.

In particular, having access to technical capabilities in your organization is not the same thing as being a competent project manager. You should interview the person that will be managing your project, and that interview will invariably involve opaque games (or small pilot projects, which are almost the same thing).

No joke. The responses to you are hilarious as well.

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