Some favorites:
- No way they would actually screw me over! We're buds/they got me tiger balm/they paid some/I did them a solid
- Thin veneer of safe fallbacks that doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Legal or other 'repercussions'
- Endless delays and excuses (though it's usually too late by this point)
I hope this is a bug in my phone’s handling of something and not intentional. Until I know otherwise, I’m treating sites where this happens as deliberately hostile for the same reason as always: ads. I use reader mode to escape ads that my ad blockers miss but also to avoid poor design or hard to read fonts and the like. My response is the same as ever: I closed the article.
However them dissolving the entity and moving their assets and IP around is also not free and will incur overhead, if they actually did it.
Threatening to dissolve the entity seemingly admits that they do have something worth collecting against. In my experience the companies who run out of money just tell you that they’re out of money and they also start losing key employees and your email contacts because they’re not getting paid either. If the company continues to exist and they’re threatening you to not sue, that might be a sign that they do have the money but they’re relying on intimidating contractors to not try collecting it.
Legal action is not free, so all of this has to be weighed.
EDIT: I should explain how I know this. Younger me took a job with a startup that got in over its head with spending but the CEO didn’t want the party to stop. His strategy was to stop paying any vendors and use the remaining cash flow to only pay past invoices for vendors that we needed something from (more work, more product) or anyone who looked like they were going to sue us. If someone got lawyers involved, they got paid. Needless to say I didn’t keep that job very long.
Often paid late, but FIVE times, I never got paid at all, one time it was several thousands over the course of months and I almost pursued it in court, but in the end I took the L.
It's always these incubator types, they're the absolute worst clients. They have the cash in the bank too, they often just forget or feel entitled and don't want to back down.
NEVER work for a YC founder.
Also, mandatory: https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1
Project goes well, he gets paid and they're best buds, and he doesn't even realize he was scammed (by intent). If not, well there's no point suing a failed company.
It isn't, but you can't get blood from a stone and squeezing costs money.
It sounds like the entity that the contract is with has no real assets and/or is based in a jurisdiction which is hard to enforce judgements in. That's a case where you need to get paid up-front, which is the real lesson in this article.
The weirdest part to me, receive a call and just get up and go? Priorities? Did you write this blog post from the doghouse?
If I don't get paid for one day of work, I will probably get over it in a few hours. If I don't get paid for six months of work, we will have a serious problem. The tighter and more incremental we can make the delivery process, the less likely anyone gets screwed.
If a party is pushing hard for long-term contracts or large up-front sums of payment, I would walk away from that transaction unless there was a literal golden goose sitting in their lap.
HockeyStack, Greptile, Velt all had problems paying me and all required 7 day a week, overnight, etc.
Early/frequent payment terms are always good to have but you may not always have the leverage for it depending on where you’re at as a contractor.
Takes getting ripped off a times before insisting on better terms I guess. It’s like bombing your first job interview… you can prepare but it just needs to happen.
And TBH, I have also had a few false positives. One contract I did not take (it was for a mix of equity and cash) turned into a 10B+ company, and I would have made enough to retire (again) on it over a 1-year contract. I didn't because the founder who called me just sounded completely clueless and was barraging me with marketing speak instead of explaining what he needed. I was so exhausted from his BS I just decided I didn't need the headache. (This is also a danger of having enough to retire ... you turn down a lot of potentially lucrative work because you just don't think the headaches are worth it).
In the grand scheme of things, other than that one big missed opportunity, I haven't missed too much upside by being so picky. And when I'm counseling colleagues about their unpaid contracts and conflicts, I'm always silently thanking the stars I have the luxury to say no. I know that's a priviledge.
When you go out of pocket - you are out of pocket and the risk is all yours. If that one thing was different then all the remaining risk is on the client - they don't want to do version contr - ok cool you still get paid.
Usually when you have to pay in to get paid out (outside of a direct investment scenario) it's a scam. The people who fall for the Nigeria Prince thing are operating the same way.
this is only getting worse with ai.
all the artifacts of good work are there but none of the depth.
Has saved me from wasting my time on loads of projects before.
Reading the thread, I think most of us who have worked contracts here have been burned one way or another
Ordinarily, I would sign master agreements and set PO terms up-front. Typically, the better customers would agree to very strict requirements / objectives for a particular time period for a specific price. Any deviations would require negotiation. Hourly is fine too but there must be regular milestone deliveries so that there's demonstrable value for money being conveyed rather than an appearance of a milking-oriented consultant. Expectations must always be managed.
