[rfugger]

I agree with everything in the article. However, my experience as a coder has been more positive on fixed-price contracts than on hourly contracts. On hourly contracts, which I started with and have done more of, I tend to feel like I'm bleeding the client with every hour I spend, so I rush. The quality goes down and my stress levels go up. I don't spend time figuring out the best reasonable way to structure my code, and I don't play with interesting corner cases for my own amusement. With fixed-price contracts, I know the client isn't paying for my desire to write the nicest code I can come up with on that day, nor for flights of fancy onto tangents that may be more about my own enlightenment than about delivering value for them.

I realize that I should be able to fix my issues with hourly billing by separating my work into "value for client" and "my own enlightenment" for timekeeping purposes and only billing for the former. In reality though, the effort required to be constantly making this kind of judgement about everything I'm thinking about seriously disrupts my flow, and seems to be just as much effort as estimating a project ahead of time.

When I have a good relationship with a client, I can try to get the best of both worlds by giving them fixed-price-style estimates, and then asking for more money if the project ends up being more effort than I thought.