11 ms·

I once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a dat

I once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a date ) and countless docs and hours spent to come up with evidence folder. In Australia, a citizen can argue their case which I did without using any lawyers. Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log for the work that I had done. I pointed out that the contract stipulates performing of tasks and is not contingent on time spent. The judge laughed and ruled in my favor because he was fully onboard the argument that it doesn't matter ,legally speaking, how much time I was at the computer but matters that the task promised were delivered with high quality. The funny thing is that the client agreed that he has seen positive returns but felt overcharged. The judge on hearing this reprimanded him for wasting everyone's time and awarded costs and interests. Pay for work not time spent on the computer.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago
> Pay for work not time spent on the computer This is the right solution, but of course is harder for some occupations - call center, sewing buttons, and more mundane work. Where 'bad' employers can push up the amount of work expected.
- ghoshbishakh 6y ago
  For your specific examples it is much more easier to monitor the amount of work done.
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    Yes, but with bad employers that can often result in 'wage deflation' where the amount of buttons sewn or marketing calls made required gets larger and larger - which can often result in overworked and very stressed workers - there's been quite a few cases in call centers in the last few years. When workers are paid per piece directly it can sometimes mean they will be paid less than the minimum wage.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      I doubt workers in call centers are stressed because there isn't enough surveillance of their work.
      - tinbucket 6y ago
        Quite the contrary. I work in a call centre and we’re intensely stressed by the constant, microscopic surveillance. Everything is watched and logged and can be used against you, and the targets they measure you against creep ever higher.
- hnick 6y ago
  Also known as piece work. It has a history of abuse as you say. Such as the origin of the phrase 'sweatshop'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work
- roel_v 6y ago
  Does that make them bad employers? I would expect it to be quite logical that employers want to hire the best workers, where the 'best' is those who can process the most items. I used to work in a brush factory when I was a teenager (during school holidays). It was basically 8 hours of grabbing a metal clip and s row of brush hairs, slide the latter into the former, put the assembly under a press, put the result in a box. I made the day interesting by getting my movements down exactly so I would get into a flow and even almost dissociate (it was better than it sounds, I was not a sweatshop child laborer). The regular workers would regularly remind me not to 'overwork' myself, and after a few weeks, those 'reminders' turned into near bullying (probably because I was upping the level for what was 'normal' output levels). Was I a bad employee or bad colleague in that case? I don't think so, but ostensibly some others thought differently.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    You just have to remember to slow down when the time and motion person is monitoring your work - its I known way of gaming the system. There's a lot of unwritten rules in factories - I recall being told about how when a big heavy engineering turbine or what have you was close to being delivered ,work slowed right down until the magic brown envelopes arrived. And my source commented even the tea boy got £750 - this was the 70's so a lot of £
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Why would people get envelopes with money if a turbine was delivered?
      - C1sc0cat 6y ago
        They went on a go slow - company paid under the table to hit a delivery date.
        Aeolun 6y ago
        Ah! Thanks. I missed that implication :)
spurdoman77 6y ago
> Pay for work not time spent on the computer. Pay for the results, not for the work or time spent.
- brailsafe 6y ago
  Hell no. If someone hires me to do work, it's on them whether or not it was a good idea in the first place. Unless and only unless the risk was explicitly agreed upon. "You owe me $50000" "But I didn't make $50000 from the thing I asked you to build" "Maybe you should have thought about that before you agreed to pay me to build it, based on your idea."
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    "Results" here are "delivering a thing", not "profiting from the thing".
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Isn't that what work is referring to here? I suppose work can refer to either the effort or to the deliverable.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        I think spurdoman77 refers to effort when he says "work". To me, one clearly should be paid based on the deliverable.
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  Or more specifically, pay for what you say you'd pay for in the contract. If it was a time and materials contract, pay the man for his T&M. I've spent way too much of my career dealing with nasty clients who signed a T&M agreement and then stopped paying when they didn't get the next Facebook / Google / Amazon. Not my effing problem that their expectations weren't in the realm of reality and the contract was based on time units not their pie-in-the-sky dreams. If they'd wanted a contract based on their pipe dreams, chances are I wouldn't have signed it OR I would have put in verbiage to make sure they couldn't screw me in the end.
nip 6y ago
One day you come home and realize that you locked yourself out of your home. You call the locksmith. He arrives, looks at the door, fiddles with the lock for one minute, opens the door then leaves. The next day you receive the bill, 150€. Are you mad for spending so much for one minute of work? You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute. — Recalling it from a discussion with a friend of mine on a related subject: the cost of experience.
- kovek 6y ago
  Also, dispatch, and there is no guarantee that the locksmith has orders frequently.
- b3lvedere 6y ago
  I fully agree with this, but it can't hurt to try and learn some of those tricks yourself. Some locks are surprisingly easy to open.
  - blensor 6y ago
    I recommend the LockPickingLawyer channel on youtube. It's fascinating how easy some locks can be picked.
  - williamdclt 6y ago
    If I remembered to take my lockpicking tools when going out, I probably also remembered my keys!
    - jsjohnst 6y ago
