On point.....

While this is true, people don't get that since most of us are paid not for the years of experience but time. It's an odd perception but people would gladly pay your wanted amount if you would take a long time to fix the issue, rather than a quick solution.

Think of it like a restaurant:
Fast food restaurants are fast and they are cheap.
Michelin star restaurants are slow, and they are very expensive.

ps. I know that the difference is deeper but every other person thinks like that :)

@potata there is a limit though. I don't fancy walking into a restaurant, ordering and then waiting an hour for the food to arrive regardless of how good or cheap the food is...

What they are really paying for is the knowledge and experience that it took to quickly analyse the situation and put in place a solution that works and that should be maintainable.

If it takes a dev 3 hours to do something and your paying them 50 an hour, or you have a different dev that can do the same in 1 hour but changes 100 an hour, there your saving money with the faster dev.

@ftyross Well, you don't have to repeat that to me :) I perfectly know the situation but thinking about the average Joe - it's not uncommon for him to think like that :)

Not true, you are owed for the (knowledge + skill) * time spent on the task

How long you took to learn shit is irrelevant

@mundo03 Yes and no. The point is that because you’ve spent time improving your skill, your skill is inherently more valuable when it reaches a point where it actively reduces the time needed to perform the task.

@JustThat “It meets requirements” is also the mark of a developer who is avoiding scope creep so he can be sure he’s being compensated adequately for his work. Not all of us have corporate jobs that pay us just for showing up and not deleting production.

@Kaji what if you are an idiot and ended up being good at something after 10000 hours when it should have taken 100 hours?

I guess what we can agree on is that experience matter. We can say experience is part of the skill component.

I still think the time you take to learn is yours to use up and not for your customer to pay up.

@mundo03 Agreed. What I was trying to say (which I think you just summed up a bit better) is that your compensation for time spent learning is being able to charge more on the basis of your increased skill—or simply find more work than before as a result of it.

@JustThat Agreed, but in the case cited by you the customer is in theory going to continue paying the company to get the work done to whatever the expanded scope is—and in either case the company is still going to pay you whatever it's agreed to for your time. The company employing you acts as a buffer here, and by all means you should follow what the PM says to do.

My reply was pointing out that for independent contractors it's a very different ball game. If you don't control the scope creep when dealing with a customer in that situation you will very quickly find yourself working lots of unpaid time for things that will get tossed aside and undervalued. All of which takes away from time spent finding additional (profitable) work or other obligations on your end.

@JustThat ideally devs should value all those things greatly but sometimes there aren't enough time and/or budget to achieve all that. Depending on the project some deadlines cannot be slipped and you have to cut somewhere.

Admittedly this shouldn't happen but we all know it does.