Don’t feed the trolls
What’s wrong with billable hours
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#22Billing hourly is bad, but you don't have to give up time & materials billing altogether. Just charge a day rate, or a weekly rate.
I'm genuinely curious: what is the difference between hourly and daily/weekly rates?
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#23I charge by the hour and will never change. It forces the customer to focus on getting the requirements right instead of hand waving it like "oh yeah, that's just what I want" and then come back later "I didn't want that, what I meant was" repeat ad infinitum. You see they are paying for my time, not results. If they choose to waste it... doesn't matter to me, it's all billable just the same. I will do my best to ste…
I see that your niche is in C/C++ world (with some Obj-C), low-level stuff.
Mind if I ask how's the market and what kind of clients (companies?) that you worked with? If you don't feel comfortable sharing the list, would you be able to share some hints?
Out of curiosity because my background in college is more towards System programming but life puts me as a full-stack and backend/cloud engineering. Gettin a bit tired with too many backend tech (too many different storage solutions, backend languages, etc)
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#24I charge by the hour and will never change. It forces the customer to focus on getting the requirements right instead of hand waving it like "oh yeah, that's just what I want" and then come back later "I didn't want that, what I meant was" repeat ad infinitum. You see they are paying for my time, not results. If they choose to waste it... doesn't matter to me, it's all billable just the same. I will do my best to ste…
> This year I'm on track to bill out between $360k and $400k
> To anyone reading this [post] and thinking they are offering you helpful advice, consider their motive
Honestly I'd be happy to sign up to your newsletter and be upsold into a private $20/mo high-end consulting community forum if I were to learn how to earn those kind of numbers and I was disappointed you didn't.
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#25Professional business people are familiar with different business models, and when to apply them. For instance, hourly billing makes a lot of sense if the scope is vague - the client carries the scope risk. Fixed price is amazing when the client has a specific, measurable problem that they don’t know how to fix (but you do). You can solve it cheaply, get paid waaay more than hourly and have a happy client. Being a pr…
On the flat rate model: I like to tell the story that the highest hourly rate I've ever earned to date was as a college student when I took on a fixed rate project to fix some department's "we have a web form that is critical to our work and backed by this perl cgi script that used to work but doesn't do anything anymore" problem.
Turned out someone had uploaded the perl script to a Linux server using dreamweaver on a Mac, and the line endings were wrong. So I ran dos2unix on it and added a blurb to some documentation on what not to do and how to fix it again if necessary.
Made $1000 for less than 15 minutes of work!
But of course I also could have spent two weeks bashing my head against an awful perl script, never figured it out, and made nothing. It's a risk/reward trade-off.
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#26Professional business people are familiar with different business models, and when to apply them. For instance, hourly billing makes a lot of sense if the scope is vague - the client carries the scope risk. Fixed price is amazing when the client has a specific, measurable problem that they don’t know how to fix (but you do). You can solve it cheaply, get paid waaay more than hourly and have a happy client. Being a pr…
> when the client has a specific, measurable problem that they don’t know how to fix (but you do)
Then the client tells you that wasn't their problem in the first place.
In the 10 years of contracting I've never done fixed rate for the reason the client never knows what they exactly want. It's not like installing a tiled floor or drop ceiling.
Being a professional means a lot of things, but fixed rate contracting is amateur hour truly. Every software dev learns this eventually.
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#27Well, I found this article insightful, even if I've no plans of going freelancer (though of course... "life, uh, finds a way", so who knows). I think my most immediate objection is one that is raised in the comments from TFA: customers don't know what they want. For a flat rate to apply, you have to work to an initial set of requirements set in stone, and we know these requirements are almost always wrong (except for…
As a freelancer I always told my customers how many hours I plan to work for them, including a rough overview of how much time we use at which phase of the project and what is expected of them. And I do that before I agree to work for them.
Interesting. Wouldn't that require a firm understanding of the project scope and a steady hand at rejecting any attempts at feature creep or redefining the scope (with the politeness required for not losing them as customers)?
In other words, wouldn't this scoping and pre-planning go against the latest findings of lowercase agile?
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#28It's incredibly important to have a clearly defined scope prior to entertaining fixed pricing. If expectations are not established with the client, they will make assumptions and they won't be in your favor.
If expectations are not established with the client, they will make assumptions and they won't be in your favor.
I think you can shorten this statement even more.
Clients will make assumptions and they won't be in your favor.
The goal is to limit those as much as possible, but they'll still happen. "Fixed price" is largely not fixed anyways, as you should always account for change requests and other budget altering mechanisms. I don't think I've ever seen a non-trivial project not have some level of change once work has started.
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#29I charge by the hour and will never change. It forces the customer to focus on getting the requirements right instead of hand waving it like "oh yeah, that's just what I want" and then come back later "I didn't want that, what I meant was" repeat ad infinitum. You see they are paying for my time, not results. If they choose to waste it... doesn't matter to me, it's all billable just the same. I will do my best to ste…
I clicked on you because I was curious and noticed your bio says you live in Nevada still if you care.
Re: What’s wrong with billable hours
#30I hear what he is saying, but he stops half way where he says 'take responsibility for outcomes'. You see. In business this is translated into fixed price projects. But in contrast to the name there is nothing fixed price about it. As a provider of such project deliveries, unless you truly are an 'amateur', you still are acounting cost plus if the project goes into overruns. The way you do this through 'change reques…
I think the lesson here is bespoke software is probably a bad idea for a lot of companies and you're better off buying off the shelf shit. I think this is particularly hard for a fortune 500 company though, especially for something like a website. You're too big for a Wix site but employing a team of developers is going to cost you an arm and a leg and it's really not in your wheelhouse. We'll probably see more software outsourced going forward.