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Do I understand correctly that most of you folks who
are contractors are charging by-the-hour?
I've missed something, then.
<heavily snipped>
Kevin:
Most of the contractors I know work for agencies. The contractor receives
an hourly wage, the agency adds their cut, then the agency bills the client.
For both the agency contractor and the truly independent contractor,
estimates are just that: estimates. Oftentimes, an estimate will prove
wrong because of something done on the client side. SMEs won't get
information to the contractor in a timely manner, a product will take longer
to create than originally thought, etc. The estimate should then be
adjusted accordingly. In addition, the estimate will usually contain
wording to the effect, "The major milestones defined for this project assume
that reviewers and content providers will complete their tasks in the
specified amount of time. If any of these assumptions fail to be true, the
documentation milestones will be adjusted accordingly."
Sometimes, of course, you find contractors who are squeezing out as many
hours from a project as they can. In my experience, their work tends to be
not so good, they're fired, and another contractor is hired to finish the
job (which usually entails re-doing about half the previous work).
Dave
(Any statements made above are mine, and mine alone.)
