IF Developer Says 10 Hours, How To Know?
 

Lets say your software developer says a job is going to take 10 man hours to complete, how the hell do you know its going to take that long?

If the job takes 5 hours and they throw an extra 5 on, by estimating it will take 10, how will you ever know?

There is no way to truly tell unless he uses a program to accurately log all his time his hours on a project like borked does.

10 hours = 2 weeks at least.

Programmers are usually WAY off base and will fake out on you once the job is about 95% complete.

If he quotes 10 hours at say $50/hr, it means he wants $500 for the job, not nessesarily that it will take 10 hours, especially since that 10 hours can be spread over many days... Also factor in even if it does take say 5 hours, he still needs to spend time on supporting you later if something breaks, talking to you, etc.

10 man hours
1 programmer is 1/10 of a man
10 x 10 hours = 100 hours
Working 5 hours a day (+3 hours for smokes brakes and WOW gaming)
Total : 20 days - not including weekends.
Final total : 1 month. :thumbsup

You don't know. But if you get impatient and start pestering them after 5 hours I can guarantee it will take a LOT longer.

that's exactly why billing per hour is dumb... :2 cents:

Too many tabs open.

k0nr4d has given you a well explained answer.

Only thing I would add is you can also end up with a higher price if they don't actually want the job. How much would I do it for if I was forced to sort of thing.

You don't and it doesn't matter ...

That's why you ask for multiple bids from different people. You look at a few different things:

1) Delivery Date
2) Total Cost
3) Quality of Work

Cost per hour doesn't matter in the end. I know some devs that will charge $50/hr and will take 10 hours for X job...

Then I know others who can do the same work in 4 hours but they run $150 / hr. They also produce much cleaner, more extensible code... However they have a backlog of work so don't expect anything for a couple weeks at least...

Use some of the trusted coders on here and don't worry about it.

True dat. Good break down on the variable to consider.

Proper code and structure is an important piece to be sure. Otherwise, you have endless headaches later. Especially when you start scaling, or need to change or add on to the original site.

This is why I charge a flat rate. The price is determined by my estimated value of the finished product(plus other variables), whether it takes 10 hours of 10 days to complete.

The client has no idea of how much time I spend, but I still receive that agreed upon amount, even if it takes longer than expected -- or shorter. For me, its an incentive to get something done as efficiently and quickly as possible.

So, there's no way for you to know.

This is pretty spot on. When I work with people I usually send them the details and specs of what I need and they come back to me with what they want for the work and when they can have it delivered by.

I'd also advise against making a full payment upfront before work has been completed. Not sure if that's part of the equasion but thought I would throw it out there. You can do a split and pay part upfront and part when delivered, perfectly reasonable and I think works out best. I've done full cash upfront a few times with both developers and designers I knew were good for it, never been screwed over by it, but 9 times out of 10 when I have done it for people it results in delayed delivery dates. :2 cents:

Really, if you are non-technical, the only way you can know is if you have a technical friend you can run it by.

As others said above though, it doesn't really matter as you should be getting quotes to complete the task and a deadline for delivery.

The only time you should be paying per hour, is when the task is unknown, such as debugging server, database or code issues where it's impossible for the worker to predict how long it may take to resolve. In such cases, you should define a limit (say 5 hours) and at that point, ask him to let you know what he has found and you will authorize him to continue or not.

there are softwares that can measure the time spent on each project...
they are not expencive if it's big work in project...

and here's my advice...
never pay programmers per hour than per job...

That's true, you just have to make sure you work with trusted coders/programmers

Well said konrad! :)

I charge per article/blog post/whatever. If I charged by the hour, I could take 3 hours to write 200 words, and that'd be a dick move. By charging a rate based on what the article/blog post/whatever entails, it gets me working harder and longer. It also means the people I'm writing for aren't getting ripped off.

Everyone wins.

For 10 hours what you get should be 2 8 hour days no longer. One day to code your shit, and the next day to make you happy and get it all set up, plus the chat back and forth.

Always have to add that conversation time.

if the project is bigger get SVN Git Trac or something similar to check working hours and code created/changes. If not agree on a pice per project, basically then you agree both on time/money and delivery date, expect that always to be 30% late, you will find bugs and get new ideas/additional ideas