I get what the author is saying here. But it's a bad idea to treat one's work team with deep communal devotion in this way, as if they are a kind of dysfunctional family-- or, in the author's case, apparently higher in status than real family.
Doing this without proper remuneration creates a market distortion, and that is bad for capitalism.
This is unfortunately all too common. It's hard for someone who isn't an expert in the specific field to separate a smooth grifter from a more typical sales pitch
99 out 100 times they will be a hassle, and you'll be lucky if they pay you anything beyond the upfront payment.
Even worse if it is another business, as the author writes, those can just declare bankruptcy and walk away.
- Payment is due X days after receipt of invoice, or immediately after the consultant has addressed any quality issues, whichever is sooner
- Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply to late fees, interest, and then principal, in that order.
- In the event of a late payment the invoice for the next deliverable shall immediately fall due.
- The consultant shall be entitled to shift deadlines on deliverables in the event of a late payment as a result of any work disruption, without incurring any liability.
- Payment shall be made in X currency, or an exchange rate at X date on Oanda.com shall apply.
- The client is responsible for any bank fees incurred by their, or any intermediary bank. In the event of a SWIFT transaction it shall be made with the OUR payment code.
- The jurisdiction in the event of a conflict shall be England and Wales. Neither party shall be bound by arbitration.
- The client and consultant shall both indemnify the other up to the total value of the contract and shall not under any circumstance be liable beyond X GBP.
We also no longer share downloadable links of our deliverables until they are paid up. They get a view/comment only link for reports/data etc.
We’ve found that clients that aren’t willing to accept these terms won’t pay you either way.
We determine the net days on the invoice based on the credit rating of the client. Ironically, the good clients pay within 2-3 days normally, and the difficult ones are very “long tail”. About 1% of contracts tend to fully or partially default on their payments.
We’re in a particularly credit poor industry but our average delay due to late payment is 23 days. Those clients where we stop delivery pay on average 11 days sooner than those contracts where we don’t stop delivery.
This is based on around 2,000 invoices sent over the last 5 years.
Do you still cut your own hair ;) ?
But yes us folks in the creative world can learn a few things from the corporate world when it comes to contracts and payment schedules. Mike Monteiro's talk 'F*ck you, pay me' comes to mind.
---
The people behind this were irresponsible, childish, and exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They weren’t really hardline crooks. Crooks are probably a lot more organized.
I have gotten myself invested with similar crowds. There’s usually a charismatic spokesperson, leading the chaos.
They likely didn’t plan to rip him off, but paying him wasn’t really something they thought about. Real crooks put lots of planning into taking money.
> Multiple very junior developers were touching (binary, TouchDesigner) code and deploying straight to production via thumb drive, with zero version control. In fact, they didn’t know what version control was.
I suspect many startups fit that description. If they survive, then they usually pull themselves up by the bootstraps, eventually. Many of them collapse, taking everything with them.
It is most likely going to not pay anyone so you need to make sure you're paid above and beyond anything else otherwise walk.
Be pleasantly surprised when a poorly run project is being run by nice, honest people. Prep for the opposite.
I am so deadly serious - do not continue working if your invoices are late.
You don't have to be a jerk about it, just explain to your primary contact that you need to be paid and you pick up tools again when the money has arrived.
BUT it is on YOU to properly negotiate reasonable payment terms. And if you don;t know or don't trust the client then require payment in advance until a stronger commercial relationship can be settled in. Do not be a baby - go research business contracts and payment terms.
Do not be afraid to lose business from companies that are squeamish about paying you - in fact actively avoid such companies.
And yet, somehow, you gave them the most important time you had for their promises.
My SO has her own story - she ran into a guy whom she later found out does it as a policy: hires people, never pays, threatens to sue them if they publish their story. Her lawyer told her to just forget about it.
It's then that find out the limitations of our legal system: if the client is international, forget about it. If they're out of state, prepare to deal with an expensive legal process taking place where the laws may not always favor you. And even if it's local, and you won in a small claims court - good luck collecting.
I have periodic payments built into all my contracts, with the final payment taking place after acceptance tests, but before me surrendering all materials and code. I won't say this is a 100% bulletproof solution, but the alternatives suck.
