4 ms·

What’s the big problem with hourly? You just listed a bunch of benefits and said it’s cursed.

tptacek 3y ago
Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417 Two overarching principles here: 1. Sane customers value determinism more than they value maximizing the productivity of a single hour. They're engaging you because they want a thing done, and the order of their concerns is: (i) assurance that the thing gets done, (ii) getting the thing on a predictable schedule, (iii) getting the thing done sooner, (iv) that they're not making a fool out of themselves by paying way over the market for the thing and (v) how much they pay. Note how far down the list the actual absolute billing number is. 2. Conduct a thought experiment: imagine you have a project that is going to take you a week to finish. Now imagine you take 100 Provigils (don't do this) and get the project done in 3 days instead. Who should get the economic benefit of that efficiency, you or your client?
- plugin-baby 3y ago
  This still isn’t clicking for me - it feels like you’re equating daily/weekly billing with per-project billing, and hourly billing with metering.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Nope, that's another misconception about how T&M billing works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421770 You're metering, but at a lower level of granularity. You don't care about squeezing the maximum customer value out of ever hour, or maximizing hours you bill but don't do work in, because you're just not tracking hours. You work at an ordinary pace. Some days you're going to give your client 9 hours worth of productivity because you're in flow; sometimes they're going to get 7. It doesn't matter. The only really important thing about your interval is that you can't book two clients on the same staffing in the same interval. If you bill daily, you as a general rule don't book two customers on the same day (really, I wouldn't do it in the same week).
- codpiece 3y ago
  Oh! I wish I didn't stop reading before the parentheses!

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417 Two overarching principles here: 1. Sane customers value determinism more than they value maximizing the productivity of a single hour. They're engaging you because they want a thing done, and the order of their concerns is: (i) assurance that the thing gets done, (ii) getting the thing on a predictable schedule, (iii) getting the thing done sooner, (iv) that they're not making a fool out of themselves by paying way over the market for the thing and (v) how much they pay. Note how far down the list the actual absolute billing number is. 2. Conduct a thought experiment: imagine you have a project that is going to take you a week to finish. Now imagine you take 100 Provigils (don't do this) and get the project done in 3 days instead. Who should get the economic benefit of that efficiency, you or your client?

plugin-baby 3y ago
This still isn’t clicking for me - it feels like you’re equating daily/weekly billing with per-project billing, and hourly billing with metering.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Nope, that's another misconception about how T&M billing works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421770 You're metering, but at a lower level of granularity. You don't care about squeezing the maximum customer value out of ever hour, or maximizing hours you bill but don't do work in, because you're just not tracking hours. You work at an ordinary pace. Some days you're going to give your client 9 hours worth of productivity because you're in flow; sometimes they're going to get 7. It doesn't matter. The only really important thing about your interval is that you can't book two clients on the same staffing in the same interval. If you bill daily, you as a general rule don't book two customers on the same day (really, I wouldn't do it in the same week).
codpiece 3y ago
Oh! I wish I didn't stop reading before the parentheses!