[tshaddox]

> As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business.

I don’t know. It’s a blurry line at best. If an agency dev team is really noticing that bug fixes are billable hours and that’s causing them to relax their code quality standards since they’ll be paid for bug fixes anyway, how is that not dishonest? Perhaps it’s possible for them to not be aware that what they’re doing is in bad faith, in which case you might argue that they’re “being dishonest with themselves” instead of “being dishonest with the client,” but it seems like a distinction without a difference.