Comment by vitaflo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vitaflo | Hacker News Reader

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I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. Frankly, this is how most clients have actually wanted it. They think in hours (or days) not some subdivision of them. And yes, thinking about work is the same as doing the work. It's all billable time.

As far as your rate, I always bill as high as I can without pushback. Where is that level? You'll know when your rate is too high. I kept increasing my rate with contracts until clients started to grumble a bit. Then I backed it off 10% and haven't had a problem since. Note this means I am getting paid 30% more than where I originally started. Wouldn't have known that if I didn't attempt to max out my rate.

In the end it's just business. You either make a client happy or you don't. As a business your goal is to maximize your profits without much pushback. That will just take some time and energy to find out what the market will bear.

> I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour.

I deal with a lot of contractors. To be clear: If I asked for a single task that takes 5 minutes and they bill me an hour for it, that's 100% fine in my book. Context switching, recording, billing, etc. aren't free. The difference between a 60-minute bill and a 10-minute bill is nothing. Let's just keep it simple and bill an hour.

But this is only for individual tasks. If someone is working independently on a project with 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 5 minutes a few hours later and billing each as an hour, that's not okay.

Depending on the contractor, we don't really scrutinize line items all that closely. However, once you're dealing with multiple contractors and gathering experience about how long things generally take, you start to notice some contractors are outliers in how many "hours" they claim to get things done. In some cases, if their hourly rate is low enough we may not really care, but when someone hits the combo of billing a high hourly rate and also racking up a lot of hours for relatively simple things with no ability to explain why it took longer than everyone else, it's time to phase out that contractor.

>If someone is working independently on a project with 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 5 minutes a few hours later and billing each as an hour, that's not okay.

Yeah I certainly wasn't advocating that. It's a two way street. Clients tend to understand they're paying for availability as much as anything and contractors understand clients want work done on time and within budget as much as possible. In my experience (having done this for almost 15 years) the best client/contractor relationships are built on respect and trust that both sides are not being taken advantage of. And I've certainly seen my fair share of contractors that try to take advantage of clients or let clients take advantage of them. Both tend to not last long as contractors.

I used to work as a project manager , where we had a large pool of vetted freelancers. You'd select the type of work, specify the price and the system would send a mass email to those- whoever accepts first, gets the job. Most of our clients were banks or investment funds. The company was providing translation services. So a fund gets to update one word in one of their files and it does happen in 12 different languages. We charge minimum fee per job, so 12 words becomes £360. The fund couldn't care less. However, because it's only one word, a single freelancer( 12 in total, for each language) would only get like £0.12 or so. They would also need to update the translation memory and send us an invoice. Nobody wanted to do it, because of this. So I used to struggle to get these jobs done because time was always very limited. We also had 50% margin per project requirement. So I ended up paying £5 per word, which would end up costing me £60, but it would still leave £300 profit for the company. Just like that I solved my issue, because the freelancers were happy to do it. The vendor management killed it a couple of months before my departure claiming no freelancer should get more than the agreed rate....

Transperfect?

Nope, but they were a competitor.

As someone that takes longer to do things than most due to ADHD issues, here's what I did:

I knew generally how long something should take. So, I would track my hours for sure, but I would reduce the final hours to be roughly what it should have been.

Everyone was happy this way.

Discounting your hourly rate and taking too long looks really bad. Keeping the rate high and discounting your hours looks normal to great.

> In the end it's just business. You either make a client happy or you don't.

Spot on.

1) Do good work. Be patient and kind to clients. Remember when someone asks you to do something for the 8th time, "Hey, it's their money."

2) Make sure you write your contracts in a way that lets you raise rates every January. Aim for a 10% increase every calendar year.

3) Give clients a discount if they sign retainers, or longer contracts. This ultimately means less sales cycle, and more profit for you.

4) Raise rates on clients based on how much you like the work. If you really don't enjoy working with one client, raise their rates until you can stomach the work. If you like a client... yeah cut them some slack.

5) Always know who your stakeholders are at a company, and make sure you send some nice thank you gifts this time of year. Even if it's just a card saying why you appreciate certain people on their team... letting those people know, and letting their bosses know... that buys you a lot of goodwill. 'Tis the season. (=

Re 5) you must be careful with the gifts as that may be misconstrued as bribery or a kickback. A card should be fine, but a bottle of Champagne rather won't be.

