
Ask HN: What is your technical or business “never again” story? - takinola
I&#x27;ll start with mine.  I built an add-on for an ecommerce platform that lets shops add a delivery date picker to their checkout flow. Given a choice, I will never again build an app that involves calendars as I never anticipated just how complex and mind-bending dealing with time can be.
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Bucephalus355
I worked with storage arrays at a service firm. The storage arrays backed up
to the cloud. They had an onboard proprietary GUI, where if you checked a
single box, it would use HTTPS instead of HTTP when transmitting to S3 (no
idea why S3 even allows HTTP to start with).

They refused to roll this out (HTTPS) across the 4-5 servers of this brand we
managed.

Something just broke in their brain, because I was coming at it from a
security angle, they thought “this must be a waste of time / I am a power-
hungry sysadmin resistant to change”. I still think about it to this day, and
will get anxiety every now and then suggesting a mildly taxing security fix,
because if ppl can say no to HTTPS checkboxes will they agree to anything?

~~~
icedchai
If this is the biggest issue you've encountered, consider yourself lucky.

Why didn't you just roll it out yourself? I would've just checked the boxes
and moved on to something else.

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deanmoriarty
Joined a company as a very early employee. The company became successful (200+
employees, mid 8 figures revenues), but founders just won't sell it: instead
of humbly admitting the luck we had (it's always about luck, I was in the
front row seat the whole time so I can definitely and objectively state it)
and take risk off the table, they are doubling down trying to make it much
bigger (targeting mid 9 figures revenues, and they just took a HUGE investment
round with a stellar valuation, which essentially prices us at beyond-perfect
execution, so it's significantly risky). In the meantime, I am completely
burned out and would just like to put an end to this adventure which lasted 5+
years, but I can't.

I can't leave due to my stock options otherwise expiring (standard 90 days
window), and I don't want to put the liquidity necessary to exercise them and
leave, too risky due to the appreciation of those shares, nor I want to take
out a loan or stuff like esofund which will eat into 50% of my profits, and
would still leave me with a taxable event if the company went belly up and the
loan was forgiven. So, I'm a typical example of "golden handcuffed".

So, my "never again": never again work for founders who are already rich and
are not looking for a reasonably early exit in case of success. My fault for
not checking during the interview process, but I was young and naive.

If the founders were not already extremely affluent, I could assure you they
would have already sold the company by now (probably at the 2-3 years mark),
very likely realizing low 8 figures profits for themselves (and low 7 figures
profits for me), whereas they are now shooting for high 8/low 9 figures for
themselves, "hurting" me by exposing me to insane time cost opportunity, and
also making the whole thing much riskier since as you grow your acquirer pool
shrinks dramatically.

Realistically, I end up being a rest and vest employee, meaning I don't do
much work these days, and I likely won't get fired since I have so much
context, so I spend a lot of my working time avoiding getting burned out and
mostly learning about new technologies, but it's still much less than ideal
and it's hurting both me and the company.

At the same time, my emotions these days are very weird and nothing I ever
thought I would ever experience: I am usually equally happy if the announced
quarter results are a big win (meaning my equity valuation is preserved) or a
big loss (meaning we are approaching the end of this company so I'll be free
without having to voluntarily forfeit a potentially large payout).

~~~
jackgolding
Rand Fishkin's autobiography has a interesting few paragraphs about "rich
founders" and why they are preferred over ones who want to "get rich" \- in
short VCs don't want you to cash out ever - they want that moonshot.

~~~
deanmoriarty
I just added the book to my Audible wish list, thanks for the suggestion, and
your comment is definitely on point. I'll keep this piece of wisdom I am
painfully learning for the rest of my working life, never do business with
people who can afford to risk/lose much more than you, whether it be time,
money or mental sanity.

~~~
jackgolding
A lot of his argument against taking VC funding comes to what you say - they
are playing with other people's money in a very risky way and choose you to
invest in because they want you to go beyond the call of duty because you have
everything to lose.

------
mojomark
1.) accepting angle funds for too much equity (45%) and not "quitting my day
job" to focus full time on my venture.

2.) Paying (a lot, $35K) a high end IP law firm to "finish" two patents I'd
drafted an file them. I now write and file my own patents for next to nothing;
it just takes time.

3.) Letting a law firm convince me to pay even more ($40K) for foreign
patents, which are pretty much worthless unless you're an Apple or Samsung.

4.) Not getting an up front firm quote for legal work (said firm tried to
collect an additional $90K, which of course we did not pay).

5.) Not watching the company bank account like a hawk to make sure my partners
weren't wasting precious raised capital on worthless overhead expenses (e.g.
empty offices... and they were).

Oh, the list goes on...

~~~
bradknowles
Sorry dude, you’ve had the wrong law firms.

~~~
yesenadam
What percentage are 'wrong'? How do you find the right ones? Ask around? What
if you don't know people to ask..

