Can we reach out directly to Reid Hoffman? Or is he too wrapped up doing damage control from being all over the Epstein Files?

Your business is getting the money. Your business is not to fly around the world trying to engineer-mog the client. The OP has a bad ego.

"They don't even use version control..." Yeah? Get the money. The client are "carpetbaggers", yeah okay... get the money.

It's implied that they hired you because they need the help. But they also may have hired you because they need the help and you seem like a sucker they can stiff.

Seems like the logical conclusion, no matter what.

I don't think it's a scam at all. Will it be around in a week? Probably not. But it's not a scam.

1) it's already been live for about a month, so definetly not a week long project 2) I use the app myself every day to reduce screentime so I'm highly motivated to keep the app up to date. When the platforms change DOM elements, or try to distrupt Dull from working I am also disrupted, so I work quickly to fix all bugs 3) There is a 7 day free trial for anyone to test out if it's a "scam". It's not.

a funny reading - if anyone pays for something that won't be around in a week they deserve to be scammed by some scammer.

that said it seems somewhat close to a scam.

but having said those things I'll just note here, knowing you were not the original poster, that people do not in any way deserve to be scammed because they fall for easy to spot scams.

The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.

The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?

I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.

I don't, so I can still call how they do things: rude.

All (not some) of the most successful devs I've known in the sense of building something that found market fit and making money off it were terrible engineers. They were fairly productive at building features. That's it. And they were productive - until they weren't. Their work ultimately led to outages, lost data, and sensitive data being leaked (to what extent, I don't even know).

The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.

Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.

There used to be a saying along the lines of “while you’re designing your application to scale to 1m requests/min, someone out there is making $1m ARR with php and duct tape”

It feels like this takes on a whole new meaning now we have agents - which I think is the same point you were making

I'm cool with blogging about your mess-ups, sort of. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy though? Yeah, you're going to get a lot of traffic to that post, but what are you signaling? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I would not go near it.

I'm cool with blogging about your fuck-ups, but honestly, not really. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I'm not going near it. But that's just me?