121–130 of 188 posts
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He is clearly not very good with that billable hour craze. By doubling efficiancy you can sell the same hour to two customers. This is normal and encouraged in law and the consulting world.
It is?! Couldn't this also be considered fraud?
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Is software development also a secretary tier profession?
not as much as lawyers and accountants imo. they're a necessary relationship but its toxic. the systems in place for software are mostly open whereas the same cannot be said for a lot of legal and financial systems. they're not beginner friendly, and have a big barrier to entry from my experience.
It’s kind of like medicine. There can be high stakes and you want someone who has “done it” before. Someone who knows the statutory law, the case law, the precedents, who keeps up on that area of expertise.
It was tempting to buy a piece of software that could draw up the papers I needed to create my family trust, but if I really need that in 10 years and something is outdated or the laws have changed, then I’m just passing down a problem of unknown potential to my next of kin.
I had recent need of an estate attorney when my mom passed unexpectedly, and the time, hassle, and general insanity the attorney saved my family and I was well worth the expense of a few grand coming out of the estate. He was very conservative in his billings and gave us four trips, in person, to government agencies on the house.
Does anybody make $1000 USD / hr? What is your day to day like? How many clients do you have and how many hours do you bill per year? Do you actually work 2087 hours per year which would net you $2MM/year? I'm curious how some people are able to bill such high amounts and how they got started. It must also be extra stressful since its not like you are working for a company either so you need to do marketing and find…
It's not uncommon in my field. And quite a few of the people billing that rate or higher actually net greater than $2m, because they get credit not only for what they bill but what work they bring in for others to bill. That said, $1k/hr billed does not directly translate to $1k/hr earned. Usually there is shared overhead, etc taken out first.
This really hit home.
Thinking like this cost me so many relationships in my late 20s and 30s. Working for startups & agencies, getting paid a bonus for launches or finding extra billable time on some projects -- and worse, even when I didn't have an insane deadline, I would usually find reasons to work.
"Oh sorry, [Girlfriend], I won't be at dinner with your friends tonight, you go without me... I've gotta work..." And I would use it as an excuse to get out of things I didn't really want to do too. "Oh sorry, [Mom & Dad], I don't have time to drive you to your cousin's funeral, but I'd be happy to send some flowers."
And what 27 year-old wants to do those things? They aren't fun, they're tedious, there's no ROI.
Except... years later, in my 40s, I really wish I had spent the afternoon with my parents grieving, to gain a bit more experience with that. And to hear their stories and memories of people who meant things to them. I really wish I made time for a few more of my ex-girlfriends too...
There will always be someone willing to help you turn each hour of your life into a paycheck. But man, you really can't put a price tag on a lot of things, and there aren't always do-overs. Not going to sit here and tell you to always put family first, but... I wish I had prioritized non-work over work when I was younger.
I've been beating a related drum on HN for years, about billing hours, and I'll try not to repeat too much of it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I know this post is mostly not about billing strategy (though that's what the thread is now about), but I'm going to chime in with a simple bit of advice for tech workers that I believe is universally applicable: Bill days, minimum. A lot of…
> A lot of the pathologies involved in metered billing, time tracking, and perverse incentives vanish when you bill days instead of hours. Billing daily and not tracking time doesn't make lazy contractors less likely to be inefficient. If anything, it gives them more opportunity to obscure what they're doing. The only model that really eliminates the perverse incentive to be inefficient is project-based billing.
I've been beating a related drum on HN for years, about billing hours, and I'll try not to repeat too much of it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I know this post is mostly not about billing strategy (though that's what the thread is now about), but I'm going to chime in with a simple bit of advice for tech workers that I believe is universally applicable: Bill days, minimum. A lot of…
> A lot of the [...] perverse incentives vanish when you bill days instead of hours. I'm confused how that's supposed to eliminate perverse incentives. Doesn't it exacerbate them? Don't you now have an incentive to spread out every client's work over every day possible? Like doing a few minutes of work for each client every day round-robin?
The incentives are not always to bill the most, and you also might have to pitch a time estimate before starting the task.
Having a day as the minimum unit removes the need to decide if it's a 2h fix or a 5h fix, an estimate that could take 2h in itself to reach.
Then a lot of scrum team will report advancement daily, and it will be way easier to communicate with the client with a billing that fits that cycle (this is also where you probably don't want to report small time sliced increments to the client, if they're already not very happy with your 20 days estimate for changing a page's footer)
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This article hits hard in a lot of ways. Have any of you who work as a freelance programmer managed to get off the hours-based billing treadmill, and onto a value-based system? How do you determine value? When your clients need constant maintenance or small incremental work, do you end up spending a lot of time with estimates? I'm really struggling with this in my own work.
You shouldn’t realistically expect to charge customers according to value delivered to their company. You’re still selling services on an open market, competing against other contractors and their pricing. Nobody is really interested in handing a services provider more money than necessary to get the job done at market rates, so even value-based bidding ends up coming back around to market rate pricing. You can alway…
For several of my company’s customers they don’t really want to discuss ambiguous ideals of value for cash or negotiate fixed deliverable costs. They ask “so what’s the rate, bottom line?” and we have had a LOT better results estimating and billing hourly than with fixed rate, retainers, and so forth. Not because we are bad at estimating but because there are too many variables on the SMB side that no customer will pay to hash out fully before a project begins, and even if they did, ours tend to value the flexibility provided by hourly billing.
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This is actually an amazingly perfect example of the old B2B sales mantra "the buyer is not the user". I might steal it! How long have you been selling your software? If it's new-ish this honest question from the prospect can be life changing for your product positioning and marketing strategy.
Good point! We've been selling for several years, but legal isn't our only/primary market. We've made much more headway in the higher education market, since students have to read so much on screen (and don't have these perverse incentives related to billable hours!). But we actually run into the same buyer/not user problem on the licensing side of our business. Textbook publishers don't really care about the student…
What kind of speed improvement can I typically expect?
Edit: I found the "research summary" link in the education page, but it doesn't appear to work in Chrome with uBlock for me. The actual "conventional" link in the FAQ does work. It might be because the former is not an but something else.
I've been beating a related drum on HN for years, about billing hours, and I'll try not to repeat too much of it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I know this post is mostly not about billing strategy (though that's what the thread is now about), but I'm going to chime in with a simple bit of advice for tech workers that I believe is universally applicable: Bill days, minimum. A lot of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article hits hard in a lot of ways. Have any of you who work as a freelance programmer managed to get off the hours-based billing treadmill, and onto a value-based system? How do you determine value? When your clients need constant maintenance or small incremental work, do you end up spending a lot of time with estimates? I'm really struggling with this in my own work.
You shouldn’t realistically expect to charge customers according to value delivered to their company. You’re still selling services on an open market, competing against other contractors and their pricing. Nobody is really interested in handing a services provider more money than necessary to get the job done at market rates, so even value-based bidding ends up coming back around to market rate pricing. You can alway…