      I used to keep a rake and tensioner in my wallet. That simple kit is usually enough to get through common locks.
- grugagag 6y ago
  Speaking of which there are some croocked locksmiths out there who pretend they cant lockpick the lock, try a few different methods to fail and add to labor and eventually drill through the core, damage the lock, charge you more than 500 and additional few hundred to replace the lock. It happened to my friend’s mom. Sometimes it’s experience but sometimes it’s just overcharging. If it’s higher than market price it may overcharging or better quality
wodenokoto 6y ago
I'm working at a consultancy, and fixed priced projects are the worst. Clients get greedy and want every little detail they come up with implemented. When things turn out more complex than expected, you have to deliver shoddy work instead of decreasing scope and at the end of the project you ended up adding a feature they asked for halfway through and now they are complaining that the feature it superseeded wasn't in the final delivery. In hourly projects, the clients are so much easier to talk to. If something turns out more difficult than expected, they are willing to reprioritise. If they ask for an extra feature hafway through, they are willing to pay for it, or let something else go.
- viraptor 6y ago
  That's a different extreme though. In the middle, you can do a "phase N paid X will include Y" contact and if they want to add features halfway, you can both update the plan and payment details.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  We tried it at my previous company once, we had a setup where customers could pay per 2-week sprint. What they tried to do was get more work done outside of that timeframe by reporting bugs in the delivered work. Bugs that were basically missed features. Before that my company tried a fixed price project; they sold 8 weeks of work, but to make a profit we had to quickly finish everything in the 6th week, maybe one more guy on the project in the 7th for the last bits. That was a bit shit.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  That's why fixed price projects should not exist. Really. It's one of the worst business practices out there.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  If you're going to do fixed price, you really need a proper spec, change management process and approval process defined up-front. If the project isn't large enough to justify that or the participants aren't willing to do it, going fixed price is almost inevitably going to cause problems. On the other hand, if you do have a reasonably clear idea of what you want up front as the client, and if you do have a reasonably clear idea of what it will take to achieve that as the service provider, a fixed-price contract on reasonable terms can work to both parties' advantage. The client gets a degree of certainty from early on that they would not have with time-based pricing. The service provider assumes the risk but is better able to judge it, and can price based on the value they are offering to the client and the degree of risk involved, potentially increasing their margin considerably while still having happy clients.
_trampeltier 6y ago
A couple of years ago, was here an AskHN question. As far I remember, the guy worked from home, had just fill some excel sheets from other excel sheets. After a while he made some scripts and one week work was done in 20 minutes. He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work. The question was then, if he should tell, he work just 20 minutes and not one week. But he also said he need the income and if he told, also the control guy would lose some working hours.
- nhylated 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945
- eternalny1 6y ago
  I had something similar (but opposite) happen. We hired a remote engineer to write a program to export to excel. He claimed it was done and the Excel "output" arrived every morning. We asked him to submit his code for review, and after stalling, he produced some extremely obfuscated C++ code that turned out to do absolutely nothing. He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    >He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports. He trained a neural network to solve the problem :D
    - eequah9L 6y ago
      Kinda tricky to scale that kind of network ;)
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        There are a lot of humans.
aaron695 6y ago
> Pay for work not time spent on the computer And next week HN will love UBI. Many people are shit at their jobs and always will be. The current system with its messiness gets them money and self respect. I'm not against a hard world that hurts more people for the next century while we work towards utopia. But just be aware what you are advocating for. Cut throat gig contracts are different to the Fuck you, Pay me, idea.
- hellotomyrars 6y ago
  So how are you defining Utopia? What makes us reach the singularity that creates Utopia at the expense of people being miserable? Not a lot of money and self-respect in working min wage/dead end jobs. Plenty of people out on the streets who can’t even get a job. Not sure what you think Utopia is, but I fail to see how another century of a hard world that hurts people gets us there.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    After a while I think you find out you’d rather have a minimum wage dead end job than no job at all. Of course, if you can keep yourself busy, then that might be unnecessary. But I don’t think humans are made to simply be idle.
0x008 6y ago
IANAL, but it might be worth pointing out that this depends entirely on the contract. In my contry there are two basic types of work contracts: One that is about the work where the quality of the result is the deciding factor and the time spent is irrelevant (within given constraints, e.g. milestones or due dates). The other one is explicitly about the hours spent working, regardless of the actual outcome (also within given contraints).
wisty 6y ago
> Pay for work not time spent on the computer. Which is fine for stuff that can be done as an individual contract. Otherwise, there's this thing called "Theory of the Firm" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm) in which economists try to answer just why firms exist. What if your job is one where it's hard to measure output? What if it's a job where the's a lot of risk? What if collaboration is important, and you want people to use a bit of common sense to put effort behind the stuff that matters (and the boss isn't some super-genius overlord , running some kind of dystopian company where meat-robots are assigned certain goals that can be well specified but are still yet to be completely automated).
Lio 6y ago
