The Value of Time (and Information)
In which I consider some work that I did and what it would be worth in different contexts, as well as why I did it.
There is no hangover quite like the mundane one of simply not getting enough sleep. The night before last, I was up until after four in the morning trying to get something to work. I was trying to get a bunch of computers to behave roughly as if they are all in the same room, without sweating the details of where they actually happen to be on the planet. When I finally woke up this morning, I decided to do a quick writeup of what I had accomplished, and that got me to thinking.
I have been in numerous professional scenarios where what I just described (specifically, a secure virtual private network without enlisting some additional vendor or software) is a valued and desirable thing. This particular one was for my own purposes, but if I was billing hours—especially wee hours—this little excursion would have cost the client around $2,000. The question that got me thinking, is what makes it worth that?
Well, the thing that cost me the bulk of the time was a bunch of really un-obvious peculiarities about Macintosh computers that have very little to do with the general task at hand—details that shouldn’t matter but do. Details that, if you’re in my position and you don’t have the information I now possess, will probably cost you the same amount of time to figure out.
Although maybe not; the ultimate solution has to do with satisfying the conditions of what is unambiguously a bug in the user interface, which I discovered by accident.
To the well-resourced client who wants a mission-critical outcome sooner than later, paying $2,000 for overnight results is a no-brainer. To me, outside of a relationship like that, it represents a sunk cost. At this point the only value of that information to me (now that I’ve used it to get the result I want, that is) is as advertising. When you game out the alternatives, this situation is an object lesson in the subjectivity of the value of time.
Continuing with the hypothetical, suppose the client opts instead of paying me to solve this problem, to go looking for a cheaper competitor, or another solution entirely. I would be in a similar situation if I wanted to shop my solution to other potential buyers, or delegate this problem for myself. First, there is a sea of candidates and candidate solutions, and your task is to pick the subset you can trust. (Would you trust me, if you didn’t know me from Adam, to come in off the street and tinker with your sensitive information?) A close second—or perhaps tied for first—is whether the solution is going to work.
And by work here I mean not be missing some qualitatively important and consequential capability. In fact I abhor the concept of an “80% solution” because that implies all the relevant bullet points are weighted the same.
The final consideration is of course the price. Relative to the people who are set up to do this for a living (I don’t explicitly contract to do this kind of work; I just happen to know how), I am probably on the affordable side, though they would no doubt be more efficient. And while you have been spending this evaluative effort, the clock has been ticking down the entire time.
There is a reason why companies (and people) delegate this particular category of technical problem to vendors: it is generally not worth paying somebody to come in and set things up the way I did, using the infrastructure you already have. You could buy years worth of VPN service for what I would have charged for an on-the-spot request. Even if you place a high premium on not having to enter into yet another ongoing relationship with a proprietary system whose terms could change at a moment’s notice—which is what using standard, off-the-shelf equipment buys you—the street value of the problem I solved the other night is invariably worth pennies on the dollar compared to what it would be if it flowed from an explicit request to solve it. Certainly nowhere near enough to warrant me trying to shop it around, at least as an isolated service.
(That said, the detail about the Mac UI bug would be useful to somebody in a similar situation to me, because it would save you about four hours of tearing your hair out—which you ironically would no longer be able to bill for. So maybe the value of this information is actually negative?)
I have never especially liked billing hours. I rather prefer to think of time as a resource, one to use to achieve a certain set of qualitative—yes, qualitative—outcomes. My stock-in-trade is helping people in organizations understand their situations and acquire capabilities, and knitting this knowledge into their activities in a durable way. On the other side of that process, you either have that understanding and/or capability, or you don’t.
I find the integrated service suffers if I track too closely to the time spent doing each part, because the more conspicuously valuable outcomes generally depend on outcomes that are less so. Plus, I believe it’s just plain obnoxious to bill fifteen minutes here and there for standing in the shower thinking about your problem, which is something I do frequently. I also find going “off-script” to be when I do the most important work; if I had to budget hours for every activity up front, there’d be no room for that kind of serendipity. Better to treat an engagement as a rough commitment of hours spread over a certain number of months, and compare the cost of that to the aggregate value of what comes out the other end.
I undertook this little project, and projects like it, because I think a lot about our relationships with tech vendors. As I wrote in the last newsletter, so many products and services in the tech industry capitalize off of a certain societal “meta-ignorance”. They simply wouldn’t be viable if the populace was just a tiny bit more situationally aware. In this narrow case, I’m not saying I expect everybody to be a networking expert, but wouldn’t hurt if we had more of an ambient understanding that tech companies routinely rent out access to shrinkwrapped versions of commodity resources that would otherwise (at worst!) be a one-time cost to set up. It would pair well with an ambient expectation that the off-the-shelf implementations of those standards actually function.
As I also wrote, and as I have written many times (so many I can’t remember where—and I’m not claiming I’m original), the future is likely to become even more connected, with more relationships of the economic and information-sharing variety. Being a digital hermit is not an option, but I do foresee organizations (and individuals) putting more effort into sculpting and curating these relationships. We who can, should practice asserting our bargaining power, and drive our relationships towards entities we want to interact with, rather than ones we have to.