You bill as long as you are even minimally plugged in. If you can’t crack a beer or head off to the gym, you are on the clock.
Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
61–70 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the end it's just business. You either make a client happy or you don't. Spot on. 1) Do good work. Be patient and kind to clients. Remember when someone asks you to do something for the 8th time, "Hey, it's their money." 2) Make sure you write your contracts in a way that lets you raise rates every January. Aim for a 10% increase every calendar year. 3) Give clients a discount if they sign retainers, or longer c…
Re 5) you must be careful with the gifts as that may be misconstrued as bribery or a kickback. A card should be fine, but a bottle of Champagne rather won't be.
Are you in the public sector is this a common issue in your industry? I ask because gifts and emoluments are common in my industry (manufacturing) with contracted clients in the private sector.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#63I'm curious for HN's ideas on doing this with WFH, for fine-grain billable time, since I wasn't entirely happy with how I did it, as an independent consultant.
On-site billing was much easier and more lucrative than WFH -- just bill any time on-site, except for lunch breaks.
When WFH, I was very serious about billing focused work only. Work included lots of heavy coding, heavy architecture, advising, and the occasional quick technical question. I logged time in 15-minute increments (at least not 6-minute), and only when I was in front of the workstation and actively ready to start working (but if I got up to pace while thinking about the work, and then went back to type, all that was billable). At one point, I even had client-dedicated laptops and email accounts, for focus and for data handling.
I'd also (unless sometimes in a rare marathon or very urgent situation) be all awake and alert, showered, dressed in biz casual Dockers, etc., before I started the clock.
One time, an exec at a client said something like "if you go for a walk to think about an algorithm, you should bill it", but that seemed too fuzzy or slippery-slope for me.
With my favorite client, I got WFH flexibility (before that was commonplace), further developed skills all over the stack and lifecycle, and made key contributions to very important projects/programs that I'm proud to have been a part of.
However, TC was a small fraction of what it would've been performing similarly at Google. So today I still have to hustle, long after doing similar work at a dotcom would've let me "retire" (i.e., do angel investment, while self-funding my own work in whatever catches my interest, or fundraise for a startup when I don't personally need the money). Being a little less stringent with the WFH clock would've helped, though I don't know where to draw the line.
(When non-consulting employed and WFH, I just make sure I put in a solid day. It's often, say, 8 "billable" hours spread across 12 clock hours, not counting meals, errands, chores, exercise, HN breaks, etc.)
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#64I only do time-based rates for vague work products, like consulting. Usually it's a quarter-day/half-day/day/week/chunk rate depending on the arrangement, and I try to limit my exposure to time-based rates, especially hourly, because they often give clients permission to eat up all my time whether or not I want them to.
For more concrete work products (with deliverables), I do fixed rate billing.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#65Do yourself a favour, and bill by the day, rather than by the hour. Engineering is creative work, and you're paid to think - code is just the end product. Thinking happens consciously and unconsciously, at all times of the day. Billing by the day will allow you to focus on the work rather than the administrivia. Whatever you do, do not drop your rate: you'll just be undervalued by your clients.
Billing by the day is good advice, but > Engineering is creative work, and you're paid to think - code is just the end product. No you aren't. No one cares if you think. They care about what thinking is (supposed to be) getting them. It just so happens, though, that whatever that is requires thinking. So you do charge for that. But no one is paying you "to think".
> No you aren't. No one cares if you think.
If you are a manager, an architect or a scientist, all you do is think. You literally don't do anything else.
The only reason diagrams, meetings, documents and research papers exist is to communicate your thinking to others
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#66No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#67I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. Frankly, this is how most clients have actually wanted it. They think in hours (or days) not some subdivision of them. And yes, thinking about work is the same as doing the work. It's all billable time. As far as your rate, I always bill as high as I can without pushback. Where is that level? Yo…
> I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. Frankly, this is how most clients have actually wanted it. I find it hard to believe anyone wants to over pay for your time by 6x what it's worth. I understand rounding up. But I don't understand working 10 minutes one day, billing for an hour, and then working 10 minutes the next day and bill…
You're paying for more that just the task, you are paying for the availability. I'd rather not block off a whole hour for a "quick" fix, but if you don't the company will come to you more often with quick fixes and those start to really eat up your day.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#68Hourly billing burnt me out. I started on Upwork with the spying software installed. I was desperate for money at that time. But my own methodology when working is to think about the problem, only typing code when I have a good hint about a solution. So for a day of work, I may spend one hour typing code, three hours reading code and the rest of the time thinking hard. But the activity monitor inside the software onl…
The thought of going back to upwork gives me nightmares.
If you don't mind me asking, how much where you (GP as well) charging there and for what kind of work?
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re 5) you must be careful with the gifts as that may be misconstrued as bribery or a kickback. A card should be fine, but a bottle of Champagne rather won't be.
Are you in the public sector is this a common issue in your industry? I ask because gifts and emoluments are common in my industry (manufacturing) with contracted clients in the private sector.
They make a big deal about it in pharma in trainings and whatnot, but then they don't really seem to enforce it. Adobe providing catered box seats to a big game? No problem. Random director spending too much on an internal team dinner, problem. It's pretty strange.
Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?
#70What about billing for time spent traveling for business relates trips? Especially long flights. Do you just bill as if you'd worked 8 hours that whole day, or by the hour spent traveling, including to and from the airport?
I usually bill those as travel expenses (flights, hotel, food and some extra per diem).