In the UK contractors actually have to be very careful to bill for deliverables and not just for time sitting on a seat. The HMRC's IR35 regulations would regard someone who just comes in and does whatever is asked of them as a "disguised employee" where as those who have fixed deliverables can be treated as external suppliers (even if they bill for the number of days it took to deliver). The difference is subtle but very important.
- tingletech 6y ago
  does that apply to uber drivers too?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I wouldn’t want my Uber driver to bill for number of days it took to deliver.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  In theory. But in reality, every contractor I know (including myself in a past life) bills for time on specific projects. The industry that has built up around IR35 insurance seems to think this is OK too.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Just in case anyone is reading this later: IR35 isn't actually as simple as that, and whether you charge fixed price or T&M is likely to be a relatively minor detail in whether you are considered a disguised employee. The "doing whatever is asked of them" in the parent comment would be a bigger indicator that someone isn't truly independent and is instead operating under direction and control like an employee.
magicalhippo 6y ago
Many years ago I was working as a IT tech trainee, and our company had gotten a contract to upgrade some ~350 local office Unix servers to NT4 for this company. The clients used Windows 3.11, with home directories shared over SMB. Number of users varied between 20-30 to a few hundred. Clients would still be running win3.11 on the same 486's, but instead a trimmed netboot variant which connected directly to a remote desktop on the NT4 server (Citrix). The NT4 server would be configured and set up centrally and then shipped, us techies "just" had to copy over the user docs and mail to the new server. See each user had a home directory and a mail directory, and after copying the data we had to go to each directory and set up the permissions. We've gotten documentation on how to do it, which involved the usual right-click property dialogs, finding the right user in the list etc. This process was very tedious and labor intensive, not to mention error prone, and was the majority of the several days of on-premise install time. After a couple of installs my inner programmer took over, and decided there had to be a better way. So I spent a day writing a few batch files that would copy the data, and then iterate over the directories and calling "cacls" directly. At the end I had a small tool which sent an email to an SMS gateway. After that all we had to do was hook up the new server, start the batch file and go for a 2-4 hour lunch until we got the SMS. Then we could verify the log files from my batch files that everything went ok, possibly fix one or two small issues and go home. On most installs we were done the first day, rather than spending 3-5 days. I distributed these files to the group and got a lot of praise from the other techies. Then my boss popped by and that's when I learned that in the contract, they would get paid by the number of users per location as they had estimated the work by that. So we would still get paid for 3-5 days of work, while the vast majority would be done in less than one day, and none went more than two days after my scripts were used. So me, a trainee, earned the company a quite significant amount of money by being lazy. On an side note, this project also taught me the importance of planning. This project occupied the majority of the available techs in our company during the 3 months of rollout. Servers were prepared at our headquarter and shipped so that techs started install on Mondays, and each Monday for 12 weeks roughly 30 servers got installed. The rollout went flawlessly and on schedule, with only a disk cable coming lose during transport of the very last server causing an issue. However, the project group had been sitting next to my office so I knew they had spent one and a half years planning and testing. A significant portion of that was the logistics of the rollout itself.
whack 6y ago
> Pay for work not time spent on the computer. Consider the unintended consequences of what you're proposing. Most software projects end up taking far longer than initially estimated. If you tell your manager that you can have something done in one month, and it actually takes you two months to do it, does that mean you should take a 50% pay cut for those 2 months? Or that you should work 80 hours weeks to get it done in 1 month? If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Silhouette 6y ago
  If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be Most employees might prefer that. It seems likely that a disproportionate amount of freelancers (and other entrepreneurial types) do not, presumably because they trust that the results they can offer will justify higher compensation than they would expect to receive as an employee and they know how to manage their risk. It's a totally different kind of relationship when you're working business-to-business instead of employer-employee.
  - whack 6y ago
    Yup, I definitely agree with you that it's an entirely different career model and some people would prefer that. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of people who want the best of both worlds. "Why did you leave work at 3pm yesterday?" "I finished all my sprint tasks, so how does it matter if I leave early? You're paying me for results, not time" "Why didn't you complete all your sprint tasks last week?" "I was working diligently from 9-5 everyday but still wasn't able to finish my tasks. You don't seriously expect me to work evenings do you?"
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  >If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be Back in the day, I billed different projects by time, by fixed price, by value, by deliverables, and by time-based retainer. What I found was that what the client was willing to consider said a lot about their values and ethics. There were cases where I could save clients money by doing something other that T&M, but their need to feel in control was so great that I finally just gave up and stopped trying to be creative about contract terms. Personally - I still think retainer based is the best option for an ongoing relationship as it should eliminate all the needless haggling - I consult, you pay, we all win. So I'm with you - for all the thinking that I might be able to increase my revenue by some other model was wiped out by the fact that it was just easier to bill hourly.
jl2718 6y ago
Unfortunately the abstract nature of our craft makes hourly pay nearly inevitable. If you want a new engine in a $50k car, you can roughly understand the difficulty and cost of that, but software just seems like magic that appears out of nowhere for free.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

