
Hourly Billing is Nuts (book) - tnorthcutt
http://hourlybillingisnuts.com
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jagthedrummer
I highly recommend this book. The author, Jonathan Stark, really knows his
stuff when it comes to pricing. His advice on value based pricing has changed
the way I approach some parts of my business.

~~~
dalke
It comes across as one of those "we know the secret to losing weight", that
then go on and on about how much better you'll feel once you lost weight. It
never tells you how, only asking for your money in exchange for the secret.

I've done work fixed-priced work, hourly work, and product sales.

The most profitable of these has been on-site, short-term fixed-time
contracts. That is, I go to a client's site for 1-2 weeks and work on a
problem they have, customized for their site.

(I haven't done a subscription service, because I develop software for
pharmaceutical R&D, and pharmas regard their data and even user queries to
non-proprietary data sets as highly proprietary.)

I also know what my clients and customers in my field are willing to pay. Why
should I believe that this author knows my field better than I do?

The link uses the phrase "effective hourly rate of $2000+ per hour". That
"effective" is suspiciously hand-wavy. It's like saying that if I do 5 hours
of sales and marketing work to sell a product for $10,000 that took me 1 year
to develop, then the additional sales and marketing to get to that sale is
"effectively" $2,000/hour.

It also reminds me of the guy who says he only works one hour per week, then
to learn he spends his entire waking life hustling, but only calls part of it
"work."

The link says: "As long as you bill yourself out by the hour, your clients
will treat you as labor. Hired help. A pair of hands to be directed. "

WTF? This stinks of classism. We _are_ labor. We _are_ members of the working
class. But master laborers from any field, whether carpenters, programmers, or
rocket designers, are not "a pair of hands to be directed" any more than the
VP of, say, a marketing company.

> "Right now, the book is a little over 100 pages"

I don't like that tally. When I look at the book pages screenshot with 111
pages, I see that 25 are single page chapter headings. It also looks like it
has high line spacing and wide margins, which are common techniques to inflate
the page count.

With that wariness in mind, would you care to explain what changed in your
pricing model and why the other parts of the model didn't change? What is your
"effective hourly rate", and what does "effective" mean to you?

~~~
jonathanstark
Hi! Author here. Thanks for your comment :) I was preparing to answer your
questions and then I read that you consider yourself a laborer. If you see
yourself as a laboror, my book is definitely not for you. If at some point in
the future you start to feel like you've maxed out your annual income and
don't know what to do about it, you might want to revisit the idea of ditching
hourly billing. Cheers! —J

~~~
dalke
It's clear now that you use "laborer" as a slur.

My extended family is not so far out of poverty that such class warfare
snobbery appeals to me.

You are not using the normal definition of "laborer". Merriam-Webster defines
it as "a person who does hard physical work for money". Wikipedia defines it
as "a person who works in one of the construction trades, traditionally
considered unskilled manual labor, as opposed to skilled labor."

Neither you nor I mean that definition of laborer.

I believe you use it as a metaphorical slur. Rather than use that
interpretaion, I decided to use the more common Marxist analysis of calling
those who labor, including skilled laborers like programmers, the proletariat.

Your secret sauce is likely to encourage people to become capitalists, perhaps
a rentier capitalist, and thereby join the bourgeoisie class.

Marx pointed out the petite bourgeoisie, of which we are members for I both
consult and sell software, are more likely to identify with the haute
bourgeoisie; those who truly control capital. But I prefer to identify with
craft-based workers (and unlike the old AFL policy, promote labor solidarity
over trade separatism; though free education/training and strong social
services).

Now, I agree with Piketty that capital return is greater than the rate of
economic growth, so if your proposal is that people should become capitalists,
the you are right. But we cannot all become capitalists. That's why, to
resolve the dilemma of the categorical imperative, I support a progressive
global wealth tax.

As an observation, many people running a con choose marks who already half-
believe in the con. The ones who follow up on a Nigerian prince scam are those
who want to believe. Your last paragraph follows the same lines of only trying
to convince those who want to believe you are right. If my guess is correct,
and since I don't think a Marxist analysis like this is flawed, I think it's a
shame that you find yourself needing to use these tactics for something I
don't think is a scam.

Rather than trying to understand your ideas through promotional materials, I
hoped to get some input from jagthedrummer, who it seems has found that they
are not applicable to part of a business. I'm curious to know both the success
and failures. jagthedrummer? Care to speak up?, since the author thinks I'm
not worthy of his time.

~~~
jonathanstark
Dalke,

I see that I have insulted you and for that I am sorry. I doubt that there is
much I can say in this medium to undo that damage other than to tell you that
it was unintentional.

I really don't see the word "labor" as a slur but I do agree that I didn't use
it in the strictest sense. To me, the word "laborer" equates to something
like: "someone who is instructed by their employer what to do."

I don't begrudge or judge anyone who is comfortable with such an arrangement.
If my words contained a tone of disdain, it's because I've absorbed the
frustrations of literally hundreds of people who are not comfortable with such
an arrangement.

My book is for folks - usually experts in their field - who are sick of their
employers telling them what to do. Sick of being micromanaged, second-guessed,
and generally disrespected by clients who have nothing but a checkbook and an
opinion.

My impression from your previous comment is that you do not fall into this
category, and therefore, my book would be useless to you. In retrospect, I do
understand why you took offense and again I apologize for that.

Yours,

Jonathan

