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I recently made the transition from full-time software engineer at bigco to independent consultant, so maybe I can help explain. There's a fairly large mentali

I recently made the transition from full-time software engineer at bigco to independent consultant, so maybe I can help explain. There's a fairly large mentality shift between salary work and contract work. When you're salaried, you're supposed to work eight hours yes - on paper. Really it's generally accepted people work 4-6 hours a day, with the rest being filled with lunch break or internet browsing or doing online chores or whatever. There is a tacit understanding between employer and employee about this, so any steps by the employer to monitor daytime computer usage is understandably seen as breaching this understanding in a misguided attempt to get employees to work more hours - or exposing the employee to arbitrary punishment if management wants to selectively undermine them for breaking rules that everyone breaks. It's different when you're contracted per hour. When you carve out an hour for a client, it's game time. No faffing around on Facebook, no checking financial statements. You do the work. Does this mean you have to work a full 8 hours? Absolutely not. Just do part-time contracts to fill up as many hours as you want to work, then charge more per hour. Your hourly contract rate will be much more (2x or more) your hourly salaried rate anyway. So, since you're actually factually working during the contracted hours, I don't really mind whatever desktop screenshot system they want to use. On another note: actually working 40 hours a week basically sucks. Let's acknowledge how good a deal we have as full-time tech employees and show solidarity to our brothers & sisters who do full-time shift work. Pushing full-time work down to 32 hours a week or less is a very worthy goal.

W0lf 6y ago
Thanks for your remarks. Few things come to mind: First I'd never charge by hour but have (at least) daily rates and I'd suggest every other independent software contractor to follow the same principle. Second, there is no correlation between the amount of ASCII chars outputted per hour and the productivity/net gain for the client (at least for the type of work I'm doing for whatever that matters). Sometimes I do have to think hard about a problem for a longer period of time, maybe executing on a few ideas before finally presenting and motivating a solution I came up with for a given problem. That doesn't mean my computer desktop looked _productive_ the whole time. In fact much of the important work maybe even done on a sheet of paper.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  For upwork you also have the option to pay per deliverable. Unfortunately this opens you up to the risk of your time estimates being off by a lot, thus lowering hourly pay.
xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
I agree with you except for > There is a tacit understanding between employer and employee about this, so any steps by the employer to monitor daytime computer usage is understandably seen as breaching this understanding in a misguided attempt to get employees to work more hours - or exposing the employee to arbitrary punishment if management wants to selectively undermine them for breaking rules that everyone breaks. I think employee monitoring is a lot more common than you think. Especially so outside of tech but I know of some very big tech companies we're all intimately familiar with that record basically everything that happens on their employees computers. Do they actively monitor everyone to see that they're putting in 40 hours a week? Not really. Does HR take a looksie when a manager comes and asks for help firing an employee? What do you think?
msadowski 6y ago
I cannot agree more. When I started getting paid by the hour, I've noticed that doing about 6 hours of full focus paid work is about as much as I can do in a day with full productivity.

W0lf 6y ago

Thanks for your remarks. Few things come to mind: First I'd never charge by hour but have (at least) daily rates and I'd suggest every other independent software contractor to follow the same principle. Second, there is no correlation between the amount of ASCII chars outputted per hour and the productivity/net gain for the client (at least for the type of work I'm doing for whatever that matters). Sometimes I do have to think hard about a problem for a longer period of time, maybe executing on a few ideas before finally presenting and motivating a solution I came up with for a given problem. That doesn't mean my computer desktop looked _productive_ the whole time. In fact much of the important work maybe even done on a sheet of paper.

ahelwer 6y ago
For upwork you also have the option to pay per deliverable. Unfortunately this opens you up to the risk of your time estimates being off by a lot, thus lowering hourly pay.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago

I agree with you except for > There is a tacit understanding between employer and employee about this, so any steps by the employer to monitor daytime computer usage is understandably seen as breaching this understanding in a misguided attempt to get employees to work more hours - or exposing the employee to arbitrary punishment if management wants to selectively undermine them for breaking rules that everyone breaks. I think employee monitoring is a lot more common than you think. Especially so outside of tech but I know of some very big tech companies we're all intimately familiar with that record basically everything that happens on their employees computers. Do they actively monitor everyone to see that they're putting in 40 hours a week? Not really. Does HR take a looksie when a manager comes and asks for help firing an employee? What do you think?

msadowski 6y ago

I cannot agree more. When I started getting paid by the hour, I've noticed that doing about 6 hours of full focus paid work is about as much as I can do in a day with full productivity.