| In fifteen years of contracting, 20+ clients , I've never had issues or questions about my hours. All software project based work on projects that span months to at most two years. Up front, the hourly rate is agreed to, the expectation that I typically bill forty hours a week is set, we agree that overtime is only undertaken with written permission. I tell them I don't bill for lunch or breaks and that if they can't provide me with work to do, I still bill but that I inform them persistently when undertasked. I only estimate work by giving complexity numbers. They all ask well how long does that take??? I say over the last x months, my average complexity points accepted in production is y points per two week period. So expect this five pointer to be done in a week plus or minus two days. Do you need a better estimate? Then it will cost you two unproductive days for me to fully spec out the work and I'll need three hours of your time for this feature to give you an estimate that has a tighter variance. This is the way it's done folks. I know what I make, I can easily have a life, wife, family. Companies make sure they have me work on most important things first and they end my project when they feel it does enough of what they need it to do. I'm visible, I show real progress frequently and they get value out of released features early on and continuously throughout the engagement. Sometimes I lower my rate for equity, people I enjoy working with, working on tech or a business domain that interests me. I'll of course raise it for the opposite. In the fifteen years I've had three weeks in 2008 where I couldn't find work. I've billed between 95-155/hr CAD. Mostly enterprise custom applications. Billing systems, engineering process systems, banking apps, trading apps. Typically lead dev roles. Working in a Canadian city or remotely for USA companies. C#, ruby, scala, python. Not a great programmer, I'd get laughed out of the room on a leet code exercise but I've repeatedly delivered projects and systems where the previous teams have failed. There's only been a few of the 20+ projects that haven't been rescues. |