What I Learned in My First Month Being a Contract iOS Developer

brandontreb.com

20 points·brandontreb··3 comments

"The other day, I asked my wife to make me a sandwich. She told me to make it myself, and I politely informed her that the 15 minutes spent doing that would cost us $25 so it had better be the best sandwhich I have ever made."

Ugh, what a load of nonsense. This would only be true if the OP was so overbooked that every minute not spent working would result in irreversible income loss.

I bill clients $200/hour for running their product or startup. Does that mean that when I go out for coffee it costs me $100 just to be away from my laptop for half an hour? Of course not. Some people seem to think that when they bill hourly they are tapping into an infinite sea of money, and the only constraint on how much they make is how much time they put in. This is clearly wrong in the vast majority of cases.

The $25 you 'loose' by making a sandwich at 14:00, you gain back by working another 15 minutes at 19:00, or the next day, or the next week.

There is a one-in-a-million longshot that he was not being completely, one hundred percent serious, did not in fact think that he should be paid 25 dollars for making himself a sandwich, and was using it as an illustration of his new-found feeling that time spent not working is time spent watching money slip through his fingers.

Great post ... thanks for sharing

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