A little hyperbolic, but more accurate than not when laypeople think about contracts.
A contract isn’t a magic spell, it is a declaration of shared understanding that can be used for clarity and in legal proceedings.
If you think of a contract as a way to ensure you get what you agreed, yes, it is toilet paper, because a contract doesn’t remove counterparty risk.
After about a month of employment, I was told I was being rude to ask for payment. Apparently they neglected to tell me that they actually only pay their employees 60 to 70 days after they start.
Of course the first red flag was them doing the 1099 dance for slightly above minimum wage. I had been forced to do that before, but guess what. They paid us every single week.
Quiting without notice was one of the greatest feelings with these clowns. By this time they had started to ask me to literally work for free. "Unpaid training". They stopped scheduling me for paid hours anyway, so no notice needed.
Right after that I worked for some conservatives. They paid me early. My first year I got a large raise.
There were some awkward moments like the CEO telling me who to vote for. But for the most part it was awesome.
I still consider myself to be very liberal, but I don't want to work anywhere that does a lot of virtue signaling. Your beliefs don't make you a good person, your actions do.
no it isn't. why you did not sue them? success rate of international arbitrage (New York Convention) proces into China is 90% success rate. USA/EU companies who sue Chineses companies in China for breach of contract seem to be winning rates. Enforcement of USA curt orders do not need to go thorugh Chinese courts again, and are enforced by local authorities (local sharks) with success rate of 80% for foreign firms suing chinese firms. fees are also fairly low. case is straightfoward.
if author went and sue, likely he would get his money back.
Nobody forced OP to work 11-14 hour days. Contracting 101 stipulates that you define your hours ahead of time. You come in, you provide your expertise, and you leave at the end of the day. Let the client's junior employees work long hours. Not your problem.
OP brought their own equipment, which is totally fine but "who provides equipment" is also in the contract from the start. OP should have made a list of equipment that the client will require to complete such a project and stipulate a client budget be set aside to cover any shortcomings as they arise.
The contract is where you define when you get paid. "Deposit is XYZ quantity, non-refundable. Contractor will be paid for the upcoming week in advance by X date. Failure to remit payment will halt work."
I understand that the point of this blog piece is that it was a learning experience for OP but this stuff is pretty obvious isn't it? This is pretty much what comes up when you google stuff like "how to get into freelance contracting." I'm shocked and feel bad for OP for letting things get this far. Sadly, they were not ripped off by anyone but themselves.
Definitely bring it up with your lawyer.
I send a gentle reminder just to my immediate point of contact to start. If that doesn't work, I start sending more business-like requests for payment every week, and I CC anyone I think might help make it happen.
I've never fired anyone, and everyone has eventually paid (knock wood), but there have been times when I assumed the money was a lost cause (though never five figures worth like the person who shared this blog post).
But more than once, I've had a client contact me and request new work, and I've had to remind them they still have an unpaid invoice. I'll tell them I can't start anything new until the old work is paid. They almost invariably blame the delay on their billing department, and the money eventually finds its way to me.
I would generalize this to "don't work for someone whose ability to pay is based on a high-risk gamble".
There are certainly shady people who can pay but don't because they are greedy avaricious bastards. But there are also plenty of people who would like to pay but whose business venture fails and with it goes their funds.
In the author's story, they probably should have concluded fairly early on that a team that wildly incompetent was also unlikely to produce a product that satisfies their client. And if the client doesn't pay, no one gets paid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_equity
Of course, the startup doesn't go anywhere, and your sweat equity never materializes, so you're left with just the pitiful pay.
I went through this in my late teens/early 20's, along with many friends.
Choice quote from the linked talk (aptly titled "F*ck you, pay me").
Or at least in very small batches and with very short due dates.
Apparently doing emergency repair work can be extremely well paid.
(His wife was fine with it, but when there's great inconvenience for the family balanced by great pay for the family, you've got to get paid)
The lesson I learned is that it doesn't matter how long they've been your friend, when it comes time to pay, they may still try to stiff you. The value of your service diminishes infinitely after it has been performed.
It costs something like 80 quid to file for recovery in court and in our experience invoices are immediately paid up when a “Letter before action” is sent.
You burn the relationship, but arguably you probably don’t want it anyway.
Do you mean 8 percent, or 8 percentage points?
Why ironically? Isn't that exactly what you'd expect?
