So, fraud? If you put a fixed price based on 3 hours, that's of course fine. If you lie about how long work takes you, that's fraud.
Unless your bids are what you bill not what it takes, and you would bill the same 3 hours if it took you 4. In which case it's a fixed price under a different name.
You are absolutely correct from a business perspective. However, I just cannot shake the feeling that I am so 'over' this society that we have created. I'm near my breaking point, I swear. Each passing day, I just think living off the grid sounds better and better.
Again, I am not trying to dog you or anything. It's just that reading statements like yours reminds my how unfit I am for this society. It's a 'me problem' not a 'you/them problem.'
I know life today provides an abundance of boons. However, I sometimes wish I could live in a time where I could be the town blacksmith, cooper, tailor, etc.. My job would be to provide a role for my small community and we would all know and rely on each other. I'm not cut out for this hyper-optimized world.
Although the internet has globalized a lot of services, there's still local, labor intensive jobs that can never be scaled up like this.
To name a few:
- Garbage man - bus driver - child care provider - teacher
Tailors still exist. I went to one last week to get an inch off my pant legs.
However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/day plus materials for four days to make him nails, but you personally think you made four days worth of nails in one day, you might ask him if this was enough and then if so move on to the next job… but if he finds out you charged him for four days work while you were making horseshoes for someone else, you’re gonna have a real big problem.
The real problem is living in a society where extracting as much as possible out of everyone you deal with is not only acceptable, it’s expected.
The value of your product is much more scalable than a pile of horseshoes to your employer. It all depends on who is capturing that efficiency. How else do you end up with billionaire CEOs?
Do everything right in your career, get RIF’d, live through an era like 2008, and watch people who have zero qualifications get promoted over you and you’ll change your tune.
The world is not fair and I will no longer be on the losing end. It’s not nice but neither is my old CEO buying their second boat and bragging about doing yoga on it at Cannes while people are living in basement apartments in NYC during COVID. I think we’ve all seen enough.
See you on the battlefield.
All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular.
I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. https://layoffs.fyi
I deliver. It is as simple as that.
If you're here, we are peers whether you believe it or not. You're certainly right.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...
I'm also stating if you choose to bill by the hour, not by the work product, you are legally and ethically required to bill by the actual time it takes.
One could simply work less. Even if you're full in the office, you can just use that extra time to learn something new.
Initial build
database integration
accessibility
speed
I'm not saying you're wrong to charge the full amount for the same job that used to take much longer. I fully support that, go get that bread! I'm just not down with writing 3h on an invoice when it took 15 mins.