I had a crack at consulting yesterday. As I was randomly cruising Air Tasker - admittedly not the best place - I saw a posting I had expertise in: AWS Costing. Perhaps it would be a fun little job for me. I wouldn’t mind the occassional consulting here and there. But the problem is that you have to deal with people.

Bit of back and forth with the original poster, to understand his requirements, to see whether I could meet them. I said I could only comment on his S3 Bucket costs - because this is easily quantifiable: like a maths equation, I could plug in some numbers and given him exact costs. He agreed to this, and we proceeded.

Next up: parsing AWS Pricing schedules, inputting it all into an official AWS cost estimator + submitting this in writing with walk-through phone conversations where the most excruciatingly asinine and mundane questions were asked and answered with patience. With all the issues were ironed out, I was ready to collect payment - yes, I did give out my advice prior to collecting some cash - and THEN he throws in a last-minute curve ball:

“I read a post on Quora” has says. “it talks about $27,000 worth of “internet-costs: Do you know what that is?” he asked.

I said I have no idea what it is. What is $27,000 worth of “internet costs”? Could you be a little more specific on what you mean by “internet costs”?

He could not be. But he stuck to his guns, re-iterating that others have been commenting on these “internet-cost”. My estimates did not account for these “internet costs”, so I was a charlatan posing as an expert on S3 Bucket pricing.

I responded by saying that I can only comment on the costs outlined in the AWS S3 bucket pricing schedule, and according to the assumptions we have made (which I walked through), and there were no “internet costs” noted on AWS’s official pricing documentation.

He said, look, I want to know the “internet costs”.

I said I can’t comment on anything outside what’s in the schedule.

He said, well then I can’t pay you $220. I’ll pay you $120 instead.

I said I wouldn’t have done the job for $120, and I wouldn’t have taken the job if he wanted me to comment on “internet costs”, based on some Quora article he read.

…So now we’re stuck an impasse.

A beat. A very long beat:

“Look I”m not going to argue about $220 bucks”.

But clearly, it looks like he was arguing about it.

This job was burning time. And causing stress. And the scope was now being expanded. And there’s no easy way out. I’m stuck in a burning building without an exit. The threat of non-payment was used to extort additional value. Still, a door through the flames was slightly ajar. If I ran swiftly, I could make it. I do not want disappointed customers, even when it was their own incompetence which caused their disappointments. So I says:

“Fine, send me the Quora article and I will have a look at it.”

The Quora article was nonsensical. Who knows what the “internet costs” were? EC2 expenses? VPC expenses? CloudFront expenses? Could be anything! I wanna get paid. And I want a good reputation. I had a look at the expenses involved with on-demand streaming (spending more time on an ever expanding scope of work), and came back to him with my assessment:

“Internet expenses”: This just a guess, but it could be a combination of Cloud Front, Lambda costs (or perhaps EC2 server instances, database costs etc.)

He then asked me to put a price on it.

How can I price infrastructure which I haven’t seen?

I will either be wrong, or horribly wrong. I said:

The price will be significantly higher than the S3 bucket expenses, if you are employing CloudFront. Other AWS products will entail similar fees. I cannot comment more than this.

He said he would then release payment…..but he never did.

Goddam Air Taskers…or rather, shame on me for not knowing any better. Clearly, I knew nothing about consulting. Add that to the fact that he did not disclose his real name on Air Tasker - an alias was used - and this was a painful lesson for me. He could trash my reputation while effectively remaining anonymous.

Why should I learn from my own mistakes, when I can learn from others’? I decided to pick up a book on consulting. Hopefully that would save me from a lot of bloody noses. I settled on was the “Secrets of Consulting” by Gerald Weinberg. If you’re interested, you can get it on LeanPub or Amazon.

A summary of what it contains, as well as my own thoughts on it will come in another post.

Here ends my second foray into consulting.

EDIT: It turned out that the payment was released. Said client certainly got something useful out of it all.