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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

I am so scared to imagine what would happen if there was any issue during the move (very likely when dragging live cables and powers over hundreds of meters).

The client would immediately refuse to pay anything because he was very clear he wouldn't pay a thing if there is downtime.

Then, the next contractor would be super quick to judge you and the situation, reinforcing that you were an incompetent idiot and the client was right to kick you away on the spot and not pay a dime.

Glad it went well in the end. There is so much to lose for the person trying to help.

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This is a junior sysadmin I suspect. With a bit more experience you'd learn to say something along the lines of "no downtime, sure, that will be 30 grand" and the ability for downtime will suddenly materialize. Him and his friend did this big song and dance, took a huge risk and only got paid for ten hours worth of work in the end.

$30k, 80% up front, strict liability waiver that says I’m not responsible for loss of business or anything else if there is downtime.

Now you're over-charging massively. If you have no liability and are guaranteed pay, charging for just double hourly rate is more than enough as a "stupid and non-standard requirements" kind of thing.

You can't get paid upfront and at the same time get a liability waiver. For a 100% guarantee with full liability $30k doesn't actually sound ridiculous because it would require obtaining 100% identical hardware and doing at least one test run on that hardware before actually doing it on the production hardware. What the contractor did is basically "wing it", explain a way to get zero downtime to the client and then not actually offer a guarantee by doing the operation straight on the production hardware. Really this was more about convincing (ie bullshitting your way through) the client to let you do the work than actually doing it properly and for a huge sum of money. It wouldn't surprise me if there was actual downtime for a few seconds and the client simply didn't notice it.

> sure, that will be 30 grand

I am having trouble finding a reference to it now, but I've heard patio11 refer to this as "the Japanese no". Don't ever say "no" directly, just quote an astronomical price.

People in the trades world do it too. If a job won't provide the margin they are seeking, or the job is more difficult than it's worth they will up the price. If the consumer chooses them to do the job, it's at a pricepoint that's worth the trouble but they are really hoping to be passed over.

The Rolling Stones tried that with Microsoft and "Start Me Up", they quoted what they thought was ridiculous $10M. Microsoft said sure, no problem.

That's a fun story. Looking more into it, it seems that $10M is based on rumors and it was more likely $3M. [1] Doesn't change the point of the story though.

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220097/what-microsoft-...

$10M is a debunked urban legend; the actual figure is only $3M, which is pretty standard. Microsoft's whole ad campaign for Win95 cost about $200M after all.

My dad's in construction and frequently gives out "fuck off" quotes. It isn't so rare that the client accepts them.

I had a client who wanted me to write some code in Adobe Coldfusion of all things. Not wanting to say no to an otherwise good client, I quoted some insane hourly.

And now I know that Coldfusion is absolutely miserable to code in (and the client tried to dodge their bills!).

There is an art to this. These situations come up because you want to continue an ongoing relationship into the future.

So you quote a price that is high, but not so high as to destroy the relationship. I call it "plausibly-deniably-high".

You also have to gauge the context of the other party in the negotiation. This technique works best when you accompany the quote with some kind of description matching the personalities. Some people are swayed by a description of the additional time it takes (the billable hours mentality). Others are swayed by a description of the additional risks you are bearing on their behalf to deliver the outcome. Still others are swayed by a description of the de novo technical challenges that no one else has ever attempted before. The list goes on, and is a fascinating study into people.

This is where a real salesman (as opposed to an order-taker) earns their keep, where they know how to read a room and craft a response, messaging and after-meeting socializing that takes into account all those perspectives simultaneously from the point of view of the other party.

That works.

A friend of mine with a consulting biz was requested by IBM to handle a job in Turkey. He didn't want the gig & told them so repeatedly. He finally decided to tell them the most ridiculous price he could think of (like appending two zeros to the number). He said they didn't even flinch and he was on the plane to Turkey the next week for six months. But he did say that it was pretty much worth it in the end (but only because of the pricing).

Welcome to the market economy!

Seriously, this sort of dynamic is why the world works as well as it does.

Yup, market economies are fantastic for rapid resource allocation!

Yet they are not a panacea.

They suck at preventing problems related to:

* tragedy of the commons - tend to create & magnify it

* long-term disaster planning / tail risk - e.g., stockpiling resources for natural disasters, pandemics, etc.,

* preventing foolish development, e.g., on cheap land subject to flooding

* self-creating safety systems for workers, consumers, environments, etc. -left to their own devices, markets always do too little-too late

Market systems literally often need to be saved from themselves, e.g., when overfishing will literally kill an industry by driving extinct the very thing it depends upon

Actually, stockpiling does happen if there are no laws against price gauging. Because that's how the capital bound in the stockpile gets it's ROI.