> Pay for work not time spent on the computer This is the right solution, but of course is harder for some occupations - call center, sewing buttons, and more mundane work. Where 'bad' employers can push up the amount of work expected.

ghoshbishakh 6y ago
For your specific examples it is much more easier to monitor the amount of work done.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  Yes, but with bad employers that can often result in 'wage deflation' where the amount of buttons sewn or marketing calls made required gets larger and larger - which can often result in overworked and very stressed workers - there's been quite a few cases in call centers in the last few years. When workers are paid per piece directly it can sometimes mean they will be paid less than the minimum wage.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I doubt workers in call centers are stressed because there isn't enough surveillance of their work.
    - tinbucket 6y ago
      Quite the contrary. I work in a call centre and we’re intensely stressed by the constant, microscopic surveillance. Everything is watched and logged and can be used against you, and the targets they measure you against creep ever higher.
hnick 6y ago
Also known as piece work. It has a history of abuse as you say. Such as the origin of the phrase 'sweatshop'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work
roel_v 6y ago
Does that make them bad employers? I would expect it to be quite logical that employers want to hire the best workers, where the 'best' is those who can process the most items. I used to work in a brush factory when I was a teenager (during school holidays). It was basically 8 hours of grabbing a metal clip and s row of brush hairs, slide the latter into the former, put the assembly under a press, put the result in a box. I made the day interesting by getting my movements down exactly so I would get into a flow and even almost dissociate (it was better than it sounds, I was not a sweatshop child laborer). The regular workers would regularly remind me not to 'overwork' myself, and after a few weeks, those 'reminders' turned into near bullying (probably because I was upping the level for what was 'normal' output levels). Was I a bad employee or bad colleague in that case? I don't think so, but ostensibly some others thought differently.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  You just have to remember to slow down when the time and motion person is monitoring your work - its I known way of gaming the system. There's a lot of unwritten rules in factories - I recall being told about how when a big heavy engineering turbine or what have you was close to being delivered ,work slowed right down until the magic brown envelopes arrived. And my source commented even the tea boy got £750 - this was the 70's so a lot of £
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Why would people get envelopes with money if a turbine was delivered?
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      They went on a go slow - company paid under the table to hit a delivery date.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        Ah! Thanks. I missed that implication :)

spurdoman77 6y ago

> Pay for work not time spent on the computer. Pay for the results, not for the work or time spent.

