I love this with all my heart. You did exactly the right thing at every step.
That an overworked employee who had already left the company would stick up for himself? Or that a company would go to such efforts to try to manipulate a former employee?
I realize my tone doesn't hide my feelings, but even if we disagree I'd still be curious to hear more.
Walking away from a toxic situation is not "psychopathic." It's common sense and if we all did it more then the psychopaths who expect us to stick around through it all would finally learn how to treat other people with respect. It's a job, not a marriage.
Sadly, I've seen this. Not first hand, but it happened to a friend and I have no reason to doubt his version of the story.
"We tried to hire back an employee to build something that we didn't train or try and figure out ourselves and a deadline forced us to pay a large lump sum to that employee".
No matter how you slice it, that's really shitty planning on the businesses side. They should have spent the time and money learning how to maintain their shit. By not doing it, they paid a huge price.
Every negotiation is about the best alternative the parties have, and it's generally harder in real life than in fantasy because you underestimate the alternatives to a deal.
Applying maximum leverage has a way of creating "out of the box" alternatives. And vindictiveness.
I have no need to judge it if it were true.
Luckily for him they decided it's easier to just pay the fee.
Because here's the thing, even with how weak US labor laws are, one thing they don't allow is for a company to come back and sue your for incompetence. So long as they didn't go out of their way to sabotage things, they are free and clear.
- if he can prove the threat, the company will be in an even worse position
- given the rather lacking precedent (as pointed out by the sister comment), there's a good chance the suit would be thrown out pre-court and therefore be rather cheap
- given that the OP seems to be a valued engineer, it is reasonable to assume that he has the f-you-money to fight this out
- even if won, the drawn out battle would take far too long to fix the software in time and, given that they then lost a 10 million contract, they lack the motivation (and maybe money) to continue
- lastly, even if they won after loosing the contract, they'd probably not be able to extract much in damage payments
So it's a rather empty threat.
Especially ex-employees who've been gone 6 months already.
Shouldn't be hard to find a no win no fee ambulance chaser to happily take them on and get costs awarded and damages as well...
I think in general all of my comments on this thread have been horribly misunderstood - I was just trying to say that if the company was scummy, instead of paying him the 250k fee, they probably could have sued him instead. I'm not saying that should have done, I'm not saying it would have been the right thing to do, that he deserved it.....literally nothing of the sort. Just pointing out that the company could have made an argument against him in court. As many other people pointed out to me, it would have almost certainly failed. But I don't understand how you can deduct where moral considerations are on my priority list from this?
This is exactly the free market at work regarding labor. Have a problem with the free market if you like, many of us do but do not accuse this poster of criminal action equivalent to a protection racket.
To clarify, the market would likely not allow this specific work to be sold at this price normally. But the buyer wasn't just buying specific work they were buying specific work to be completed by a specific date. The work in isolation does not have this value but the work completed by a certain day does. Companies use this rationale all the time charging more for expedited services.
It's especially common in construction and manufacturing where costs double or even triple when expedited delivery is required.
The way the story is told the price doubled after and because of the CEO screaming.
The market has nothing to do with that except the good old "The fair price is the one that god paid, uh.” I suppose.
I'd be inclined to believe that if there were some other providers but as it is told working with OP was the only solution. And OP's first offer was 125 000. Two screams later it's 250 000 ? It has nothing to do with economical theory or free market interpretation.
Second, you speak as if his claims were irrational. The way I see it, however, you would set for 125k (probably much less judging from what you write) while he, the sentimental fool, scooped up double the money. Therefore, your decisions, which you personally claim are rational, would have left you with half the money the "irrational" player would get. Seems to me, the "irrational" is actually the rational one, as he netted more profits. Economy and market are not math games in a vacuum, and players are not formless ideas.
The way I see it you are putting words in my mouth and I am definitely not interested in having a discussion like that.
I never insinuated OP was a sentimental fool or wrong to raise the price. I am calling bullshit on the free market and econ 101 as an explanation of why the price got doubled and call it like it is: it's payback from OP because they were dicks to him first, everything else is pedantry and useless justifications.
edit: if anything, OP could be considered a fool since he obviously gave an under the market quote as his first proposal. Had he started with 250K from the beginning he would have gotten more since there likely would have been screams anyway and he would have risen the price all the same.
And yes. I completely agree with your edit and said as much elsewhere. Their acceptance of 250K showed that the OP under-priced their services at 125K.
And yes. Free markets produce monopolies. Especially when time is important. As I said above, the critical good here was not the delivery but the delivery within a certain time.
And yelling, made the prise jump closer to market value.
I find this explanation (from top comment) more in line with how the world spins:
> If they left under bad terms because the business was a bunch of dicks, expect to pay 10x market rate. If this is truly "fix this or the business is out of business" - then it shouldn't be a tough decision to make.
So, “being a dick” has more to do with price raising than any free market justification (which I am okay with, just don't try to convince me it's the only thing at play. The offer would have been 250k from the beginning then. Or 500K to get 250K, whatever.).
Any small or independent contractor in any business will eventually have a blacklist, or a list of troublesome customers who get charged extra. Most of my contractors charge me less because they like me (and I pay on time). My HVAC contractor charges a particular customer double just because the customer is a rich entitled asshole; the contractor has decided that it's only worth dealing with the man's unpleasantness if there's more money to be made. Apparently the man has been blacklisted by other HVAC companies, so he might be in a tight spot, but whatever the reason, he ends up paying a lot more money for the same service.
