[xrd]

Working for a company that had one of the USA national league sports organizations as a customer.

They were super litigious. And the contract had metrics we had to hit with our services or they wouldn't pay us.

I was building the service. The customer was load testing it.

My manager had me on the phone in his lap while he was in the office with them. He had another back channel to the server guy who was monitoring the load.

He was whispering "Defcon 1" if the server started creaking and I needed to switch to a perl script that used cached data. If he said "Defcon 2" I was supposed to switch to sending a static file. Can't remember if we got to Defcon 2 or not, I think we did.

It was pretty nuts to deal with that customer. We passed the load test.

[Waterluvian]

What was the reason for doing that vs. shipping something that met specifications? Were they testing in bad faith (ie trying to DDOS it to not pay)? Was the contract poorly specified so you couldn’t test it ahead of time with double the load? Etc.

[tester756]

>Were they testing in bad faith (ie trying to DDOS it to not pay)?

Basing on "USA national league sports organization" it feels like they were reasonable

[xrd]

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying because they are a national sports organization they are probably honorable? I definitely didn't feel that way after working with them. They had no idea about how technology worked (granted, this was 20 years ago so they have probably fixed that deficit internally).

They did have a clear understanding of how to use litigation, and they played to their strengths, which I can respect.

[tester756]

I meant that I think that they're operating at really big scale (big events?), so their requirements and testing them feels reasonable

[xrd]

In my opinion, yes, they were trying to DDOS it and find a flaw and then renegotiate.

I saw this kind of behavior a lot those few years. A major university did the same.

In the case of the university, they weren't fulfilling on their end by providing us with raw video materials in time to process them. Then our software had bugs processing the files in time. We had to do it all within a few weeks. Who's fault is that, our bugs or their personnel issues.

Usually lawyers then come in to fight it out. And they will comb over those contracts to find one item that was not fulfilled and use that to the hilt.

And, lots of times, you sign a contract and THEN you figure out how to fulfill upon it. If you haven't done that, you've never really run a business, don't fool yourself.

[blitz_skull]

> If you haven’t done that, you’ve never really run a business, don’t fool yourself.

Whoa, okay Business gate-keeper. I didn’t realize you held the keys for bestowing “True Business Owner” status on us.

Some of us prefer to run our business in a sensible way that doesn’t include legal fees for signing contracts we know we can’t reasonably fulfill.

[sneak]

Does simple fraud now count as a hack? The bar should be higher than this.

[xrd]

Not a bad question.

They were super litigious and apparently often refused to pay once the slightest detail was missed in a contract. I wasn't in a position where I negotiated those things but it was conveyed as such in meetings I was a party to.

This was twenty years ago and the world of these contracts was different in that no one really knew how to structure them and inevitably all the parties involved were disappointed.