Comment by lpapez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lpapez | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was once contracted to work on a project where the monthly GCP bill for Postgres was $60k per month - this was basically my YEARLY rate at that time, just for managed Postgres.

After some time I was quite familiar with their stack and had gathered considerable domain experience. This led to an idea how to halve the database load (and the cost would presumably fall by a similar percentage), which I wanted to use as leverage during contract renegotiation.

I boldly offered to work for free to halve their database load, in exchange for being paid half the money this optimization would save over the course of one year. This would basically triple my pay, and they would still save money.

They declined, and I moved to a better opportunity.

Last I heard they had to pay a team of 4 new consultants for a year to implement the same idea I had. Without the domain knowledge, consultants couldn't progress as fast as I suspect I could have done (my estimated was 2 months of work).

I know it's very petty, but I regret revealing too many implementation details of the idea during the pitch and allowing the company to contract other consultants to see it done.

If you built up that domain knowledge while being paid top dollar per hour by the same company, then I understand their reluctance to go along with your offer. It feels a little bit extortionate to be honest. I wouldn't go along with it either, not because it's a bad deal in isolation, but because it sets a bad precedent. It basically tells every employee/contractor that if they know a way to add a lot of measurable value, they can use that as a bargaining chip to 3x their pay. This also discourages trying to add any value that isn't as easily expressed in dollars (which is the case for many important things, such as product quality improvements).

I think part of the expectation when contracting somewhere long-term (or just being an employee, for that matter) is that the amount of value you add per hour worked increases sharply over time, and slower than your fee. In other words, initially you're overpaid wrt your value-add, and then that corrects itself over time as you figure out what the company is all about.

I've made similar pitches to clients many times, and one thing I've learned is that ironically the problem is promising the actual saving, vs. offering a much smaller saving.

The challenge is that people don't believe you when you tell them they can save that much, no matter how evidence you prepare. I'm starting a sales effort for my agency right now, and one of the things we've worked on is to promise less than what we determine we can deliver after reviewing the clients costs, and raising our prices, because it's ironically easier to close on the basis of a promise to deliver 20%-30% savings at a relatively high cost than a promise to deliver 50%+ with little effort.

It's not petty. It's the profit margin average solutions get to make over expertise with individual tools, or groups of tools.

> I know it's very petty

No it isn't.

My current and last jobs had monthly RDBMS bills in excess of $1 million/month. It is staggering. We could buy two fully-loaded 42U racks in separate DCs and be net positive after a few months. I’ve done the math, in great detail.

No go. “It’s hard to hire for that skill set.” Is it $9 million/year hard?! You already have a team lead – me. This shit is not that hard; people will figure it out, I promise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com