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Comment by soft_dev_person | Hacker News Reader

> No one is paying you for your “time,” they are paying you for a result, so stop charging for your “time.”

I wish regular employers would adopt this more as well. My value is what I do/produce, not how much time I spent doing it. Some days I produce massive amounts of value, while others I barely get anything valuable done. I'd like a work place that would encourage me to go home and enjoy myself on the bad days and stay as long as I want on the good days, instead of expecting a regular 40 hour work week every week (I have flex, but on average...).

On the other hand, I guess my employer has this issue too. We usually have an upper (money or time) limit on a contract but charge by the hour. And this is pretty much the standard in my industry and a requirement from our clients. How did we end up this way? It makes no sense!

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> Some days I produce massive amounts of value, while others I barely get anything valuable done. I'd like a work place that would encourage me to go home and enjoy myself on the bad days and stay as long as I want on the good days, instead of expecting a regular 40 hour work week every week (I have flex, but on average...).

In the words of Stephen King, "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

Very often the value is in just showing up and doing the work. Even if the work isn't your best work, it's still better than no work. You can always fix bad work later. Even if you throw it away and start again, you've already primed yourself on the problem.

On the other hand, there's been a lot of value for me clearing the calendar on weekends and just playing videogames for 48 hours. Really sets priorities straight and freshens me up for the upcoming week. This is best used when I can't even make the effort to do "bad work".

I can see where he's coming from.

It's a fine line. Sometimes the best thing to do is to walk away and leave the problem for another day. Other times you're just making excuses because you don't know how to solve a problem.

Learning which is which comes from experience I would assume.

Sometimes the cost of fixing bad work is actually greater than just doing it right when your mind is capable of it.

Also, I don't think software development is very comparable to writing a book. Unless you need to finish a book every day, your mistakes one day can easily be fixed the next.

In software, if your bad work on a project is committed to a place where it affects others, it may very well be too destructive to be worth it.

I charge by time, even though I am producing results. The biggest advantage is that it deals with changes in the specs, addition or removal of features, new environmental issues (eg also test on ARM, use a cluster).

If you charge for results only, then any change in what is desired means a renegotiation. Attaching a dollar figure to every "could you also ..." gets old quickly.

For your regular employer what you are after is ROWE - results only work environment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

A hybrid approach works fine too. A fixed price for the prototype on a date; time and materials for changes after that point.

Changes in the specs requires negotiation anyway if you have a contract with an upper time/cost value. Charging by the hour doesn't solve that, unless you have a no limit contract that puts more or less all the risk on the client.

This is very rare where I work.

Value of items produced isn't always so easy to measure.

Which is probably exactly the reason why charging/paying by the hour is the default. Much easier to reason about, and much easier to measure.

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