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Comment by throwaway0255 | Hacker News Reader

I was once assigned a task that had been estimated at 8 hours of development time, but only required the modification of a single line of code.

I finished it in 5 minutes. My boss asked what happened, I told him, and he told me to revert the code, work on other tasks, and redo it at the end of the day so he could bill for 8 hours (in addition to billing for the other tasks I worked on).

I did it and didn’t say anything. This was just a few weeks into my career.

I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often, to be honest. The people handling the business and writing the checks never seem to know anything about software. You could probably get away with telling them just about anything.

I’ve only ever seen it happen once, though. Software industry has been pretty honest in my experience (at least as far as billing goes...)

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Guess I haven't had enough coffee -- I'm struggling to remember the joke in which the punchline is the professional telling the client something like "You're not paying me to do [one simple/small thing], but for the years of experience it takes to know that [it's that one simple thing]".

The problem with trying to charge for programming work is that so much non-trivial work can be summed up as a few keystrokes, or an addition of a single line, or even producing less code (by deletion/refactoring). That said, I don't understand why your boss thought this subterfuge was necessary. If the client is non-technical enough to approve 8 hours of billing for something that takes 5 minutes to fix, how is that client competent enough to look through the git history to know that it was only 5 minutes of work?

Available in many, many places, but here's one:

https://www.buzzmaven.com/old-engineer-hammer-2/

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/

My art history textbook has a similar story about James McNeill Whisler, who when challenged on charging 200 guineas for a painting, responded, "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."

I think this is extremely common in payed-by-the-hour scenarios, when the person doing the tasks aren't on-site.

I also think most people are aware that's the case, and are fine with it since they've got an estimate that they've approved. The estimate was good enough to justify the business value so they expect to pay the full hours.

Letting people know you need more time is probably a bigger issue.

Your mistake was getting it done too quickly. I hope you learned to manage your time better for future endeavors.

That’s how consulting usually works. You scope out stories and commit to the number of stories in a sprint. Even if you wanted to add more to the sprint you’d just mess up the allocated time of QA and add more stuff for the dev ops team. That’s why more than one person (and people who know the system) should be giving estimates.

Otherwise, if it takes half the time use the other half to test, or train yourself to be better at your job. IMO

For a salaried position, this wouldn't even be unethical. When I finish my work, I take off and have fun. Even for hourly contracting, it's dubious whether this is unethical. The only mistake is telling people it took five minutes. Ideally you'd spend the day having fun and check this in at the end. Not getting paid for actual work done is so common in contracting, however, that I certainly wouldn't feel bad about using up the whole time estimate for a five minute task.

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