I hope you are not seriously suggesting making price gouging in disasters legal as a method of preparation.

Price gouging is nowhere near a reliable method of disaster preparation as actual expert planning.

The stockpiles you speak of are usually just ordinary current inventory marked up by an order(s) of magnitude.

Also, stockpiling goods is not the only thing needed for disaster preparation. One must also stockpile services, i.e., have the right people recruited, trained, equipped, and ready to respond. Prime examples are military and firefighters, who spend a much time & resources training, and little time actually fighting the wars or fires.

Unregulated price gauging will likely end very badly, yes. I'm aware, and just didn't mention it in detail for brevity's sake.

Yes, but funding allocation is hard.

That'd be the case only if it was sudden. If entrepreneurs had the time to think and plan, they'd come up with stockpiles that they rise the sale price for when the time comes, calculating to use that future sales price increase to offset the increased bound capital and storage expenses of their large(r) inventory.

Military is a bad example, but firefighters do train a lot. But that's also due to them needing to respond within hours at best, instead of weeks/months for most wars. I'm referring to the majority/bulk of them, not the leadership hierarchy.

my grandfather called this the "asshole quote"

I've heard people say that the right way to say 'no' in Japanese is more along the lines of "it is very difficult." I have no idea how much linguistic truth there is to that, but it definitely rings true culturally.

I don't believe I've said that.

For what it is worth, if a customer of my previous (salaryman-heavy) employer asked for this, we'd tell them an actual no, which is extremely rare in client relationships in Japan. A contextually appropriate "no" for something which is less absurdly wasteful of engineering time to no purpose would be "That sounds difficult. We could explore options to do it, but perhaps you could accept an hour of downtime in the dead of night" then bargain down to 15 minutes.

I am very sorry, I must have been mistaken.

4.5 hours of a consultants billing rate can be much more than 10 hours of your regular hourly rate working a similar job. A good consultant will have a contract. The client saying I won't pay if XX happens doesn't mean anything unless it was in the contract.

Networking/spanning tree loops, arp table mismatch/corruption, the switches at the destination being misconfigured are all realistic problems that would result in downtime here. The normal way you do this is with live migration from hyper-v or vmotion from ESXI. If the initial migration is not successful, you just leave the server powered on while you address the issues. Once the VM has been migrated you can do whatever you want with the original server without worrying about downtime.

This reminds me so much of when I joined vmware in 2006. vmotion had already been around for a few years - but I believe this was the first release of vCenter with DRS.

A couple of months I joined, a room full of customers chewed us out for not publishing our vmotion compatibility tables. After 4 hours of chewing out - they then told us they reverse engineered the compatibility tables and reorganized their entire data center to conform to vmware vmotion. Then (of course) we worked with intel to make sure the compatibility matrix worked in the future.

I realized at that point that I joined the right company.

If there was downtime during the move and the client was there and declaring that they would not pay, you just walk away. You'd be surprised at how fast they can cut a check in that situation.

Also, moving a server with spinning disks? What could possibly go wrong.

Wasn't here a story about Sun (or HP or someone like that) where they moved a bunch of disk servers across a parking lot to another building and found that many of them had died from the vibrations on the trolley cart used to transport them.

it was Yahoo, IIRC.

I had a spinning disk in my car back before we had all these cool embedded PCs. The disk was never an issue, these things can take a lot of abuse (Even New England roads). I had it mounted sideways so a large pothole wouldn't push the heads into the platter.

>a spinning disk in my car

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record-play...

"The stylus did not jump the grooves even when the car was moving at various speeds over broken pavement, cobblestones, and deep holes."

Spinning disks can take a surprising amount of shock and vibration before they fail.

Disks aren't that sensitive to motion.

At my last job, we had 2 airplanes with 5 computers each with 6 disks each mounted in an aircraft. These were regular servers from Dell, not special hardened or resilient hardware or anything. So 60 or so hard disks flying around. Takeoffs, landings, turbulence. Two flights per day, 3 hours each flight, 6 days per week. So 626 landings per year.

Disk failures were not particularly common.

As a counterpoint, I worked for a place that used Mac Minis inside spinning displays and the hard disks absolutely did not like it one bit.

(They also tried spinning disk machines on buses which also failed quickly but that was more the grime and electrical noise than the motion, IIRC. Then they tried mini-servers running from CF and the motion would slowly work the CF cards out of their sockets. The company did not last long.)

Reminds me of the video where they yell at hard drives and measure disk latency. https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4

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