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"
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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