Comment by nightpool
8 hours ago
GP is saying that they were already one of Cloudflare's vendors (they did the networking/IT setup for Cloudflare's office). Whether you'd tolerate that kind of behavior from a vendor is one thing, but for an existing vendor relationship I think adding a few billable hours for "I found this issue in your network and documented and reported it for you" to an existing contract is not particularly unreasonable.
More likely, this is a spectacular version of CYA. By billing the hours, there is a paper trail so that when the inevitable breach occurs, you can point to having done the appropriate thing.
> but for an existing vendor relationship I think adding a few billable hours for "I found this issue in your network and documented and reported it for you" to an existing contract is not particularly unreasonable.
Billing for random things outside of the agreed upon scope of work is actually unreasonable. It’s something covered in every contracting agreement I’ve ever been a part of.
Maybe they could point to some contract that maybe would have covered it, but when your contractors start billing you for sending quick emails about unrelated things you didn’t ask them to look into, it’s not a good sign. When contractors bill for quick emails they don’t bill for the 3.7 minutes it took to write, they round up to some bigger number like an hour.
Anecdotally, every time I’ve encountered contractors who started billing per individual communication that they initiated (not something requested) or started finding new things to bill us for that we didn’t ask, it was a sign that we were a target being milked for billable hours. Some contractors have a lightbulb moment when they think nobody is scrutinizing their billing and think they discovered an almost infinite money glitch by initiating new things that they can bill for. None of the good contractors I’ve worked with over the years would even think to bill for an individual short email.
I hope some people post up outside your office. You probably have some secrets just laying around with that attitude. Could be quite profitable.
"Let's defend Coinbase, that small little startup!"
Maybe just stop being a boot licker? It seems pathetic from the outside.
s/cloudflare/coinbase/
One day while driving, I received a call from a technical recruiter at Stripe. I told them about how much I admired their developer first approach, the Atlas program for startups, etc. Later that day, I looked up the recruiter on LinkedIn and realized they worked at Square, not Stripe!
I do this all the time with Shopify / Spotify. The number of times non-tech friends have had to ask what Shopify is when discussing music and I slip up :/