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Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

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Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#81

Post by joenot443 »

halpmeh wrote: post #51
vitaflo wrote: post #12

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. 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…

>But I don't understand working 10 minutes one day, billing for an hour, and then working 10 minutes the next day and billing for two hours total.

If someone's breaking up their time like this, they wouldn't be in business very long I don't think. Any reasonable contractor would complete the job in 20 minutes the first day, bill for an hour, and have everyone leave happy.

It's easy to imagine scenarios where contractors take advantage of their clients due to information asymmetry, but most contractors eventually realize their lifetime value is probably higher if they can keep their clients happy. I think the same principle holds true if you're a contracted Rust engineer or a contracted plumber; it seems to be that the honest, skilled, and justifiably expensive ones float to the top.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#82

Post by pclmulqdq »

skydhash wrote: post #31

Hourly 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…

Upwork absolutely sucks. Never again.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#83

Post by Loic »

I bill per week, but I keep track of my hours to the minute to be fair with my customers. My customers only get the number of days I have been working on an item, the exact number of minutes making a day is my own cooking.

The cooking is that, I can only get 5h to 6h of highly focused work per working day "over the year".

Sometimes, even if I recorded some hours for the customers, when I consider them not well spent, I just remove them from my logs. The goal is always to make my customers happy.

I have been doing it like that for the past 15 years, the customers keep coming, so I suppose it works well.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#84

Post by orangesite »

Unless the work you're doing provides meaningful output in an hour:

Bill per day, maybe even per week, ideally per % of your focus you're giving your client during the month.

Ultimately, what a client cares about most is whether the output you produced helped them achieve their goals and that you charged a sustainable price for it.

How many minutes you spent doing it is rarely the important factor.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#85

Post by poulsbohemian »

You are kinda tapping in to why I stopped billing hourly where possible and went to a monthly retainer model. The answer wasn't to give clients more granular tracking - that just made them argue over every 5 minute task - the answer was to find better clients who understood they are paying for my skills not just my time.

> fifteen minutes I go off reading HN, having lunch, or any other short break?

On the other hand, you also have to be fair and realistic if you are spending a lot of time on non-client activities, especially if you are billing hourly. Don't bill the client for your lunch break, bill them for work.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#87

Post by halpmeh »

bityard wrote: post #78
halpmeh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Most people recognize that the value a contractor delivers is not linear with respect to the time it takes them to complete a job. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/

That's very different than agreeing to a price ahead of time.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#88

Post by halpmeh »

joenot443 wrote: post #81
halpmeh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>But I don't understand working 10 minutes one day, billing for an hour, and then working 10 minutes the next day and billing for two hours total. If someone's breaking up their time like this, they wouldn't be in business very long I don't think. Any reasonable contractor would complete the job in 20 minutes the first day, bill for an hour, and have everyone leave happy. It's easy to imagine scenarios where contract…

Sure, I agree with everything you're saying. However, we don't know that the the original poster is a great contractor. All we know is they thing their clients can't think in non-hour units and prefer to be over billed, which is preposterous to me.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#89

Post by lawn »

linsomniac wrote: post #74
lawn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Many of my best ideas have come to me in the shower, on a walk and even in the middle of the night. It's ridiculous to say you should have a stopwatch with you at all times, so daily billing it is. If they don't want to that, just assign 8 hours as a full day and stop worrying of you reach them or not.

There is a science component to ideas in the shower. I read somewhere that the shower puts you into a similar state to the waking/sleeping transition that people like Einstein tried to ride by sitting and holding something heavy and loud, so if the slipped too far towards sleep they'd drop it and wake themselves up. I don't have any references to where I heard that though. Similar lines, I read about some earlish com…

I think I've heard the same story about sleeping with a ball, but with Edison.

Re: Ask HN: Hourly billers, do you bill for only focused work?

#90

Post by lemax »

I bill by the week only and generally tie it to functional deliverables. E.g, deliver x feature in y weeks. Instead of going back and forth on how I spent my time, it works better for me to invest the time to scope things out carefully ahead of time. This process also forces clients to think things through earlier on and do their homework on what they’re asking for.
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