

Ask HN: Charging for amount of code versus charging an hourly rate - washedup

I have been doing some freelance work for a year or so now. I charge an hourly rate, but recently I started wondering if anyone charges their clients based on the amount of code. What are the benefits and drawbacks of charging for amount of code produced?
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valarauca1
What incentive do you have to write clean performant, easy to read code if you
are being paid by LoC?

A lot of the draw backs to this scheme are the same with measuring developer
productivity in LoC/hr

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washedup
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

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mark_sz
That doesn't make any sense.

What if you've spent 8 hours thinking/planning your code and you came up with
the solution that takes only 10 lines of code?

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washedup
Than such a payout would miss a lot of work that went into development of the
code.

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Jeremy1026
Drawback would be what happens to all the code that gets scrapped along the
way? Do you charge for it even though it never makes it into production?

