Re: Billable hours versus fixed bidding and flat rates for IBM i developers

Jerry,

Your story about "lines of code" billing reminded me ...


And these clowns obviously abused the practice. There are probably bad
apples in every trade who do similar things. For example, one of my kids is
a pool contractor in Florida. Before digging, he "always" calls all the
utilities to have them come mark placement of buried lines. Well, on one
particular house he didn't bother to call the phone company, because the
pool was in the back yard and he could see the phone pedestal by the road
and the phone demarc was at the front corner of the house directly in front
of the box at the road. So he assumed it was fine.

They dug the hole and sure enough, the phone went dead. Not only that, but
they actually cut the phone line in like 4 or 5 places while making a
rectangular hole in the back yard. When the phone company came out and used
their locators to follow the path of the phone drop from the house to the
road, it was a very zig-zaged line which arced all the way around the house,
through the back yard, completely circling the house before coming back to
the font corner directly in line with the box on the road. And it zag-zaged
the whole time.

The phone guy said it must have been a subcontractor paid by the foot. :(

Doug