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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Streamlined version:

Should I work for free? -----> No.

Not even if they're your bestie, a charity, or your mother - unless you want an unpaid support gig from here until the end of time, or want to never speak to them again.

Free is not a sustainable dynamic for non-transient (I.e. Serving soup) tasks.

Imagine if you were to work in a soup kitchen as a volunteer, but the terms were that you'd be liable for any food poisoning, and you have to come in at 3am on Sunday because the stove isn't working, and someone there thinks you looked at the fridge once, which is close enough.

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This might be a cultural thing, but I think everyone should help their close relatives with computer problems.

Sometimes when their relatives need help, people literally give up everything and live with them and help them with everything. Spending 20 minutes to sign them up for email is not the biggest investment.

Basically if you think of yourself and your family as one entity, it makes sense to minimize overall wasted time. Since you are most efficient at computer-related things, it makes sense to do those things for them.

I think the problem madaxe_again is underlying is that the 20m task often leads to the person assuming you're the culprit of any possible problem the computer might have in the future.

I still help friends and family with computer problems, but I try to avoid friends-of-friends and such.

By the way, the idea of considering myself and my family as a single unit is bizarre to me, unless you're talking about just the immediate relatives. Each branch of my family has at least two "sub-branches" who don't speak to each other :)

Well, I understand where he's coming from. But if you follow this line of reasoning further, you basically say that you should never help anyone - including your immediate family - with anything because they might think you ruined it for them.

I'm not saying you should be Mother Teresa, or even help people you don't like, but iff you like someone and they need help, just help them out.

They might help you out later with something else they can do better than you.

They might help you out later with something else they can do better than you.

Unlikely, because they won't see what you've done as help - you just end up associated with the computer, and viewed as part of the problem.

I'm not saying never help anyone with anything ever - just not with technical tasks - don't build someone a website, don't set their computer up, don't uninstall their malware - you will just end up beholden, and nobody will thank you.

By all means, however, mow the lawn, do the shopping, bake a cake - just nothing which requires ongoing support.

> Unlikely, because they won't see what you've done as help

So many times this.

It is peculiar how people view computer janitory as "simple" activity, despite not being able to do it themselves. Is that because all you do is press some buttons here and there? It is in fact perceived to be so easy that you get people complaining for your free work.

I've been asked by literally total strangers to "fix their PC" for them; would they ever consider asking a random plumber for a favor like that?

- "Oh so you do something with computers, could you please fix my laptop?"

- "Eh what are you doing for a living?"

- "A mason"

- "Cool then, we long wanted to change tiles in the bathroom"

[awkward silence]

I admit, I've never gotten this from total strangers. That would be a very strange experience and I'd probably make a joke about it, as you describe. Relatives have occasionally asked me for computer help but those questions have typically been very specific, time-and-effort-bound, and nobody expected me to deliver on a follow-on "service contract".

I'd guess the scenario is more like a social setting where you know some of the people and don't know others. And you're having a "what do you do?" kind of conversation where you respond with "computer stuff" and then the person you're talking to, or someone in earshot, says something like "Oh, maybe you could help me with mine...".

That's happened to me several times. I've also had people do a similar thing in work settings--people who weren't even direct coworkers.

I don't get much "service" work for the relatives either, save for immediate family. Somehow it's more distant acquaintances (most of my close friends are in IT).

And yeah that conversation was quite out of blue: we were standing in slow grocery queue, think I was wearing my keycard and it came up.

Roughly nobody is going to come up to you after you've helped them put in a fence and say it must be your fault the animals got out last night because you helped them put in the fence six months ago, and you need to come fix it right now. Nobody is going to come up to you after you gave them some chicken soup while they had a cold and say it's your fault they now have cancer and you need to come fix it. But for some reason, a lot of people will do this with computers. Not everybody, and if you have a user who is actually reasonable about it then by all means help them. But be wary about it until you see how they act with computers (which will not necessarily be how they act for anything else) and be ready to cut them off if they start abusing you.

I always teach them what I am doing and why. Results have been better than expected but of course the person being helped has to be open.

> assuming you're the culprit of any possible problem the computer might have in the future.

I learned this the hard way with my girlfriend's grandmother. After I fixed a whole bunch of stuff, all complaints became "Omegaham monkeyed with my computer and now it won't work."