This is a completely market-based mechanism: the troublesome customer has limited options (in this case, maybe only one option), and is thus obviously disadvantaged in negotiating price. Regardless of the myriad motivations involved in price discovery, it all leads to the same place: if the price wasn't worth the service the customer was to receive, they would not have paid it.
Honestly, this isn't mysterious or profound. It's economics 101.
Yes.
> It's economics 101.
Not even that. It's payback, that's all it is. There's no need to call for a more elaborate explanation for what was at play here. Not that I disagree with it. It's humane nature.
> My HVAC contractor charges a particular customer double just because the customer is a rich entitled asshole;
Like you say. No need to even know about market dynamics to (wisely) choose that option. Because the other guy is an asshole.
This is literally the definition of price discovery in a free market. If the price was not worth the service the company was to receive, they would not have paid it.
The fact that they did pay it clearly indicates that the first price was far below what the "market" would bear.
I think so too, however maybe better play safe I guess, and be content with 250? The negotiation partner seemed a bit irrational to me
Anything distorting those conditions - e.g. there's only one seller, only one buyer, a time constraint, a skill constraint, an information disadvantage, will distort the pricing as well. One trade isn't enough information for a market to exist or to settle on a fair price. I agree there that the market has nothing to do with it.
But I disagree with your implication of "the fair price is the one paid" is somehow unfair in an ethical sense. (I also think OP is in no way obliged to be "fair" in any ethical sense to the company, but that's another matter). The company got a $10M contract for $250k, versus losing the contract, is that unfair? If that really was the pivotal factor between losing the contract and not, the company ought to benefit by spending right up to the point where the contract becomes a money loser, to not lose it. Would it be unfair for the company to get an $8M contract by paying $2M? Or a $2M contract by paying $8M? Is OP obliged to help the company make as much profit on the contract as they can, by charging them less for his services?
This is non-sense. Those conditions specifically define a market and make it distinct from any other. To say a market with any of these constraints is "distorted" is to say all markets are distorted and render the term meaningless.
Also, I never said this one trade signified a market. My point was that this is a consequence of free markets. You can make any single trade "irrelevant" by choosing arbitrary criteria by which to separate it from its market. The company could have certainly hired another engineer in hopes they could complete the work in time while running the risk of blowing the deadline. But it was freely and fairly worth at least 250k to them to guarantee the job could be done correctly and on time.
This kind of thing is such a common part of the free market, that there is a whole aspect of contract law that pertains to ensuring companies don't get into this position. It's why contracting completed work is so important. Leaving things partly done leaves you vulnerable to others eating right up to the tiniest margin of your profit.
This is pure slander
The company can avoid this if they only care to maintain the documentation / wiki left behind by said person
When they failed to do even just basic proper operations, it's their own fault.
I'm a business owner and a consultant, and I too charge more for these kind of asshole clients, because of the extra stress.
But nowadays I just try to avoid them, it's just too damaging for your own sanity. Their kind of stupidity, self-entitlement, and ignorance is on a completely different level.
<pedantry>It's libel (written) not slander (oral); "defamation" is the generic noun. </pedantry>
It seems that paying to skywrite (you know, small plane making artificial clouds) could be slander but not libel
Citation? By that light, a DVD containing defamatory speech would be libelous, but that's generally not how courts see it.
From the (highly-influential) U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, summarizing New York law (which is quite typical): "Defamation, consisting of the twin torts of libel and slander, is the invasion of the interest in a reputation and good name. Generally, spoken defamatory words are slander; written defamatory words are libel. Libel is a method of defamation expressed in writing or print." [0]
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=601727562995661...
Coding standards, documentation requirements, meetings and code reviews exist for a reason, too. It's not like companies are defenseless.
This is a gross failure of leadership at the company, and the former employee has every right to negotiate compensation for the inconvenience of having to work for them again.
This person left the company, and documented everything. What should they do, come in and save the day for $15/hr?
The company could have apologised, and do a lot more ego stroking before asking a favour which they can pay for and maybe throw in an all expenses paid weekend with the SO as a thank you. Not only will you get goodwill but future problems are going to be significantly cheaper to solve. Even if you have a bad break up - as a business owner you should understand the value of mending bridges. It's cheaper than losing sleep at night and losing your steak dinner to a bad stomach.
If your company were in the hands of incompetents, but still kept going in spite of the incompetents because it had gotten its foot wedged in the door or whatever, and then fell apart in ways you could only scorn, how would you view that sort of situation?
You may be doing any of that already, since I don't know anything about you except your one comment.
But the answer to your fear of exploitation is avoid making people hate you/your environment enough to want to protect themselves from it.
If you do not have the money to pa for someone's services you cannot complain. You say you have a company? Have you ever let a client get your products by paying less than their value or nothing at all? Work itself is a product too.
I feel for them but they failed to protect themselves.
He left detailed instructions how to release the software. The company managed to screw up so bad they lost the manual he made sure to write on their internal wiki.
And you identify with this band of miscreants? That's embarrassing.
That's probably what they deserve, if they come asking for a favor and then start getting abusive.