Comment by jjguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjguy | Hacker News Reader

In a past life, I ran a consulting team at a BigCo whose business centered on T&M contracts like OP's. BigCo had 10k employees, mostly associated 1:1 to contracts with the same "bill exactly 40 hrs, but never overhead" constrains.

Our little team had 100 employees, but we matrixed those guys across all our contracts. While the clients disliked the idea of not having "their guy," they really liked having access to the technical depth of 100 guys vs. just the 10 they could afford. Turns out being able to have a Linux kernel guy, OS X kernel guy, Android kernel guy, database expert and hardware hacker on call at all times is incredibly valuable.

Since we matrixed across contracts, we managed to instuitionalize the "overtime hack." The guys were exempt status, so they didn't get time and a half for hours over 40, but they did get paid for every hour they worked. It was a phenomenal hack - guys were routinely making 20-50% more than their base salary. We intentionally understaffed by a bit, to make sure there were always extra hours to burn.

That team is 15 years into existence at a BigCo, and the hack still lives. If you find yourself in a consulting org and think you can make something like this work, don't think for just yourself, but shoot for the moon - set it up so it works for everyone and outlasts you.

I don't get it. What did you actually do? Multiplex their time so they worked for two clients during the same hour, or what?

I think each contract was for 10 people working for 40 hours each per week. In effect buying 400 hours of expertise. That did not stop one of those 10 people doing 40 hours on one contract and another 10-20 hours on another. As long as both contracts were satisfied all was good.

By under resourcing the operation, employees were guaranteed to earn 'overtime' if they wanted it. However implication is that you would be happy putting in 50-60 hours.

> However implication is that you would be happy putting in 50-60 hours

You're taking a too narrow a view of it. We never committed anyone to 50-60 hours, that's unsustainable. But by _allowing_ it and building a system to manage it, you let folks work what they want and still meet the client needs.

Without that flexibility, what happens is what OP describes - folks work more than 40 because you need to / want to, but you don't get compensated for it.

No, we'd never bill two clients for the same hour. Very few (no?) T&M arrangements where that would be legally/ethically/morally acceptable.

We simply let the team bill to multiple contracts. The contract & dev managers were responsible for authorizing the time and ensuring it was necessary/suitable/etc.

A typical T&M contract considers something around 1920 billable hours per year an FTE. 40 hrs a week, 4 weeks of vacation/sick time/etc per year. The typical way to manage those contracts at scale is hire one person per 1920 hours on a contract, then that person works exclusively on that contract.

We didn't allocate one person to a single contract, but fractions of a person - based on how much we estimated any given contract would need a certain set of skills:

"Joe's 20% on Project X and 80% on Y. Valerie's 100% on Y. Bill's 80% on Y and 20% on Z."

Of course, those are just estimates and nothing ever goes to plan - and it's always hard to hire enough good people. As a result, there were always opportunities for folks to do more work - either on their primary contract(s) or supporting another.

It makes the contract management harder, but it provides meaningful benefits to both the team and the clients.

To extend the other answers: the 'hack' in this case is putting everyone on every project. In a lot of consulting settings, charge numbers are kept within a small pool of people working primarily on that contract. When things are heavy, they work overtime, when things are light, they work undertime.

In this case, a team of ~100 all had access to everyone's projects. So rather than being stuck with the demands of a single client, everyone got to work overtime whenever they wanted, and not when they didn't.

It is more inclusive to use to "people" or some other gender neutral term.

nobody cares

Some obviously do.

is it still all guys their?

Your comment makes no sense.

I am from a region (rural mid south US) where "guys" as in "all of those guys" is gender neutral, referring to both male and female. I have learned when speaking to not do this.

I was pointing out the repeated use of "guy" by the parent. It implies that only men work at the BigCo. Certainly the use of guy is cultural, but it derives from a male dominated work culture.

(also I used the wrong "there"...)

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