If you are hiring someone who does not know how to tell how long it will take them.
Imagine paying someone an extra $10,000 because they missed the deadline. That’s how hourly works.
> Imagine paying someone an extra $10,000 because they missed the deadline. That’s how hourly works.
Yes it is.
You should probably ensure you only hire people who have experience predicting the costs of the projects you hire them for.
Deep Neural Networks who try too hard to maximize or minimize things will take weird misaligned actions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao4jwLwT36M
I won't go into details, but my experience from the past year of trying to minimize the chances of losing my home and work visa has provided ample evidence that this also applies to human mental health.
> There is no way to know ahead of time what kind of contractor you are.
Which is why any strategy that resembles "fire and forget" is a poor one for anything that hasn't been repeatedly tested before with mostly the same components.
It's better to have a process where you repeatedly get visibility into a risk than to imagine that you can wall yourself off from it.
I'd rather charge by day/week to discourage those unproductive things and have the company get its act together in terms of scope/approvals so that there is no blocker (or they get expensive).
* A contractor who insists on an hourly rate for a project with unknown timeline does himself and the client the favor of killing the deal.
* A client who insists on a total-cost pricing for a project they need budget-certainty on does himself and the contractor the favor of killing the deal.