But even back then, in 2012, I knew freelance consultants who specialized in something like Salesforce setups, who would come into someone's office and charge $450/hr to be there.
Is $300/hr stupidly cheap now? I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand.
I'd like to hear from anyone in a similar position.
Spoken like someone who charges by the hour.... you are incentivised to do things the slowest possible way...
Now, of course, slow might be better, or fast might be better, but you frame fast as "cheating" not as "inferior"... which is ... interesting..
Unless you are a very well known expert in a certain niche, who the hell is paying $400/hr?
Of course, I mostly bill by the project, not by the hour. And you are right that feature and scope creep is the killer when you do that. I take the contracts and SOW very seriously and keep the main goals literally on the screen in front of me when working, and call out any requests that are out of scope, saying something that sends the message of: "I cannot work on this because it is outside the contract, and I don't want to set up a future estoppel conflict. Do you want to re-negotiate the SOW?"
Sometimes they say yes, sometimes not. But I find that when you put feature creep directly into the context of a re-negotiation with their legal team, and not a product management discussion, it increases the stakes of the discussion and it suddenly becomes crystal clear what they really want from you.
You've reached the end!
mujib77•1h ago
Most clients care more about results/reliability than whether every line was typed by hand.