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The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

timharford.com

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Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#141

Post by tyingq »

gnicholas wrote: post #27

Another downside of the billable hour: it encourages perverse incentives. I was recently talking with a potential customer in the legal field, and he was interested in my startup's software, which helps people read on screen more quickly/easily. But at one point he turned to me and said "I know one of the senior lawyers is going to ask me if using your software is going to cause the billable volume to go down for the…

Mechanics aren't shy about charging "hours" from a reference book that have little to do with how long the task actually took.

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#142

Post by willcipriano »

tyingq wrote: post #141
gnicholas wrote: post #27

Another downside of the billable hour: it encourages perverse incentives. I was recently talking with a potential customer in the legal field, and he was interested in my startup's software, which helps people read on screen more quickly/easily. But at one point he turned to me and said "I know one of the senior lawyers is going to ask me if using your software is going to cause the billable volume to go down for the…

Mechanics aren't shy about charging "hours" from a reference book that have little to do with how long the task actually took.

That's really just a guide for mechanics to figure out what to charge, it's a fixed fee deal with the estimated man hours on the invoice for reference purposes. You could call them work units or story points and arrive at the same number.

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#143

Post by smitty1e »

> By accounting for every moment of their working lives, and defining each moment as either “billable” or, regrettably, “non-billable”, lawyers were being tugged inexorably towards an unhappy, unhealthy attitude to the way they spent their time. Not all lawyers, of course. And not only lawyers, either.

We fetish precision at the expense of humanity.

Organic life is messy, sloppy, and imprecise. Wisdom is understanding that diminishing returns sets in at the 80% solution. We don't need to Automate All The Things until the Orwellian social credit system leads to complete demographic cratering and the human race dies off.

As XKCD points out[1], you're OK at around four significant figures. Breath.

[1] https://xkcd.com/2170/

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#144

Post by gnicholas »

majormajor wrote: post #138
weq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a lawtech startup and this is the EXTACT reason why i left and the reason why its hocky-stick never evolved. Sure they have customers, but they cant retain or grow. Lawyers get paid less the more efficent things are. Thats not a thing they desire, nore incentivize. Eventually they will come, kicking and screaming, but dont hold your breath.

Are there lawyers who want to do more instead of doing the same amount less efficiently? Or are there other limiting factors of how much work they can take on like court schedules or such?

Some firms take fixed-fee work, but it is looked down upon at most top tier firms. When the economy tanks, all firms open up to these "alternative billing arrangements".

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#145

Post by [deleted] »

gnicholas wrote: post #27

Another downside of the billable hour: it encourages perverse incentives. I was recently talking with a potential customer in the legal field, and he was interested in my startup's software, which helps people read on screen more quickly/easily. But at one point he turned to me and said "I know one of the senior lawyers is going to ask me if using your software is going to cause the billable volume to go down for the…

[deleted]

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#146

Post by patrck »

karaterobot wrote: post #119

Counter-point to most of the comments here: I was a billable hourly consultant for the first 13 years of my career, and I never felt the urge to work "just a little more". I made plenty working about 40 hours a week, and valued my free time more than any marginal amount above that. If anything, the biggest problem I had was knowing that the client had an alloted pool of hours, and I had to make my solution fit within…

Yeah, Harford overweights the trade-offs and does not cover any benefits.

For parents, one large gain is explaining your work to your kids. They get to see how you work, and this provides a template for them. Of course, whether this is good or not....

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#147

Post by huijzer »

As my parents have a dairy farm, I can tell that the idea that they have time off after doing the milking is false. There is always something to do and it is also easy to fall into the trap of not calling your mother because it is not worth it. The solution is to set clear boundaries.

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#148

Post by mjreacher »

gnicholas wrote: post #131
gomox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I was checking out your website and thought the product is actually deceivingly simple, but I couldn't find any mentions of actual reading speed improvements, other than the invitation to "take the challenge". 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" l…

> What kind of speed improvement can I typically expect? For a typical skilled reader, up to about 25-30%. For people with reading challenges (dyslexia, ADHD, vision impairments), it could be much greater. One fellow with ADHD (and two PhDs) said that he could read about 3x the speed with BeeLine versus regular text. To get a sense of what the speed difference could be for you, check out our "Reading Challenge". [1]…

Has there been much scientific research into how much improvement you can get through beeline or other similar tools like bionic reading?

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#149

Post by stavros_ »

gnicholas wrote: post #131
gomox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I was checking out your website and thought the product is actually deceivingly simple, but I couldn't find any mentions of actual reading speed improvements, other than the invitation to "take the challenge". 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" l…

> What kind of speed improvement can I typically expect? For a typical skilled reader, up to about 25-30%. For people with reading challenges (dyslexia, ADHD, vision impairments), it could be much greater. One fellow with ADHD (and two PhDs) said that he could read about 3x the speed with BeeLine versus regular text. To get a sense of what the speed difference could be for you, check out our "Reading Challenge". [1]…

Cool software. I have ADHD and it definitely made reading more comfortable (only 21% faster, but I read a LOT so that's not too surprising.)

Hope it succeeds enough with commercial partners (especially ereaders!) that you can offer the browser extension for free on Chrome someday.

Re: The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

#150

Post by shkkmo »

thebean11 wrote: post #120
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Project based billing just creates a different perverse incentive of churning out garbage that technically meets requirements

It also makes on fly design changes harder and makes managing scope creep critical.
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