Comment by JoeAltmaier
5 years ago
This may explain why lawyers are motivated to stir things up, rather than settle them. They're motivated by the wrong metric.
As an Engineer, I sell my time by the hour too. No different than the lawyer. Yet I try to finish things efficiently. Huh.
> As an Engineer, I sell my time by the hour too.
As in you literally bill for hours, and the more hours you work, the more you get paid?
Most programmers that I know (which is obviously not a great metric) either get paid a salary (which is divorced from actual hours worked) or they get paid by the hour but have no say over how many hours they will. In both cases, time is independent from productivity. Therefor, there's no harm (and really only benefits) to coding efficiently.
But if you a) control how much time you work (like lawyers do, to an extent), and b) get paid for your time, then yes the incentives are setup to encourage you to be inefficient. Completely agreed.
I’m guessing they’re an independent contractor or freelancer of some sort.
Yup
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>As in you literally bill for hours, and the more hours you work, the more you get paid?
that's the way I do it.
>then yes the incentives are setup to encourage you to be inefficient.
I'm pretty sure if I was inefficient I would lose the job and thus not make as much money as I would otherwise.
Paradoxically, if you optimize for billable hours on your first job, you might never get to that highly-compensated 100th job. A selection effect of sorts.
I'm sure lawyers think they try and settle things efficiently as well.
The software engineering profession is riff with wasted work: rewrites, new bullshit services and tech, insanely complex clustering and cloud deployments, etc.
> This may explain why lawyers are motivated to stir things up, rather than settle them. They're motivated by the wrong metric
Most lawyers I know have many clients and are swamped with work. They have little incentive to "stir things up". It's similar with accountants and plumbers in my city. They aren't trying to make more work for themselves because they already have their hands full.
But in regional markets where supply isn't so constrained relative to demand then, sure, there's an incentive to make-work once you've wrangled a client, just as with any other profession.