Why do programmers want to charge by the hour and not fixed price?
We can go back to the biography example used above. Can you imagine trying to pay a ghost writer a fixed price to write your biography? A computer program has so many variables, so many unknowns that it’s hard to estimate the time required to give you what you want. Now I’ve heard – “I know exactly what I want!” Ok, do you know what every piece of data, every field on the screen and every piece of data on a report should look like and act? If you really think about it you don’t. Don’t believe me – let’s try a little example. Let’s define a simple program to track Phone calls that come in Let’s keep it simple and say only one person is going to enter information into it. Now, the obvious (which is like common sense – there is no such thing) we need time and date, who called and a topic plus maybe a notes field for details. Simple, but do you need first name and last separately – are you going to want to look up by last name or first? Do you want to type the names in all the time or do y
