5 ms·

I'll me-too your me-too. I had that exact same situation on a job and left because of it. The only question I ever heard from my boss was "Are you billable?"

by T-hawk 10y ago

I'll me-too your me-too. I had that exact same situation on a job and left because of it. The only question I ever heard from my boss was "Are you billable?" She didn't care anything about technical quality, career development, tooling, architecture, morale; the only thing that mattered was billable billable billable. It wasn't entirely her fault, it came transitively through her from upper management, the entire division only cared about billable hours, but she sure didn't do anything to help either. Classic "shit pipe" rather than "shit umbrella". The product had a hideous installation process involving hundreds of manual edits to settings in IIS and configuration files. I was deliberately told not to try to improve that via scripting, because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation.

mgkimsal 10y ago
One of my early software jobs was at a shop and we built conference registration 'pages' (a big form with a bunch of perl stuff behind it). Each project was... a lot of hand-customization, and usually took 8-12 hours, and we did a few dozen per year (IIRC) and that number was growing. But each one was... a pain. I spent some time putting a lot of configurable stuff in a a config file, and some runtime checking of the configs, and dynamic behaviour, and... we had something that would make setup of the form and most 'custom' requests down to about 1-2 hours max. I wasn't filling out my timesheet, and someone said "you have to put what project you were working on"... so I filled in 42 hours (over 2 weeks - part time here and there) for "project X" and... holy crap I got a verbal beating. We're going to lose this client - we're overbilling, we're gouging, etc. I tried to very little avail to demonstrate that... we can keep charging 12 hours ($2500? IIRC) for the pages in future, but now they'll only take an hour or so. Apparently I was talking to the wrong people because they thought I was advocating fraud, and I probably almost got fired over that. My code was erased, everything was put back the way it was, they 'ate' the overage to the client (read... I just had 42 less billable hours for 2 weeks) and ... I was sort of 'demoted'. Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it.
- flukus 10y ago
  > Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it. He probably didn't know about that situation, but he should have been aware of the billable hours culture and the problems that was causing.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    agreed, although... in his defense, it was a crazy time and crazy growth - they were hiring and putting a lot of policies and structures in place at that time, and I know some things got lost in the shuffle. This was definitely one of those "hindsight" insights from me years later though...
VikingCoder 10y ago
> because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation. Wow... I'll just stick my toe in the water... At what point are we as an industry going to call that fraud?

by T-hawk 10y ago

mgkimsal 10y ago

One of my early software jobs was at a shop and we built conference registration 'pages' (a big form with a bunch of perl stuff behind it). Each project was... a lot of hand-customization, and usually took 8-12 hours, and we did a few dozen per year (IIRC) and that number was growing. But each one was... a pain. I spent some time putting a lot of configurable stuff in a a config file, and some runtime checking of the configs, and dynamic behaviour, and... we had something that would make setup of the form and most 'custom' requests down to about 1-2 hours max. I wasn't filling out my timesheet, and someone said "you have to put what project you were working on"... so I filled in 42 hours (over 2 weeks - part time here and there) for "project X" and... holy crap I got a verbal beating. We're going to lose this client - we're overbilling, we're gouging, etc. I tried to very little avail to demonstrate that... we can keep charging 12 hours ($2500? IIRC) for the pages in future, but now they'll only take an hour or so. Apparently I was talking to the wrong people because they thought I was advocating fraud, and I probably almost got fired over that. My code was erased, everything was put back the way it was, they 'ate' the overage to the client (read... I just had 42 less billable hours for 2 weeks) and ... I was sort of 'demoted'. Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it.

flukus 10y ago
> Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it. He probably didn't know about that situation, but he should have been aware of the billable hours culture and the problems that was causing.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  agreed, although... in his defense, it was a crazy time and crazy growth - they were hiring and putting a lot of policies and structures in place at that time, and I know some things got lost in the shuffle. This was definitely one of those "hindsight" insights from me years later though...

VikingCoder 10y ago

> because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation. Wow... I'll just stick my toe in the water... At what point are we as an industry going to call that fraud?