Posted by williamc on Thu Apr 22 21:56:54 1999
In Reply to: prices posted by TimJ on April 22, 1999 at 15:58:38:
| Distribution: | paneris@paneris.org |
|---|
multiboard@paneris.co.uk writes:
> How busy is everyone?Bloody busy. My variances are not positive definite and my
log likelihoods are all NaNs (that's BAD) :-).> I'm very busy, and likely to let down customers (only i-way :) in the near future.
If it's something I can do it's worth remembering that I am worth
asking if it's short and pays well enough, which leads into the
pricing discussion ...This is tricky.
What I think is clear enough is that in negotiations with
external capitalists, shareholders, option-laden directors etc., the
available choices of pricing policy can be summarised as "supply and
demand" and "get ripped off and be shafted". At this level I HATE the
idea of any project (joint or individual) being costed any lower than
we can get away with. It's just a moral ClassCastException
and it does noone any good except people who are explicitly taking
risks in the hope of doing well. They would think we were quite,
quite mad, if they bothered to think about it at all.[If some trade union came up with a credible plan to restrain wages
in the interests of keeping unemployment down, and/or to finance a
minimum wage scheme for the low-paid, then we would have a duty to
support it; but that's not the situation (nor is it likely to be in
this industry---rates will fall on their own when unemployment
threatens ...).]In fact your (1)--(4) are not dilemmas when it comes to
external pricing, either for individuals or, if we consider only the
overall costing, for collaborative projects. Even if we have to give
hourly breakdowns to make up that number, we know they're inaccurate
and presumably they're not binding once they've handed over the dosh.Most urgently I feel that if Paneris standard rates are causing us
overall to draw in less money than we would otherwise, then the
solution is to abolish them (whatever headline target figure or range
we mention on the website). So ...> supply and demand indicates that i should put up my prices.
... do it.
Turning to internal pricing---how we in practice carve up the money
we make on a joint project---things are much murkier.Within the Paneris microcosm, we are to a large extent a We, to
that extent the relevance of the concept of "the going rate" is
vitiated, and we have the opportunity to operate a jointly rewarding,
fair, convenient, stable, relaxing and generally Good setup. (In this
sense we have a closer relationship than do the salaried employees of
a company.)So up to a point, the principal is equal pay for equal effort, pro
rata. Granted, it seems fair to pay people something for PMing and
attracting new work. But any attempt to micro-manage the
apportionment of $$$ is going to miss the point. (Of course it would
also founder on the insuperable problems of productivity metrics and
relationship breakdown.)I say "up to a point" because I must admit I'm not willing to share
a project fee equally with a sixth former doing data entry. If there
is a clear and big difference in the externally quotable rate for
different kinds of work then I would rather we reflected that---in a
moderated form, since we are in the fortunate position of not having
to exploit people---in our internal arrangements.Personally I would be happy paying good designers at least as much
as programmers, so maybe there is a "could I do that?" factor in there
somewhere ... or perhaps: going with absolutely equal pay would only
be appropriate if Paneris were a commune (a closer community than it
is), or if we believed in unilateral communism (which I don't).So in the end there is a compromise. I hope we can identify clear
categories of work which command broadly similar fees in the external
market, and pay all the participants on a project working in the same
capacity at the same rate, unless that seems obviously unfair on
someone. On the supply side it would then be a guild-ish system,
though as I argued above I think we should be entirely opportunistic
on the pricing side.