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Comment by InsideOutSanta | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue is that they got used to pulling a rabbit out of a hat with their badges. The budget they have for them is apparently ridiculously low, and it seems like sheer luck that it somehow worked out in the past. At some point, defcon must have confused luck with skill. Meanwhile, others paid the price for that by working "for exposure."

This year, it blew up in everybody's faces. Whose fault is it? Defcon, for having unrealistic budgets? Contractors, for taking on an unrealistic project for the prestige?

IMO there's plenty of blame to go around.

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HN comments were dismissive of the Google SRE "no heroes" article recently, but this is a great example of why that policy is in place. Heroism leads to unrealistic expectations until something implodes far more catastrophically than setting reasonable expectations and not killing yourself to make magic would have.

> HN comments were dismissive of the Google SRE "no heroes" article recently

If (like me) you hadn't seen this one, I think it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172531

(Some of the top-level comments do indeed seem a bit oddly negative to me)

I would say the fault is on the both sides. Defcon being so big knew that someone will pick up their unrealistic budget. But it’s still the contractor’s fault if they took a project with full knowledge of its scope and agreed on the price, and then did not deliver.

The whole point of being the vendor is that you're the party with the expertise to know what is and isn't a realistic budget for a project. Clients ask for unrealistic stuff all the time; part of your job is saying "no".

We are not talking about a ordinary computer nerd - newb buisness relationship here.

> After going overbudget by more than 60%, several bad-faith charges, and with a product still in preproduction, DEF CON issued a stop work order.

My reaction was "only 60% over budget"? This is a low volume custom computer. The way Defcon pushes promotion and recognition, I do not think they paid full commercial price.

We all don't know how the contract was structured.

EE claims, they stayed in Budget while also claiming they did not receive the agreed upon payment.

DC claims, EE went 60% over budget

A run with 30k badges is not that small and eight months is not that short of a timeframe.

Somewhere I read about a $20 target price all in which I find realistic for PCB parts and assembly, but not if the cost include injection molding ($10k / mold and $1/pcs I guess) and especially not if it contains hardware and software development cost

The last defcon I attended (5 or so years ago) they didn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat and we ended up with lame plastic badges. Obviously badges aren’t everything, but they’re not nothing either.

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