Hmm that would be a great website - for anywhere, it tells you who the right
law firms are for what, with user stories, ratings, etc. And links to orgs who
give good advice about those things etc.

------
bayareamaverick
My "Never again" business/ people lesson is to avoid anyone with toxic nature
be a part of a startup team, howsoever genius that person might be. Once
bitten, twice shy about this.

For a Startup, destination obviously matters, but making the journey enjoyable
should be one of the top priorities.

------
ewams
Never will I use, stay on a team that uses, or assist any client which uses
zip ties for cable management.

Anyone that says "we will just do this temprarily" will get charged double and
need to send that statement in writing with firm start and end dates along
with the consequence of not meeting the deadline.

Once your average deal size hits >$250k touch nothing less than $100k if it's
a new client, leave it to inside sales.

If someone (or a business) has ever paid you for anything they never get free
work. Free product? Maybe, but never free work.

Put it in a contract, regardless if buying or selling, or it doesn't exist.
When asked to modify something on the fly from that contract, "we'll let you
know" is the only acceptable answer until you review with your team.

"I don't know but will try to find out" is acceptable. "Yes if..." is
preferred.

"No." Can help you live longer and healthier.

~~~
sgillen
What’s so evil about zip ties? They probably shouldn’t end up in a real
deliverable product but for prototypes and proof of concepts I’ve always found
them to be very useful.

~~~
bradknowles
The prototype always gets pushed into production and then you’re never again
allowed to make any changes to it.

But you are still responsible for fixing all the problems.

~~~
sgillen
Yeah I here you there I’m sure that happens all the time.

I’ve mostly done R&D work in my career so I guess my real question to you is
what are all the problems that happen when zip ties are used in production.

------
codegeek
Letting a Rude and Insulting client stay on for longer than we should have.
Never again our company will deal with a Rude/Insulting client no matter how
much they are paying. Rude = Fired. Be nice. And I am not a snowflake. I can
deal with tough clients but not rude/insulting/entitled ones.

------
paulie_a
I've dealt with clients that eat up 90 percent of your time while only
providing ten percent of the revenue. Never be afraid to fire the client.

~~~
softwarefounder
Some of this too is learning how to say _no_ , especially regarding time
frames.

This of course works best when you "can" say no (i.e. multiple clients and
other sources of revenue)

I have clients right now that I won't be able to attend to for a few weeks or
so. If that doesn't work for them, I'll help transition them to a situation
that works for them. But likely they'll stay around since good help can be
hard to find.

------
stephenr
I've been burnt recently, the self-hosted proprietary time tracking &
invoicing tool I've been using for the last decade has decided they're only
supporting their 'cloud' service from January.

Unfortunately, I haven't see any existing OSS options that quite work for me
either.

~~~
mindcrash
Did you check out Hours? That could cover your time tracking needs.

[https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours](https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours)

Then the only thing that would remain is to take the hours registered in Hours
and stuff them into invoices somehow...

~~~
stephenr
I hadn't seen that before. Time tracking is probably the harder part to make a
polished solution. Invoicing is much less frequent, and while I'm using to a
desktop app now, I could live with a web app.

Time tracking though - if it's not a button in my menu bar I can click start
on (and helpful stuff like noticing inactivity and pausing/prompting etc) I'm
going to forget to enter times.

I've wondered sometimes if it'd be possible to fork the toggl desktop app (its
open source) and reverse-engineer a backend to support it (or just update the
desktop app with new backend calls).

------
HillaryBriss
working with a genius programmer who is arrogant and insulting

~~~
ed_at_work
he's not a "genius" if he also has a low EQ.

~~~
n4r9
Would you class Isaac Newton as not being a genius, then?

~~~
ed_at_work
Fine, I'll clarify : no "genius" is worth the money if they have a terrible
EQ. Let them take their "genius" and terrorize somebody else.

~~~
meikos
They are tho

------
forkLding
FB ads when you don't really have enough money for a marketing budget anyways.
FB ads is really a money game, the more money you spent, the more likely your
ads will get conversion.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
This is definitely not true. In general, the CVR for DR ads will slowly
decline as more money is spent, as you are removing users from the pool with
each conversion.

edit: s/pool/poor/

------
rootw0rm
I used to sell grey market designer drugs. jumping thru hoops to be able to
accept credit cards for such transactions is totally not worth it. I had so
many chargebacks that were impossible to fight... some of them were $1000
orders. stick to Bitcoin or litecoin for your shady business ventures.

------
farseer
If you inherit a large code base that is badly written AND you are planning to
stick around in that company. I would strongly suggest to immediately start
re-writing that legacy code even if you have to burn extra hours. Otherwise
you would be doing nothing but firefighting in that job with limited control
over your situation.

~~~
softwarefounder
Unless you're communicating _all_ of this with your managers/supervisor/team,
this is a fool's errand.

