I love Tim Harford and both of his podcasts (listed on the site) are brilliant and well worth listening to -- but a lawyer's approach to hourly billing is not t

I love Tim Harford and both of his podcasts (listed on the site) are brilliant and well worth listening to -- but a lawyer's approach to hourly billing is not the only way to look at it. Take an Engineering firm who bid $100,000 for a scope of work and internally allocates 1000 hours to complete the job drawing from a shared resource pool of 100 full time staff. The PM in that case will need to closely balance productivity as a function of time vs completed scope which is very different from the pay-as-you go perspective of a lawyer. You jealously guard every fraction of those hours and fill them as much as is humanly possible. Not as easy to make the comparison with the Farmer I suppose which was his point in the article, but since this HN discussion is considering the overall concept of billable hours in general this needs to be said.