How do you deal with clients that perceive and expect to have you available and working more than eight hours a day? What do you do about when your not immediately answering during lunch etc. What do you do about days where you detect l weren't fully engaged by the client for a full eight hours?
Don't set that expectation. Don't work with clients that expect you to track hours when you bill days. The threshold for productivity and exclusivity I've had has been "if I billed you for a day, I'm not going to bill work for anybody else in that day"; that's as far as I go. In 15 years of doing this kind of work ('05-'20) I never had a problem --- but we did bail on RFPs where clients made it clear they'd be looking over our shoulders to make sure we were busy. That happened only a couple times, and, in retrospect, based on conversations with the people who ultimately won those bids, we were always glad to have had the early warning on those clients.
I've never had to fix bid for work, always had hourly gigs in the wings. I hold the philosophy that sw dev is a product development, iterative exercise, not a construction metaphor that is predictable.
Yeah, I expect you would be able to do the same if you billed hourly. If a client insisted I bill daily, I'd probably have no issue with it either. It's just so rare to bill daily in my circles that I've never considered it, I'm often rebilled by my client to their end customers for specific features so they need hourly tallies to pass on.
When you bill hourly you are literally demanding that your clients account for your time on an hour-by-hour basis. So, no, it's not the same.
If you're subcontracting in order to make ends meet, then you don't have any control over your project structure; you're a subcontractor. My advice is to plot a course to not subcontracting anymore as soon as you can. I doubt that the driver developer who kicked this thread off is subcontracting.
I've been in full control of the architecture, team makeup, feature design, most of the technology choice, and often the feature priority. I put my foot down on clients that dictate how a feature is to be built and give them the 'why' talk. I've had enough control over all the projects I've ever worked on these last fifteen years I've worked hourly.
I get your ideas about subcontracting, but I've always been treated higher than an employee and typically like a partner. The trick to this is to charge a ridiculously high rate. That instantly establishes the dynamic and relationship I want.
But you don't have a direct relationship with the actual buyers of your work, so you don't control your project structure, and the middleman business reselling your work presumably needs to be taking a cut. It's no wonder they treat you well, right?
Well for the case right now, I'm building a multi tenant system. Some tenants want features that no others want and they pay for my hours on those. I still have enough control in these cases.
I come up with better lower costing solutions when the stakeholders express WHY the feature is needed, what problem it solves. Then we and I can creatively explore HOW to solve the problem. There's usually several ways to solve anything, many that vary by orders of magnitude in terms of cost or architectural complexity.
If I am dictated always on the HOW, handed fully solutioned work to implement like a monkey I rebel and have a long talk about how this won't work. I never have had to quit over this stance but I would if it wasn't reconciled.
So when I say control, that's really what I specifically mean by that word. The ability to negotiate and explore the HOW with the why being firmly in mind.
Not really, if you are a consultant or external business you account for your own hours - you set a budget and then hand in a timesheet either weekly or monthly, then send an invoice at the end of each month.
> How do you deal with clients that perceive and expect to have you available and working more than eight hours a day?
The contracts specifies which days I will be there/available, and the times (usually 9am to 4:30pm in their time zone). Sometimes if the work is interesting I'll give them extra hours on me.
> What do you do about when your not immediately answering during lunch etc.
I work through lunch. I always answer. I take care of my personal needs before and after the contract time. I build in 30 extra minutes to account for bathroom breaks and heating up food to eat.
> What do you do about days where you detect l weren't fully engaged by the client for a full eight hours?
That's a them problem. If they don't have enough work to fill my time, then that's on them. If they have enough work, then I do it. It's just my work ethic.
"The biggest issue with hourly billing is that neither of us knows how much the contract is worth until afterwards."
You still don't with daily billing.
I know with daily billing because they can only book me for a set of days in advance. It's not ongoing. We agree ahead of time on the specific days I will be there/available.
I would guess we do different types of work. Most of my engagements are at least a year long. I've been billing at my current company for four years this December.
