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Do I understand correctly that most of you folks who
are contractors are charging by-the-hour?
I've missed something, then.
I'd been living under the misapprehension that one of
the most valuable skills a writer needed to develop,
before leaving employeedom behind, was the skill of
sizing up a job and ACCURATELY estimating the
necessary tools and man-hours to get it done. The
purpose of that was to bid on a contract job for a
specific dollar figure. 'Guess' too high and you
watch the contract go to somebody else. 'Guess'
too low and you're stuck with a money-loser that
you must finish or lose face (and future customers).
Can you call yourself "independent" or a "contractor"
if you are working by the hour and if you can simply
declare that you need more time -- within the schedule --
and charge overtime for it? ("I worked 7 hours per
day for three months, and then I worked 16 hours per
day for the final 2 weeks and charged 'em time-and-a-half
for half those hours".)
I've occasionally contemplated the alluring prospect of
independence, but I've always been scared off by the
kinds of reschedules (in either direction) and rethinks
that go on at my "permanent" employers, which tend
to shoot big holes in any estimates that were made
way back at the beginning. At least, as an employee,
I just go with the flow and keep getting paid -- at
overtime rates, if necessary -- when a schedule slips
or a product gets an emergency revision.
How many of you do we think are quoting complete
contracts -- with which you are then stuck, unless the
client does something drastic that unmistakably justifies
overruns -- and how many are just signing up for "X"
many hours per day (or week) until there's no more
work to do on this project?
Also, for either kind of "independent", how important
have you found your estimating skills to be, in the
furtherance of your net worth?
PS: Please forgive a recent lapse, where I forgot to trim
the replied message when I sent to the list. I know
what a pain that is for anybody receiving the digest in
concatenated form. Didn't want to send a separate
message just for that apology.
> And THAT is truly one of the joys of contracting! As I've gotten older,
> I've
> found I'm even less willing to suffer fools gladly. Which makes dealing
> with
> managers/developers/engineers who don't know what they're doing very
> difficult -
> tact is, for me, a learned skill. What keeps me sane in those
> circumstances is to
> silently remind myself that they're paying me by the hour.
>
[snip]