But then given what I’ve learned since I think I can say with some certainty that this particular group saw the writing on the wall and were willing to use the skilled labor and time of an endless army of cannon fodder to try to staunch the bleeding or take one more long shot at getting final payment, and doing so without the agreement or awareness of the people they enlisted to the risk they were participating in.
These founders hire/fire through hundreds of us, they don't give a shit.
If you say 1 thing they don't like they go to the next.
The author does contracting in niche topics. When your contracting domain is uncommon you have to go where the work is.
You can charge higher prices for niche work and therefore tolerate more time in between contracts. This person may be spending more time not working and with his family than the typical FTE in this arrangement, even if the jobs occasionally require them to fly somewhere for a month.
The job worked fine for about six months, and then one week my paycheck (which usually was on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month) wasn't in my bank account. I go the CEO of the company and mention this and he said something like "Oh yeah, something got fucked up with payroll man, don't worry we'll give you a double paycheck next time, with interest man".
I was young enough in my career to just accept that, and so I waited two more weeks and again, no money in my checking account. I confront the CEO about this, and he says the payroll stuff is still fucked but don't worry man I got you, next paycheck will be a triple paycheck, and an extra two grand for everyone.
Two weeks later, the building's doors are locked, and none of us are able to get into the building. One of the other engineers called one of the investors and apparently the CEO "could not be found", and all of us were laid off on the spot.
This began one of the worst times in my life. I was already not the best at managing money, and because I had naively believed him about eventually getting all my backpay I hadn't been saving especially. I hadn't been conservative with my money, and I had gone a month and a half without a paycheck, and as such I was completely broke.
This led to a lot of terrible stuff happening; my landlord filed a lawsuit against me for back rent, my wife started having medical issues with her eye and we didn't have any insurance or money so we couldn't get it looked at, and I had to call a friend and beg him to loan me $400 to pay some bills and so I could get groceries. He's a very good friend, and he did help me out and I did eventually pay him back, but it was unbelievably depressing to me.
The part that sticks out to me was when I had to fly to Seattle for an interview with Amazon, and while they would happily reimburse everything for the trip, I realized that I didn't have enough money on my debit card to do the "pre-charge" thing that hotels do, and my credit card was maxed out. I was afraid that I was going to be stuck being homeless in Seattle for two days because of an interview that I knew I would not get, and I felt so bad that I let my life get this way. Fortunately in this case, I was able to call my mom once I got there, lied and said I "lost" my credit card and I was able to get her to call in a credit card to the hotel, so I wasn't homeless, but that didn't occur to me until about five minutes after I arrived at the hotel.
Eventually I was able to get my stepfather-in-law to loan us enough money to get my landlord to drop the lawsuit, and eventually I found the job at Jet.com, which was a great job that paid well and ended up being a huge stepping stone in my career and where I met a ton of ridiculously smart and cool people that I still chat with to this day.
I will never forgive that CEO for that period of my life. While it did end up working out, I still occasionally have nightmares about that time in my life, and how upset I was, and how I wouldn't wish that feeling of worthlessness on my worst enemy. In some senses I'm kind of grateful for the experience because it did really force me to grow up and learn how to take care of myself, but ultimately I still wish it hadn't happened.
This wasn't YC, but it was still a VC-funded megalomaniacal CEO, which is why this reminded me of it.
OTOH, one other clear subtext of the story is the "savior" attitude of a lot of tech people, who think that, if they weren't using version control before, think, "oh, I'll just tell them about this great thing, and because it's much better they will definitely listen to me and implement it - it's only logical". But the harsh reality is that "better" things won't affect an org that went along that far and dug themselves that deep.
Never underestimate an org's ability to shoot itself in the foot, even if you think you know better. That includes getting your money from them.
It might have involved OP getting a taxi to the airport and being chased down at the gate, but it would have worked.
And even if it didn't, they would have saved themselves enormous time, money, and stress by following through on their threats if it didn't work out.
As an electrician currently self-stopped (for both non-payment & absenteeism, two months no contact, so far) I'm not budging. When you didn't show up for our last two on-site meetups (and still haven't contacted), I thought about filing a lien... but decided to just keep you from having tenants (by not finishing AC/water/electric). You'll get around to it..?
When I told this LLC/owner "you obviously aren't in a rush because you obviously aren't visiting the jobsite/me" I sort of expected him to show within a few days. Then a few weeks. And now we're entering a few months.
