Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
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.
Yeah contracted flat rate and hourly billing are just different. If you’re billing someone for time and not deliverables, it’s not ethical to bill someone for more time than you spend on it because you were more efficient. The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share. If you’re not willing to do that, use a different metric to bill or charge 10x your hourly.
> The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share.
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.
I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing.
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.
Software isn’t real, and your employer would sell you for meat if they could. It is only that your current value is worth more than your meat value.
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.
I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are on top because they either started on top or were extremely lucky. Hucksters that find themselves one step in front of the curve, trying to claw themselves a double portion of scraps will always do better than their immediate peers in the short term, and almost universally think they’ve figured out some grand secret to gaming the system. But gaining depth and credibility is what makes people actually successful in the white collar world. We’ll never be on the same battlefield for many reasons. Good luck on yours.
No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful.
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.
Used to be peers. Unless you start making very precise physical objects out of metal for the aerospace industry, our professional lives are very deliberately several degrees of separation apart.
You'd be surprised! I was a custom microscope parts maker during my time in academia, mostly one offs but a couple fun things that we shared with our collaborators. Surely not at your level of precision, but I did my tour of duty in academia for ~10y, and was none the richer for it. I can only imagine the toys you have, We had a great machinist who was an ex-tool and die guy in our department, was a dream to work with. This work was my first love, but the American student debt system caught up with me. So it goes.
I'm in no way suggesting you should bill less. I'm suggesting you bill for work product and not time.
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.
Implying that I'm lying is a tall tale, I am capturing the efficiency of my own efforts. Sorry you see it that way. Consider your employer sells your time for more than they pay you and you'll see it my way.
If you worked for 15 minutes but wrote 3 hours on the invoice, how is that not a lie?
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.
