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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

#171

Post by wodenokoto »

magicink81 wrote: post #21

Jonathan Stark is a thought leader / coach / writer / blogger etc that has been beating the drum on time-based pricing vs value-based pricing. He helps software engineers and others get off the time-based model and transition to value-based. Here's his website: https://jonathanstark.com/ Here are some interviews where he covers the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT32G9wmONg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1b7…

I strongly disagree.

The dream is that you can deliver a project for 100 hour pricing in 10 hours of work, but usually value based pricing means you'll be spending 200 hours on something that was initially valued at a 100 hour level and there are no one to bill the OT to.

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

#173

Post by wink »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #51

One potential advantage of the billable hour: My wife works for a company which provides consulting and evaluation services to states and the federal government. Project budgets are fixed and every employee's time must be accounted for precisely. My wife's time is expensive. What this means it that there are many project meetings to which she is deliberately not invited b/c her time is too expensive to be spent in a…

A long time ago when I was freelancing (as a student, writing software) the company I had been working with for a whiole suddenly decided to not let me write up hours for meetings that were basically requirements/planning because they wanted to treat it like a pitch or informal business meeting or whatever (media agency). That's when I wrapped up the month and never worked with them again.

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

#174

Post by v-erne »

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

Isn't "churning out garbage that technically meets requirements" a motto of IBM Global Software Services (or whatever they name themselvs these data).

But jokes aside one of my friends seen this kind of setting degrade to "our lawyers will talk to your lawyers about this change request" on every piece of communication between client and big software consulting company.

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

#175

Post by SkyPuncher »

gamblor956 wrote: post #118
SkyPuncher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inconclusive if it's fraud without knowing contract details. If you're being paid simply to travel, then it is not fraudulent to also work on another client. If your being paid to travel _and_ focus on that client, then it would be fraudulent to work on another client.

No, if you are paid by a client hourly for travel, you cannot bill that same hour to another client. That's bog standard for every profession. If you bill two clients for the same hour, that's "double billing," and it's fraud, and a number of accountants and lawyers have had their licenses suspended or (more commonly) terminated over this. Most of them usually plea bargain to avoid time behind bars, and this is gener…

Oh, yea, I agree that by default you should assume that travel time == client time.

I'm getting a bit "well, technically" on this. While rare, it is possible to have a contract that allows for this.

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

#176

Post by micromacrofoot »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #102
micromacrofoot wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being on a jury was one of the few times in life when taking notes paid off for me, mostly to correct the memory of other jurors! oddly some judges don’t allow it.

I was allowed to take notes, but I was not permitted to bring them with me during the deliberations. Were you allowed to look at your notes, and share them, during the entire process?

They let me use them in deliberation, but took them at the end of the trial. The judge did specifically mention at some point that notes aren't the equivalent to a transcript.

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

#177

Post by oefnak »

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]…

I found the colours extremely distracting, and the test didn't give any results because I was better/faster without them. You still should give numbers in such a case.

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

#178

Post by [deleted] »

gamblor956 wrote: post #118
SkyPuncher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inconclusive if it's fraud without knowing contract details. If you're being paid simply to travel, then it is not fraudulent to also work on another client. If your being paid to travel _and_ focus on that client, then it would be fraudulent to work on another client.

No, if you are paid by a client hourly for travel, you cannot bill that same hour to another client. That's bog standard for every profession. If you bill two clients for the same hour, that's "double billing," and it's fraud, and a number of accountants and lawyers have had their licenses suspended or (more commonly) terminated over this. Most of them usually plea bargain to avoid time behind bars, and this is gener…

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by lazide »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #75
lazide wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes buyers are able to properly price shop, and can discover a law firm that is more efficient. Much rarer than one would assume.

I do not know what “properly” price shop means, but I do not think law firms get blank checks. Buyers themselves are frequently lawyers so they are not completely out of the loop on what is and is not reasonable.

'Properly' price shop means that a client would be able to evaluate quality/price across a wide variety of firms in a transparent fashion relatively easily. Say with a week or two of work.

That is impossible because the quality of work for a lawyer is very, very difficult to gauge, and it may take years (or decades) for bad work to be visible in many cases (say missing some bad edge cases in contract language, or they can't handle in litigation in certain types of cases, or the like).

And other lawyers have little incentive to price shop either, as they usually get to add on a little on top when they farm out the work. Cost-plus, essentially.

And if 'very expensive and opaque' is the norm, it's not like 'very expensive and opaque' is unreasonable.

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

#180

Post by tptacek »

ornornor wrote: post #166
tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. You can bid a project-priced project with T&M overages, which is what every project at Matasano did; Matasano was founded by @stake people, which is where we got our project structure from; @stake was Cambridge Technology Partners people, which is presumably where they got it from; and so on down the line all the way back to, I assume, Samuel Adams or Patrick Henry or some other famous Bostonian who came…

I think the difficulty in software comes from the fact that it’s very hard (impossible?) to provide estimates because you never know what problems you’ll run into until you do. And so how can you tell “project will take 8 weeks, times weekly rate, for a total cost of X” under these conditions?

Like I just said: you give your best estimate, and bill overages at a pro-rata day rate.
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