[ladelfa]

This reminded me of the story about Charles Proteus Steinmetz diagnosing the problem inside a generator at Henry Ford's auto plant just by listening to it very carefully.

"Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz ... responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...

[thaumasiotes]

Why repeat a common joke as if it were a historical event?

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

[MarceliusK]

Funny how both cheese tapping and generator listening come down to the same core skill: quiet mastery built from experience, not textbooks

[dataflow]

How much is the legal obligation to pay such a bill, legally speaking? It sounds like they hadn't agreed on a figure beforehand, so could he have billed an arbitrary amount (say, a million dollars) and would Ford have been required to pay that too? What is the limit?

[nandomrumber]

What is an appropriate fee to charge any particular customer when what you’re billing for isn’t necessarily time and materials, but more so the skill / experience required to diagnose and rectify an issue, or otherwise provide a solution, in a timely manner?

I’d argue the most correct answer is: up to the customers ability to tolerate, such that they’d be inclined to want to become repeat customers.

[dataflow]

I'm not asking what's appropriate. I'm asking what is legally obligated.

[rcxdude]

The legal standard will be related. Absent a written deal, the court would look at what the customer would have or should have reasonably expected, based on typical rates for such work, the value and cost of doing the work, etc. It can get quite messy and usually it's not worthwhile litigating such a thing.

(heck, even with a written deal, the fine print often matters less that people might think in court, though a badly written contract will sure draw out much more protracted arguments about such details)

[pasc1878]

Depends on the contract the parties agreed on.

[nandomrumber]

I’ve met a handful of technicians who have been somewhere up and to the right on the skill / experience axes, and they’ve typically know what the problem is immediately upon listening to, or otherwise observing, a machine, or plant / equipment in general.

They’re usually a pleasure to work with, and I’ve found they’re typically the sort of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge.

[rob74]

The modern equivalent of this would be a one-line change in a codebase that fixes a significant issue. If you then log three days of effort on the ticket, people may also start questioning that, but:

Changing a line: 1 minute

Knowing which line to change (which includes making sure that the change doesn't break something else): 23 hours, 59 minutes

[rob74]

Interesting! I was reminded of the skills of older physicians, who could make an informed diagnosis going just on the symptoms and maybe using a stethoscope, whereas younger ones immediately order a full blood test and maybe throw in an MRI just to be sure.