Re: Billable hours versus fixed bidding and flat rates for IBM i developers

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 4:48 PM, jde iSeries <jde.iseries@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If you bill by the hour, do you try to prolong/stretch the project as long
as possible so as to earn more money?
Is your approach to your work different on fixed bid projects than it is on
billable hour projects?

what I see time and time again is not people padding their hours. They
do nothing to reduce the complexity of the systems they work on.
Where employees and contractors alike reinforce their being
indispensable to an organization by being the only ones who can fix a
broken app, add a new feature, interface one system to another.

As a contractor, you keep instructions, some detailed, some not,
describing how to do the various things you do in the apps you are
responsible for. When the client decides to bring your function in
house, are you ethically responsible to hand over your notes? Esp if
you billed the client for the time it took to write the notes.