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> No clients care if you spent 80 hours a week not solving their problem, so why would they care if you spent 20 solving it?

This has not been my experience at all. It's a different subject entirely, but it is very common for clients to be much happier to pay for 20 days at $550 a day than 5 days at $2,200 a day, even if they got it two weeks earlier. People are not rational.

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Right right. They have other weird concepts like "market rates" and average timeframe lodged in their heads.

It's complicated and pardon me if I have glossed over the details somewhat.

If you're smart, you get all of the work done in advance, then stage it over the course the next few days, providing a steady trickle to create the perception of steady progress and to have something to mention at the standup meetings. I suspect a good percentage of experienced developers with good customer management skills do something akin to this.

This aggravates me, because as a customer, I want the expert who charges the highest rate, but also does things really fast and correctly, because I know what a difference there is between competent and incompetent people. But other people don't think like that, and if I say I'm ok with a high hourly rate, they think I'm saying I want to be ripped off in terms of both rate and hours.

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