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by SyneRyder 3063 days ago
That's very similar to something Derek Sivers wrote last week. His post was very short, so I hope he'll forgive me posting it here (but his entire blog is worth the read, and his book Anything You Want is one of my all-time favorites):

One time a college far away in Ohio, about a 12-hour drive, asked what I would charge to do a two-hour show.

I said, “$1500”.

She said, “Oh, that’s a bit too much. What would you charge to do just a one-hour show?”

I said, “$2000”.

She said, “No, wait, you’ll be performing less, not more!”

I said, “Yeah! Exactly! What you’re paying me for is to get there! Once I’m there, playing music is the fun part! If you tell me I have to get back in the van after only an hour, and drive home, then I’m going to charge you more than if you let me play for a couple hours first.”

She liked that so much she came up with the $1500.

https://sivers.org/pp

2 comments

The guitarist Tommy Emmanuel has a line like this: "I'll play anywhere for free, but you've gotta pay me to travel!"
Similar to the story of “how do we build this?”

“I push this button.”

How much does it cost?

“$10,000”

What?!

“$1 for my time, $9,999 for knowing which button to press.”

The problem with this story for software developers is how it feeds into very common mental models of how software development works. Certain people who think configuring a mail client is the same as coding a large-scale distributed system just because their eyes glaze over the first sentence of an explanation of how to do either, and their 12-year-old nephew can do the former, therefore they must be equivalent and just a matter of salesmanship/credentialism.