Are you in the public sector is this a common issue in your industry? I ask because gifts and emoluments are common in my industry (manufacturing) with contracted clients in the private sector.

They make a big deal about it in pharma in trainings and whatnot, but then they don't really seem to enforce it. Adobe providing catered box seats to a big game? No problem. Random director spending too much on an internal team dinner, problem. It's pretty strange.

I'm in the private sector and I'm in no way allowed to accept gifts worth more than 10-15€ and even those are under strict premises to not allow it to be misconstrued as a bribe.

Not even working in any industry that is usually under scrutiny for bribes (finance, defence, pharma, etc.).

You sure this is about bribes and not about taxes?

Yeah this is a great cautionary point. A goodly chunk of my annual training is about bribes/inappropriate gifts.

One of our salesmen seems to like giving out small bags of nice chocolates.

Yeah, this works for me. One option I did early on was run a Pomodoro timer and bill every half hour, but a client brought up that I should also be charging for the hours I spend in traffic on the way to a meeting.

My wife once asked why I bill $115/hour and not a round number like $120 or $100? How did I get the 5? I just kept raising rates to say no to jobs I didn't feel like doing, and found a point where I got the jobs I wanted.

Seems surprising to me. Rounding to 15 minutes, sure, but 60 seems surprising. Can more people chime in?

Imagine it was 10 seconds instead. Would rounding it to 15 seconds be reasonable, but 1 minute too much?

By that logic, why not round to a whole day? A week? A month?

Because you bill for an hour.

I've got a half hour floor and bill in half hour segments.

But if it's project management I watch quantity of increments and add accordingly.

But bottom line is nothing takes less than a half hour per day per project

> I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour. Frankly, this is how most clients have actually wanted it.

I find it hard to believe anyone wants to over pay for your time by 6x what it's worth. I understand rounding up. But I don't understand working 10 minutes one day, billing for an hour, and then working 10 minutes the next day and billing for two hours total.

The only way I'd do that is if the client gave me 10 mins of work one day, followed by 10 mins of work the next and nothing else. Otherwise I'd just work 20 mins and bill an hour. More often however they are giving me 40 hours of work per week and I bill 40 hours, even if not every single hour is doing "focused work", and some of it may be downtime. Just like any employee who gets a salary.

I've been a contractor full time for almost 15 years with dozens of different clients big, small and in between. You tend to get a feel for what clients want and/or need and what they don't. Mostly clients just want help getting work done and as long as you're meeting their deadlines and are pleasant to work with, they don't care that how much time you bill (as long as it's not more than 40 hrs per week).

I'm not advocating for taking advantage of clients, but I am advocating for being realistic with running your own business. If you're only billing 10 min stretches you won't be in business for long. Clients understand this. It's just part of doing business.

I do what OP does down to 30 min increments but I also bill a bit in how much cognitive power it required to do it. If I hopped on for 10 minutes to restart a server or something, I might bill 0 minutes or I might bill 30. If I had to drive out somewhere, live debug a device for 30 minutes, and drive back. I'm going to get an hour or two into my invoice somehow.

>But I don't understand working 10 minutes one day, billing for an hour, and then working 10 minutes the next day and billing for two hours total.

If someone's breaking up their time like this, they wouldn't be in business very long I don't think. Any reasonable contractor would complete the job in 20 minutes the first day, bill for an hour, and have everyone leave happy.

It's easy to imagine scenarios where contractors take advantage of their clients due to information asymmetry, but most contractors eventually realize their lifetime value is probably higher if they can keep their clients happy. I think the same principle holds true if you're a contracted Rust engineer or a contracted plumber; it seems to be that the honest, skilled, and justifiably expensive ones float to the top.

Sure, I agree with everything you're saying. However, we don't know that the the original poster is a great contractor. All we know is they thing their clients can't think in non-hour units and prefer to be over billed, which is preposterous to me.

Some people are willing to pay a lot for the convenience of not having to plan.

You're paying for more that just the task, you are paying for the availability. I'd rather not block off a whole hour for a "quick" fix, but if you don't the company will come to you more often with quick fixes and those start to really eat up your day.

Most people recognize that the value a contractor delivers is not linear with respect to the time it takes them to complete a job. See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/

That's very different than agreeing to a price ahead of time.

Which would obviously be malicious and your output would suffer and the client would probably notice. Everything within reason.

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