You have weeks of my punchlists (unresolved to do), I have weeks of questions (what do you want?) and you won't even do simple things like turning on power/water.
Fuck you, pay me.
This wasn't because of the customer or not getting paid. This was the author's choice.
That way your “discounted” rate is the rate they should have paid and they feel like they got a deal.
While these statements are generally true, it shouldn't dissuade anyone from pursuing these remedies.
Years back I took a small programming contract with a 'friend of a friend' that ended with me delivering what was asked and them suddenly not having any money, claiming the company was going under.
They were in another state. I filed small claims by mail and they never responded, so I got a default judgement without ever needing to travel, for under $500 in total fees. The judgement is worthless though, right? Probably...
Fast forward about a month and they had an investor willing to float the company for a while longer, but now my judgement is a giant wrench - the investor won't give them money as long as this is hanging around. I got the cofounders to jointly take on the debt personally (after consulting with a lawyer that this was possible - he didn't even charge for the consult!) and I vacated the judgement against the LLC.
A short while later the LLC went under anyway, but since I had both founders' personal finances under my thumb (which would allow garnishing wages, obtaining leins, etc.) I was able to recoup the entire contract amount from them personally.
I wouldn't have spent more than about $1,000 chasing that money down, but a few hours of paperwork and a few hundred dollars ended up making it easily worth my while.
My boss said that the ones who have negotiated the best deals are the ones that are late paying, complain about just about every bill and will write angry letters when my boss index adjust pricing.
He said it taught him to never offer a really good deal for a regular customer (ie where the upside isn't very obvious).
Its easy to say don't be afraid to lose business, but when you're starting out, the economy is rough or all you have are the one or two clients, that's a different matter entirely.
One thing I've learned is that you always have to do the leg work, you can't assume someone will do the right thing or keep their word.
Develop a system where even bad clients, can't do too much damage i.e. upfront deposits, milestone-based payments. You have to control cash flow risks, if you are gonna take risks know what risks you're taking and when to get out.
> They were attempting to pull off AR effects on the transparent OLED windows of the bus without accounting for lens distortion, field of view, parallax, occlusion, etc., and were frustrated and mystified when things didn’t appear to line up. They were completely naive to what depth and scale cues are and how to deploy them.
Honestly, this seems to be bad advice from their recovery services. Suing is 100% recommended here. There are plenty of lawyers that will work on a pro rata basis for account recovery in California. Sure, you lose a portion of your 35k; but you get more than you would have letting them get away with paying zero.
There's also laws in place to keep companies from "closing up shop" and opening in a new entity. It doesn't necessarily erase your debt (it can, but only in rare circumstances). And, even if they do get around it, it keeps them from pulling the same shenanigans going forward, in the state.
And is who they are relevant to the lesson (stealing time/effort is easy to get away with, you need to protect yourself from that)?
They mean “percentage points”.
https://www.gov.uk/late-commercial-payments-interest-debt-re...
As I understand it, from our lawyer, is that this exact wording is automatically enforceable in UK courts and easiest in the event of a dispute. It’s also generally internationally accepted.
I believe this is what we call small claims court in the United States. The threshold varies by state, but it is a very effective way to deal with recalcitrant companies both large and small.
It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.
When the wheels start coming off, morals are first over the side.
In some cases (think Theranos), it can go all the way into straight criminality. Most times, it just reaches the point where everything collapses, when the supports rust away.
Kind of mirrors "it's expensive to be poor"
In Spring of 2024, a good friend contacted me saying he’d heard of an opportunity to help finish an augmented reality bus tour of a Beijing park. He’d gotten the impression the California-based client were in a pinch, and said they’d mentioned by way of referral the names of some folks we both knew and respected.
In the past, I’d consulted on AR bus bids for both The Mill and IDEO, and from those I was well aware how many hard problems AR buses involved. I was very curious to find out how these folks had addressed them, and on our introductory call I told them as much. They demurred. This was my first warning not all was right.
We spoke briefly about the nature of the project and their need for help, and agreed I’d immediately try to get a work visa and come out to China for as long as I could spare - we determined it’d be a month. Fortunately I found I still had a valid visa from a previous project, so I was good to head out immediately.
When I arrived I found the project in shambles. Multiple very junior developers were touching (binary, TouchDesigner) code and deploying straight to production via thumb drive, with zero version control. In fact, they didn’t know what version control was.
