Comment by nickelcitymario
5 years ago
> 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
And that's great! But there's a reason I used qualifiers like "most", not "all".
If you bill by the hour, there's a reasonable (but not necessarily correct or optimal) case to be made for measuring your productivity in terms of billable hours.
But it makes zero sense to do so if your hours are disconnected from the economic activity that results from your work. In such cases, it would be completely arbitrary to measure hours and call that a measure of productivity. Just as arbitrary as lines of code.
>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.