brailsafe 6y ago
Hell no. If someone hires me to do work, it's on them whether or not it was a good idea in the first place. Unless and only unless the risk was explicitly agreed upon. "You owe me $50000" "But I didn't make $50000 from the thing I asked you to build" "Maybe you should have thought about that before you agreed to pay me to build it, based on your idea."
- StavrosK 6y ago
  "Results" here are "delivering a thing", not "profiting from the thing".
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Isn't that what work is referring to here? I suppose work can refer to either the effort or to the deliverable.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      I think spurdoman77 refers to effort when he says "work". To me, one clearly should be paid based on the deliverable.
poulsbohemian 6y ago
Or more specifically, pay for what you say you'd pay for in the contract. If it was a time and materials contract, pay the man for his T&M. I've spent way too much of my career dealing with nasty clients who signed a T&M agreement and then stopped paying when they didn't get the next Facebook / Google / Amazon. Not my effing problem that their expectations weren't in the realm of reality and the contract was based on time units not their pie-in-the-sky dreams. If they'd wanted a contract based on their pipe dreams, chances are I wouldn't have signed it OR I would have put in verbiage to make sure they couldn't screw me in the end.

nip 6y ago

One day you come home and realize that you locked yourself out of your home. You call the locksmith. He arrives, looks at the door, fiddles with the lock for one minute, opens the door then leaves. The next day you receive the bill, 150€. Are you mad for spending so much for one minute of work? You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute. — Recalling it from a discussion with a friend of mine on a related subject: the cost of experience.

kovek 6y ago
Also, dispatch, and there is no guarantee that the locksmith has orders frequently.
b3lvedere 6y ago
I fully agree with this, but it can't hurt to try and learn some of those tricks yourself. Some locks are surprisingly easy to open.
- blensor 6y ago
  I recommend the LockPickingLawyer channel on youtube. It's fascinating how easy some locks can be picked.
- williamdclt 6y ago
  If I remembered to take my lockpicking tools when going out, I probably also remembered my keys!
  - jsjohnst 6y ago
    I used to keep a rake and tensioner in my wallet. That simple kit is usually enough to get through common locks.
grugagag 6y ago
Speaking of which there are some croocked locksmiths out there who pretend they cant lockpick the lock, try a few different methods to fail and add to labor and eventually drill through the core, damage the lock, charge you more than 500 and additional few hundred to replace the lock. It happened to my friend’s mom. Sometimes it’s experience but sometimes it’s just overcharging. If it’s higher than market price it may overcharging or better quality

wodenokoto 6y ago

I'm working at a consultancy, and fixed priced projects are the worst. Clients get greedy and want every little detail they come up with implemented. When things turn out more complex than expected, you have to deliver shoddy work instead of decreasing scope and at the end of the project you ended up adding a feature they asked for halfway through and now they are complaining that the feature it superseeded wasn't in the final delivery. In hourly projects, the clients are so much easier to talk to. If something turns out more difficult than expected, they are willing to reprioritise. If they ask for an extra feature hafway through, they are willing to pay for it, or let something else go.