They were attempting to pull off AR effects on the transparent OLED windows of the bus without accounting for lens distortion, field of view, parallax, occlusion, etc., and were frustrated and mystified when things didn’t appear to line up. They were completely naive to what depth and scale cues are and how to deploy them.
Their gyroscopes had an axis flipped, and the pitch of the bus was producing an opposite reaction in the virtual content. GPS was highly unreliable (because China) and there was no workaround in place.
Their render pipeline was drawing everything - including their renders - to fullscreen quads, which were then used for basic compositing with alpha and re-rendered - all 35+ and counting layers, using alpha-to-transparency. Their (consumer, air-cooled) gaming PC’s intake was exposed directly to the dusty air outside the bus. Their consumer OLED panels were roasting in the direct sun coming through the windows. Their ‘rack’ was an MDF shelf in the passenger seat of the bus, which was bumping along on rutted dirt roads. Their ‘code’ was the absolute worst kind of fucked-up node spaghetti, not a thought given to legibility or maintainability or standards - basically the reason people hate node-based programming.
They couldn’t deliver even the very basics of what they’d sold and worked on and delayed and cost-overrun for years, much less the exciting effects they kept promising the client.
They were carpetbaggers and dilettantes convinced by their own inexperience and the advice of a onetime VJ that they could pull off something I’d twice helped quote to be brought home by a cadre of hardened killers with shitloads of math and know-how at eye-watering prices. They were way way way over their heads and were in no way interested in updating their priors in light of the shit they were swimming in.
The quiet office rang with a still-unheard answer to their “how hard could it be”: “fuck around and find out.” They were in the deep dark forest of unknown unknowns, drowning in hubris.
I was, I fully believe, endlessly patient.
I suggested they measure the intrinsics of their lenses to flatten the image. I suggested they implement some (any) color science. I suggested they get a second (just one more) of each of the bus’ cameras, so I could work camera issues in the office and not on the bus, in the hot sun, sitting sideways on a bench seat with the keyboard in my lap and the mouse on my leg, using the ridiculous 3x OLED arrangement as a coding environment. I begged them to let me rebuild their render pipeline in a less psychotic way. I begged them to let me standardize their Windows builds before they rolled out this alpha template to the remaining ~20 buses, a process that had already begun.
I demanded they implement version control, and showed them how it would save time, not waste it, by making deploys to the bus from dev instantaneous and diffable, reversable, and how branches could keep feature dev off the stable build on the bus.
I agreed against my judgement and objections to drop these necessary things on a regular basis so I could build flashy gags that did nothing to address their root issues, or to accelerate dev — sequenced particle effects and sparkly animations that were given to me not with animatics or storyboards or reference images but rather just a quick verbal explanation. I was exhorted to have them ready immediately for client review, often the same day, at which point the client repeatedly became openly upset to find out that the result was not what he expected, or thought they had agreed on.
When I realized this was happening I gently suggested the client could implement a process for new work — one that moved inexorably from lower to higher fidelity with a fixed number of revisions and explicit client sign-off at each step.
I negotiated a touchy situation where I discovered one of their junior devs was secretly being abusive to one of the others.
I worked 11-14 hours a day for 24 days straight with no time off. We used my gear - my depth camera (I brought my own — bringing everything is a habit I acquired in my previous life in showbiz), my laptop, my software keys. I came out of pocket for all expenses.
I had arrived with a massively inflamed wrist from a Muay Thai injury and working in this situation was excruciating. They knew this - they bought me some chinese tiger balm pads.
I missed the month of May with my 2-year-old kid. My wife cared for a 2-year-old alone.
I’d received a deposit for less than 1/4 of the contract amount. I did all of this on faith. The faith was that, as you’ve surmised from the title, they’d pay me, and — spoiler alert — they did not. A few years later I can say for sure these people won’t pay me the $35k they owe me.
The faith was that if they could’t pay, they’d let me know because I was actively digging their asses out of a hole they’d dug, and doing so tirelessly and professionally, without complaint.
The faith was that if they didn’t pay, the legal system would enforce our California-law contract and make them pay.
I hired debt collectors - they did the usual nastygram process and eventually told me it’d be unwise to sue - the debtors could simply close up shop dissolve the entity.
I would be holding this particular bag.
