Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesSwift | Hacker News Reader

I explicitly do hourly when working on the side because of the lower overhead on my end to manage the process. As long as the trust is there on both sides, its a much more pleasant relationship to manage. The client is never going to be surprised by my hours (because I've given a gut estimate and am communicating as we go), and we never have to worry about horse trading for scope. If requirements change we just do the new thing and don't even worry about it.

I will caveat that I also generally enter long term retainer style agreements (though I dont usually structure them as a proper retainer) to handle various issues rather than fixed projects per-se. Things like "we want to scale up and dont know how" or "we are growing and need a hired gun to handle a broad spectrum of miscellaneous requests". Scope is a lot more nebulous in the first place for these.

View on HN

Isn't the incentive structure for hourly completely ass-backwards? If you're a consultant there is an implied information assymetry - the client doesn't know what you are doing and has a hard time judging the amount of work required/being done. How do you handle the inherent and justified suspicion of padding billable hours?

I just can't charge hourly because I just can't imagine trusting someone who charges hourly.

Thats what I mean when I say "as long as the trust is there on both sides". They trust that I'm honest and don't sandbag work, and I trust that they aren't going to ask for an itemized breakdown of my time. I keep a very coarse ledger of time and what I worked on, but the invoices are generally just a line item of

"Development: 30 hours"

Again, nothing is a surprise in my relationships because we constantly are in communication, and I've raised issues with them beforehand if anything comes up / diverges.

you nailed it, it’s about trust. i’ve had a couple clients for 9 years, all hourly, and never had an issue. i’ve had 20 or so clients that this didn’t work and one of us fired the other, most of the time amicably.

> "we are growing and need a hired gun to handle a broad spectrum of miscellaneous requests"

I have difficulty seeing how you could charge for this other than by units of time.

As the other commenter says, a retainer agreement for a "block" of time is common, but again for simplicity sake I just do it on the fly and we keep each other in the loop. They keep me informed of current/future things that are coming up and I keep them informed of sizing estimates (e.g. "thats simple", "thats pretty involved", "we should hold off on that and have a discussion to see if we can solve it with a hack then reevaluate")

billing weekly for things like this i’ve found works nicely. they basically get everything you got for a week. still requires some level of trust, and understanding of the work by the client.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com