viraptor 6y ago
That's a different extreme though. In the middle, you can do a "phase N paid X will include Y" contact and if they want to add features halfway, you can both update the plan and payment details.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
We tried it at my previous company once, we had a setup where customers could pay per 2-week sprint. What they tried to do was get more work done outside of that timeframe by reporting bugs in the delivered work. Bugs that were basically missed features. Before that my company tried a fixed price project; they sold 8 weeks of work, but to make a profit we had to quickly finish everything in the 6th week, maybe one more guy on the project in the 7th for the last bits. That was a bit shit.
ilaksh 6y ago
That's why fixed price projects should not exist. Really. It's one of the worst business practices out there.
Silhouette 6y ago
If you're going to do fixed price, you really need a proper spec, change management process and approval process defined up-front. If the project isn't large enough to justify that or the participants aren't willing to do it, going fixed price is almost inevitably going to cause problems. On the other hand, if you do have a reasonably clear idea of what you want up front as the client, and if you do have a reasonably clear idea of what it will take to achieve that as the service provider, a fixed-price contract on reasonable terms can work to both parties' advantage. The client gets a degree of certainty from early on that they would not have with time-based pricing. The service provider assumes the risk but is better able to judge it, and can price based on the value they are offering to the client and the degree of risk involved, potentially increasing their margin considerably while still having happy clients.

_trampeltier 6y ago

A couple of years ago, was here an AskHN question. As far I remember, the guy worked from home, had just fill some excel sheets from other excel sheets. After a while he made some scripts and one week work was done in 20 minutes. He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work. The question was then, if he should tell, he work just 20 minutes and not one week. But he also said he need the income and if he told, also the control guy would lose some working hours.

nhylated 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945
eternalny1 6y ago
I had something similar (but opposite) happen. We hired a remote engineer to write a program to export to excel. He claimed it was done and the Excel "output" arrived every morning. We asked him to submit his code for review, and after stalling, he produced some extremely obfuscated C++ code that turned out to do absolutely nothing. He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  >He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports. He trained a neural network to solve the problem :D
  - eequah9L 6y ago
    Kinda tricky to scale that kind of network ;)
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      There are a lot of humans.

aaron695 6y ago

> Pay for work not time spent on the computer And next week HN will love UBI. Many people are shit at their jobs and always will be. The current system with its messiness gets them money and self respect. I'm not against a hard world that hurts more people for the next century while we work towards utopia. But just be aware what you are advocating for. Cut throat gig contracts are different to the Fuck you, Pay me, idea.

hellotomyrars 6y ago
So how are you defining Utopia? What makes us reach the singularity that creates Utopia at the expense of people being miserable? Not a lot of money and self-respect in working min wage/dead end jobs. Plenty of people out on the streets who can’t even get a job. Not sure what you think Utopia is, but I fail to see how another century of a hard world that hurts people gets us there.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  After a while I think you find out you’d rather have a minimum wage dead end job than no job at all. Of course, if you can keep yourself busy, then that might be unnecessary. But I don’t think humans are made to simply be idle.

0x008 6y ago

IANAL, but it might be worth pointing out that this depends entirely on the contract. In my contry there are two basic types of work contracts: One that is about the work where the quality of the result is the deciding factor and the time spent is irrelevant (within given constraints, e.g. milestones or due dates). The other one is explicitly about the hours spent working, regardless of the actual outcome (also within given contraints).

wisty 6y ago

> Pay for work not time spent on the computer. Which is fine for stuff that can be done as an individual contract. Otherwise, there's this thing called "Theory of the Firm" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm) in which economists try to answer just why firms exist. What if your job is one where it's hard to measure output? What if it's a job where the's a lot of risk? What if collaboration is important, and you want people to use a bit of common sense to put effort behind the stuff that matters (and the boss isn't some super-genius overlord , running some kind of dystopian company where meat-robots are assigned certain goals that can be well specified but are still yet to be completely automated).

Lio 6y ago

In the UK contractors actually have to be very careful to bill for deliverables and not just for time sitting on a seat. The HMRC's IR35 regulations would regard someone who just comes in and does whatever is asked of them as a "disguised employee" where as those who have fixed deliverables can be treated as external suppliers (even if they bill for the number of days it took to deliver). The difference is subtle but very important.

tingletech 6y ago
does that apply to uber drivers too?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I wouldn’t want my Uber driver to bill for number of days it took to deliver.
beaconstudios 6y ago
In theory. But in reality, every contractor I know (including myself in a past life) bills for time on specific projects. The industry that has built up around IR35 insurance seems to think this is OK too.
Silhouette 6y ago
Just in case anyone is reading this later: IR35 isn't actually as simple as that, and whether you charge fixed price or T&M is likely to be a relatively minor detail in whether you are considered a disguised employee. The "doing whatever is asked of them" in the parent comment would be a bigger indicator that someone isn't truly independent and is instead operating under direction and control like an employee.

