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...

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.