• bjorney@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    1 year ago

    Very much 4

    We wanted to get an engineer to audit something we set up, talking like 1 hour phone call, maybe 1 hour of work beyond that if something needed to be adjusted

    We wasted like 4 hours on the line with different agencies (talking to sales people) who wanted to connect us with a DIFFERENT agency to do the actual work, who wanted us to sign a 3 year service contract.

    Like no, “please just let us talk to one of your senior engineers and bill us $500/hr for his time”

    • zero_iq@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      While a 3 year service contract was clearly overkill, your estimate of 1 hour is ridiculously tiny. Nothing of any worth can be audited with a 1 hour phone call.

      • PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Not true at all.

        It’s just a bad idea. You need to have a minimum contracted price.

        There’s plenty of “$0.10 for the screw $1m for knowing that’s the solution” stories.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        In this case, by “audit” it was more of a metaphorical “here is our setup, do we plug this into slot A or B, we don’t want to read the 300 page manual”, so 1 hour was literally all it needed

        Spoiler: I ended up reading the 300 page manual, it took a week. That was 3 years ago and we have never touched it since