My mom is a lot better about this, though... and my grandmother has been programming since the punch-card days. So it's not all bad.

> if you think of yourself and your family as one entity

That's nice if you have a nice family. A lot of people have really shitty families. I don't see any reason to treat people special just because they are family. I do things for my parents, but I actually like my parents. There is no way in hell I'm doing anything for most of my aunts, uncles, or cousins, because they are bad people.

My solution to family tech support has been to buy an iPad for anyone who gets in touch asking which purple gorilla they should trust.

A child response to you refers to my point - which is that if I uninstall bonzi buddy for you, you then decide it's definitely my fault when you install malware next time, and instead of "please can you help?" it's "fix my fucking computer, why did you break it?".

No good deed goes unpunished. Introduce a financial exchange into the mix and it ceases being a good deed and becomes a commercial transaction, and peoples' assumptions and expectations accordingly change.

Once, I told my mom that she should install a hard drive herself. She has since moved on to setting up routers and at least one security DVR. By convincing her to empower herself I've freed her from the crappy support at the store, which has saved her lots of money.

I'm in a similar position - I'm notoriously slow to answer emails and check voicemails, which is fantastic. After a few instances of this, my mom just started learning how to Google the answers to her problems. These days, if she needs help with something, it's usually something that I end up needing to ask someone else for help with.

I can't even make her write down what I tell her, which she will forget in a minute... or she wants me to install her new laptop but refuses to migrate away from her crappy desktop (and I refuse to set up 2 backup set-ups).

but she gives me money to study while not having a good pension saved for the future, so who am I to complain!

I think there's a difference between working for free and doing occasional favors if you have the time and it's a two way street (no need to keep score, just in general).

Work often implies responsibilities and demands. There can be none in a favor.

> it makes sense to do those things for them.

I try to "teach them to fish", not just "give them the fish", though. Unless it's too complex or we're too pressed for time.

"Computer-related things" isn't a thing, any more than an evolutionary biologist who works with fruit flies is well-qualified to work on a particle accelerator (despite both being "science"). I'm an engineer. I'm not a Microsoft help-desk staffer, a GMail support center, or an Acer repair technician. If my family members don't use the same equipment, software, and services that I do, I'm unlikely to have any special knowledge that will help them more than what they'll get from tech support (bad as it often is). Half the time I can't even understand what they're talking about and just end up reading the manual to them until everyone is too angry to continue the conversation.

If you work on a consumer e-mail app, sure, by all means get them using that and help them with it. But many (most) of us don't work on products that are targeted at consumer needs, or have any special knowledge about the products our family members use. Let the people who do, do their jobs; everyone will get a better outcome that way.

I think it is about respect. Like my grandparents who will copy any error message down by hand and ask me about them later, but who actually listens and care what I have to say. If they kept asking the same thing and didn't listen I would feel very different about what I am doing.

I usually help close relatives and long-standing friends with computer problems. I felt funny charging them money, but a nice compromise I settled on after a while was asking for food as payment. They felt good about giving me something (many good people will actually feel guilty about getting something for free), I felt good about getting awesome food (often homemade), and it discouraged the worst leeching.

When I used to repair computers, my starting rate was a six-pack and went up to a case for virus removal.

Both my grandmothers are nurses who have given me and my parents remote medical advice for years. I actually really wish that I was better at remote computer support.

Ah, but when you get ill, do you phone them up and ask why they made you ill, and fit in three or four digs about how the medicine they told you to take last time is definitely causing this, and potentially also your dog's illness?

That's the difference between computers and pretty much anything else... For some reason all ration just goes clean out of the window.

Eh - my parents are pretty good. I'm not going to let them pay the Geek Squad $700 to remove viruses from their computer (again). I can do that. You do have to draw boundaries - like I'll say "yes, I can help you, but I'll have to block out 2 hours next week." So if it's really an urgent problem they'll get the message and go pay someone, begin to understand that what I do isn't trivial, and become respectful of my time. YMMV - my parents are dope.

In the 90s in my first business I did support at home for people who thought they could get unpaid support from their friends, neighbours and neighbourhood kids. We were expensive and never lacked clients who had gotten unpaid support which had only made things worse.

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