NYCPHP Meetup

[Matt Morgan]

David Mintz wrote:

>May I ask real dumb dilettante question? Thanks. How is it that a client
>can agree to an hourly rate without there being some kind of cap on it? If
>I say $75/hr and bill for 20 hrs, that's one thing; quite another if I
>bill for, say, 50.
>
>---
>David Mintz
>http://davidmintz.org/
>
In the case of Brooklyn Museum--actually yes, we often agree on an 
overall price for jobs. But it depends partly on where the funding is 
coming from. When it's my IT department funding and I know I'm going to 
be supervising the work directly, I don't mind doing it hourly 
(especially because then I can often ask the programmer to do additional 
work that was not part of the original spec, without having to get it 
approved by people outside the IT department). When the work is being 
funded by some other budget (kiosk content for a special exhibition, for 
example) it's always this-much-work for this-amount-of-money.

Sometimes I'm hiring programmers not just to do exact work that's 
perfectly spec'ed out--sometimes I'm hiring programmers to tell ME the 
best way to do things, and to do it that way. In that case, hourly it is 
(usually).