magicalhippo 6y ago

Many years ago I was working as a IT tech trainee, and our company had gotten a contract to upgrade some ~350 local office Unix servers to NT4 for this company. The clients used Windows 3.11, with home directories shared over SMB. Number of users varied between 20-30 to a few hundred. Clients would still be running win3.11 on the same 486's, but instead a trimmed netboot variant which connected directly to a remote desktop on the NT4 server (Citrix). The NT4 server would be configured and set up centrally and then shipped, us techies "just" had to copy over the user docs and mail to the new server. See each user had a home directory and a mail directory, and after copying the data we had to go to each directory and set up the permissions. We've gotten documentation on how to do it, which involved the usual right-click property dialogs, finding the right user in the list etc. This process was very tedious and labor intensive, not to mention error prone, and was the majority of the several days of on-premise install time. After a couple of installs my inner programmer took over, and decided there had to be a better way. So I spent a day writing a few batch files that would copy the data, and then iterate over the directories and calling "cacls" directly. At the end I had a small tool which sent an email to an SMS gateway. After that all we had to do was hook up the new server, start the batch file and go for a 2-4 hour lunch until we got the SMS. Then we could verify the log files from my batch files that everything went ok, possibly fix one or two small issues and go home. On most installs we were done the first day, rather than spending 3-5 days. I distributed these files to the group and got a lot of praise from the other techies. Then my boss popped by and that's when I learned that in the contract, they would get paid by the number of users per location as they had estimated the work by that. So we would still get paid for 3-5 days of work, while the vast majority would be done in less than one day, and none went more than two days after my scripts were used. So me, a trainee, earned the company a quite significant amount of money by being lazy. On an side note, this project also taught me the importance of planning. This project occupied the majority of the available techs in our company during the 3 months of rollout. Servers were prepared at our headquarter and shipped so that techs started install on Mondays, and each Monday for 12 weeks roughly 30 servers got installed. The rollout went flawlessly and on schedule, with only a disk cable coming lose during transport of the very last server causing an issue. However, the project group had been sitting next to my office so I knew they had spent one and a half years planning and testing. A significant portion of that was the logistics of the rollout itself.

whack 6y ago

> Pay for work not time spent on the computer. Consider the unintended consequences of what you're proposing. Most software projects end up taking far longer than initially estimated. If you tell your manager that you can have something done in one month, and it actually takes you two months to do it, does that mean you should take a 50% pay cut for those 2 months? Or that you should work 80 hours weeks to get it done in 1 month? If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be

deleted 6y ago
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Silhouette 6y ago
If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be Most employees might prefer that. It seems likely that a disproportionate amount of freelancers (and other entrepreneurial types) do not, presumably because they trust that the results they can offer will justify higher compensation than they would expect to receive as an employee and they know how to manage their risk. It's a totally different kind of relationship when you're working business-to-business instead of employer-employee.
- whack 6y ago
  Yup, I definitely agree with you that it's an entirely different career model and some people would prefer that. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of people who want the best of both worlds. "Why did you leave work at 3pm yesterday?" "I finished all my sprint tasks, so how does it matter if I leave early? You're paying me for results, not time" "Why didn't you complete all your sprint tasks last week?" "I was working diligently from 9-5 everyday but still wasn't able to finish my tasks. You don't seriously expect me to work evenings do you?"
poulsbohemian 6y ago
>If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be Back in the day, I billed different projects by time, by fixed price, by value, by deliverables, and by time-based retainer. What I found was that what the client was willing to consider said a lot about their values and ethics. There were cases where I could save clients money by doing something other that T&M, but their need to feel in control was so great that I finally just gave up and stopped trying to be creative about contract terms. Personally - I still think retainer based is the best option for an ongoing relationship as it should eliminate all the needless haggling - I consult, you pay, we all win. So I'm with you - for all the thinking that I might be able to increase my revenue by some other model was wiped out by the fact that it was just easier to bill hourly.

jl2718 6y ago

Unfortunately the abstract nature of our craft makes hourly pay nearly inevitable. If you want a new engine in a $50k car, you can roughly understand the difficulty and cost of that, but software just seems like magic that appears out of nowhere for free.