Now I’m aware this all sounds like a complaint, and I suppose you could say to this point that it has been. The constructive thing to do is to ask “well what have we learned now that we’ve touched the stove?”
I learned:
FAQs:
$35k seems pretty low for this job. Hindsight is 20/20 of course.
In a different domain, this is the painful lesson of almost anyone who tries to help people in a bind -- you can try to help, but yours is unlikely to be the advice that sets them straight, so you shouldn't get too invested with unproven or, especially, proven unreliable actors.
Please don't be them. If you do good work make sure that you get your bills sent on time.
> I’ll happily tell you who they are - get in touch
A. You need to know where a passager's eyes are to display the POI in the right place. Even if each rows gets their own and only screen you'll need to account for their head vertical position (different people are different height) and movement, hence the eye tracking.
B. If you share a window between multiple people you end us with a POI mess with informations displayed multiplied by as much passengers in the bus.
|- r9 -|w9
| |w9
|- r10 -|w10 T
| |w10
|- r11 -|w11
| |w11
|- r12 -|w12
The takeaway here is probably that the fix isn't just "never discount", but it's to screen for the kind of customer who treats a good deal as an invitation to strengthen the relationship.
Or... maybe he needs income to exist.
atleast that's my interpretation of it of how logic might follow if they are working in niche space, many people seem to be applying the logic onto themselves into completely standard situation, but I don't suppose that is the case here.
Hope this helps in genuinely understanding their situation, from my reading/thinking about it.
Sadly, while this is true, there are plenty of folks still doing freelance who have not learned this, and there always will be. It's just one of those lessons that quite a lot of people have to learn from experience, even after reading posts like this. The exact same reason why companies will continue to get away with taking advantage of freelance work.
Not all of us can do that, or our dad, and there’s nobody to help us nor a savings to fall back on.
Almost everyone gets hooked up by their parents and society is designed around that.
I don’t know anyone else in the world except for me who doesn’t have any help.
Even the homeless people get more help than me. Often they have parents and even kids somewhere.
Pretty broken system we have where basically nothing you do in your life matters, it’s all about how much money your parents had.
Almost everyone on this site comes from a background like that, just free shit without any merit while the rest of us struggle, crazy
Neatly distilled I believe you are correct
Because, I’m sure multiple people here could tell similar stories with the political leanings of the groups involved reversed.
Because they could just dissolve the entity and get away with it. Did you even read the rest of the article?
This is really the key. The "deal" has to have something for both parties. The vendor gets some kind of lock-in, prepayment, guarantee of future business, whatever it is, and in exchange the purchaser gets a discount.
The discount doesn't just come out of nowhere.
Didn’t realize it needed saying but I left the child and did the work in exchange for money I needed (still need) to feed the child.
Many people do this every day. I do it when it makes sense or the conditions require, which is to say I am a WFH contractor who sometimes works on site occasionally.
Think of ¡all the exposure! doing this free labor for us will give you! /s
or:
I'll cook you dinner if you do this days of work for me /serious?!
That was indeed the point, guess I conveyed it in a poor way.
I'm sorry you don't feel like you get the help you need, though I think just based on this comment you would benefit from talking to a therapist. This isn't a dig, I see a therapist.
Corporations, can not. I've been though this twice. If they're doing press releases about how liberal they are, it's probably not a good fit.
Now that I'm old and jaded, I want politics out of my workplace.
It's literally just not worth it. Time is the most finite resource that we all have.
If they try to dissolve and create another business that operates in the same sphere/as a successor or with the same management team; the debt doesn't disappear, you just prosecute the new entity. With an added cherry of potential criminal prosecution, if they're particularly egregious about it.
People can 100% get around paying, that happens. But the judgement will remain on their record. This will make reincorporation difficult as well as just acting as a warning to future partners that do basic due diligence.
No one's saying it's easy to get the money back, but rolling over probably is the least desirable outcome (and probably why they've acted this way with so many people).
As to your collection firms, I can't speak to it. Maybe your situation is more complicated (e.g. registered entity out of state, unclear contract terms, etc) or they just don't want to go through with the hassle of doing more than they were hired to do (send nag letters and hope for easy turnover).
In the future, you can use it as a learning experience. Keep your deliverables under the small claims limit, do metered payouts, etc.
It is possible to switch to a smaller VNO with better customer policies. But then your cellular data gets dropped during heavy network congestion, which is probably worse for most of us.