
Ask HN: Billing for non-customer specific tool usage - jcboon
Hey folks,<p>I&#x27;ve a customer that brought me on as primarily a systems and compliance consultant and my responsibilities look to expand into helping manage and update their Terraform managed infrastructure. I&#x27;ve not yet used Terraform and will need to get up to speed on it. Should I bill all of my time learning it or eat some of the cost? If it was something they designed in-house I would bill all of it as the skills don&#x27;t directly translate to skills for other customers but this makes it a bit of a grey area.
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mtmail
You might learn on the side, e.g. read a relevant book during a train commute.
But you can also learn on the job. Here it can be about optics though and what
others around you think is fair: reading a book at the desk for hours doesn't
look productive, while browsing online help for hours does.

As freelancer I've billed hours for literally reading a book at home. They
wanted me to know and be able to debug a critical storage system if something
goes wrong. I believe my fees were still lower than finding another person.

