Boss: Hey build me a server.
Me: OK. How much storage.
Boss: IDK.
Me: How many processors?
Boss: IDK.
Me: How much RAM?
Boss: IDK.
Me: 1U or 2U or bigger?
Boss: IDK
Me: What’s it for.
Boss: [Program]
Me: How many concurrent connections?
Boss: IDK.
Me: Budget?
Boss: IDK.
Me: *eye twitch* oooooookkkkkk

Nice to know that when I (was) selling/renting servers it was for people that most of the time knew what the fuck wanted to do with it

That is why we exist(tech savy).. Sometimes we are suppose to work with people who don’t know anything about technology.

Thats a great opportunity! 😃
You now can fly to Taiwan or Shenzhen and get an exciting vacation and a custom manufactured beast of a server.

@Torbuntu we still have put up with it.

@No-one 😄👍

Just setup Firebase project for such IDK-jerks

I find it interesting that your boss didn't know the budget...

Amazon free tier then. Scale whenever they fire back a call "my users couldn't get into the service yadayada"

@zankar same. Like wut. Boss in this case is also the owner so really WTF it’s your own money how much you wanna spend.

Yeah this is why scalable cloud hosting exists.

AWS is godly when it comes to extra services (firewalls, databases, caching, vpns, load balancers, microservices, logging, etc) — but their ecosystem is quite complex and in some cases expensive.

Digital Ocean is great as a simpeler alternative. Bit more manual work, but affordable, and their interface for managing servers and firewalls is stupid easy.

I also use Vultr as they tend to offer super cheap hosting, and the Dutch TransIP Stack because they have cheap storage (1TB free, 10TB for 50).

My dog is smarter

I see requests like this all the time. I patiently ask all the questions you asked, and inform the requestor that no work will be done until the questions are answered and approved by someone with procurement authority.

@bahua But I think you can't expect technical questions to be answered.

The client doesn't know how much ram a server needs, but should be able to guess how many website visitors they expect.

If my boss is asking for it, that tells me the company is probably big enough for there to be a process for this, and may even have project/product management staff. If it was a company so small that customers are interacting directly with the boss of the person who's going to do the work, I would probably not be working there in the first place, as jobs like those typically require far more time than I can reasonably give while also being a father and a person who sleeps.

However, if I was there, I would work directly with the customer, making it known that these are all critically important questions to be answered, prior to any fulfillment/provisioning. I would make it known that if they are not answered ahead of time by the customer, and explicitly requested, then they would be relegated to guesses, which is absolutely unacceptable.

@bahua that's a good point about the company size and the policies.

@bahua yea it’s a mess. Boss is owner, president, and figurehead our representing the company to customers but also directing the technical team and has a hand in hardware and software management. He is a very smart person generally but I think anybody could look at that list of responsibilities and tell he’s overwhelmed.

@jeeper hmm maybe it's time to seek help from the sorts of EY, PWC, Deloitte for that structrual problem?

Buy a raspi and charge a full server rack