huh. I guess I am more 'product oriented' than you are, but I tell people 'no' when they want passwords rather than ssh keys to access their out of band console. I imagine it would be different if I was charging by the hour, but I'm not.

But this is part of why I like being a product company. I do my R&D on my own time, without an angry customer if it fails or if I take longer than I thought. "Here" I say, "are the products I've sold to hundreds of other people. I can sell these to you, too." Then I add "If you want something else, suggest it, I might add that as a product as well, then I will sell it to you and others who want it at a low cost, but I'm not going to make it just for you."

(of course, being a product company, if I screw up production, I have many, many angry customers.)

For me, this has largely solved the problem of not estimating correctly and/or managing customer expectations. Here is what I have. you don't like it? Oh, I'm sorry. would you like a refund?

On the other hand, if you can convince them that ssh keys are better than passwords, you might never get to the point where you have to say no.

mostly it's a filter. If you can't make an OpenSSH public key, you should probably not be managing your own VPS, and you should certainly not sign up with me, as all my interfaces are command-line only, and I don't have a nice GUI web control panel like many competitors do, and my support is email-only. go, pay the extra bucks, pay slicehost, and get someone to talk you through it on the phone. I don't charge enough to deal with that sort of thing.

If you wanted to hire me by the hour, that'd be different, but we're talking about people giving me $8/month.

Your line makes more sense now, since you're talking about a different situation from the article. It's a different relationship; since anything you do would have to benefit the many of your users at once to be worthwhile, it makes sense to have users who are similar to each other, ie, to say no to the outliers.

Yeah. a successful product business involves a whole lot more 'no' than a consulting business.

However, I think even when working by the hour, when I charge what I seem to be able to charge lately, I try to say "No, that's outside of my area of competence" because really, they are paying me way too much for me to 'figure it out.'

When it is in my area of competence, I think it's just as important to say "No, I think that's a bad idea, and here's why" - They are paying me silly rates, presumably because I know more than they do about what we are trying to get done; Sure, sometimes you need to translate the technical choice into a business decision and push it up the chain, but sometimes it's a purely technical decision, and within your realm of knowledge, and in that case, I am not doing my job unless I say "Don't do that" when the customer asks me to do something that is clearly incorrect.

When you say no to some things, you obviously have to think about what to say no to. It helps you prioritize and focus on the most important stuff first. Only when you've stripped down an idea to it's bare minimum can you really say that you understand it.

"Yes, there's a way to do that. No one has ever done that before, so now is the time for someone to be first..."

This sounds dangerous. What one really wants is to add stuff that will be useful to the user and will help him get things done easier. If the client proposes a feature and you say yes because "it's the time for someone to be first", then you are wasting time and effort on something that maybe isn't really necessary.