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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

One of the questions I like to ask contractors before beginning work is "what changes would make this cheaper/easier for you?" Often simple things like moving a planned wall an inch or switching the location of something can make it vastly easier; or there will be things they can get preassembled or done for free.

And sometimes the factory building whatever has a giant machine that can easily do what would take you quite a long time to do by hand.

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It’s funny. They seem to be two kinds of contractors out there. Type one will push as hard as possible for you to design things in a way that makes it easier for them. To the point where there are all sorts of design compromises like a beam in the middle of your kitchen. The second type is the one who wants to deliver exactly the vision of the client, to the point where they are adding a huge amount of complexity to perfectly meet unreasonable demands.

In my experience, contractors will build exactly what I ask for without challenging unimportant details that would have made things easier. My interpretation is that because they have so much internalized knowledge, they assume that I obviously know many of the same things that they do, and that I have already considered any such changes and actively decided against them. I've since learned to do what was suggested above.

It's been a valuable lesson for myself to question just how much of my internalized "obvious" knowledge about technical matters is apparent to clients and partners. Never assume.

I’ve learned to try to hedge against this kind of thing with language like “I’m no expert here, so let me know if you have any ideas on a better way” or the like. But yeah it is a good reminder not to make those assumptions when speaking with others.

Also, they can charge more if it’s harder (usually), as long as it’s obvious to other contractors it would be hard too.

If the low bidder gave that bid because they didn’t notice, then also lulz - tends to weed out the problem children. Really painful for the customer and said contractor though.

As an example of the opposite of this...

We had a pond put in a number of years back. The guys that did the work laid out what they would be building, showed us everything, and we agreed on it. While digging out the earth for the pond, they ran into a boulder not too far underground. They spend about half a day fighting with the boulder, seeing if they could break it up, etc; whatever they could do to get it out of the way.

When we went out to chat with them and see how the work was going, they told us about the rock and how it's being difficult. We told them we'd be fine with them changing the shape of the pond to just work around the boulder. They were happy about this because it made their lives much easier.

The cost of the creation of the pond was set before they started work on it. They gained nothing by trying really hard to create what they said they would; other than the fact that they did a good job and had happy clients. But they spend the time trying to deal with the problem without any real complaints (the talk about it being difficult was a casual chat, not them coming to us to complain).

They are obligated by law to do what they said they would, even at their cost, if above and beyond what they expected and not covered by the contact as a cost-plus, or risk losing their contractors license and being civilly liable. At least in the vast majority of US jurisdictions.

You saved them a lot of hassle by being flexible, but were under no obligation to be.

Smart contractors build in the odds of this happening in their contracts. Dumb ones expect everything to go right all the time, and then try to run away or cheat when it doesn’t. Or lose their shirts.

> They are obligated by law to do what they said they would, even at their cost, if above and beyond what they expected and not covered by the contact as a cost-plus, or risk losing their contractors license and being civilly liable. At least in the vast majority of US jurisdictions.

This is technically true, but misleading. They have to follow the contract, but the contract likely includes exceptions for unforseen issues. And while you can technically sue a contractor for breach of contract the only reason to do so in this situation would be spite. The rational choice if a contractor cheats you on a small project is to be sad and move on. (Google around and you'll find lots of people who learned that the hard way).

My point was that they didn't try to convince us to let them do something easier. They didn't even talk to us about it until we came out to see how they were doing. They weren't "happy taking the harder, longer route because it meant more money for more time". I was pleased with them and would recommend them any time.

I think you’re misunderstanding?

That decision would have had to be before they signed the contract.

No one knew about the geology.

At the point they did, it was too late.

It was great they didn’t try to avoid their responsibility, many would have!

This is often called “The Curse of Knowledge”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge?wprov=sfti1

I didn't know this had a name, thanks!

There's a quote along the lines of:

"An amateur will build what you want and an expert will build what you need."

Similar saying in engineering:

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.” ... “The fewer moving parts, the better.

Yeah, but the problem is that there are too many customers who refuse to believe that they need what you tell them and then blame you when you deliver what they asked for.

Yes, the quote could be updated in a couple of ways. I like "An amateur will try to build what you asked for, a professional will deliver it, and a psychic would have built what you want".

Caveat: Sometimes what the client needs is a cheap and low-quality solution. Sometimes.

An expert should be able to deliver that too. It might require outsourcing the task to make it cheaper, though.

This is usually where the general contractor or the architect (if you don't have one, then that means you are that role) steps in to help insure the project is as it should be.

I worked at a custom millwork firm and had a knack for value engineering projects. After making the switch to SWE, where I assumed everyone knew how to do this, I've realized that there only seems to be two kinds of SWEs as well, exactly as you've described. It turns out that value creation is hard.

There are plenty of contractors who know how to deliver an optimal solution and who make incredible money.

> It’s funny. They seem to be two kinds of contractors out there.

One way to view it is that they're each targeting (deliberately or unconsciously) a different market-fit, with respect to cheap/good/fast.

For some jobs you might want the advice of the first "compromise this and it'll be cheaper and faster" group.

There's a Seinfeld episode about the latter.

I used to work in a place that assembled machines based on old designs that rarely got reviewed, since if it ain't broke don't fix it.

When working on one particular unit, I found that they would order a bunch of plastic panels, cut to size, and some with precut holes. And others with secondary drawings, instructing us how to drill out a bunch of holes ourselves. Sometimes not even all the holes, just a few, in addition to the precut.

When I asked why we didn't just ask the supplier to cut out ALL the holes, I basically got a shrug.

So I merged the secondary drawings and sent them to the supplier, and the assembly team never wasted time on that nonsense again.

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