>>In any given year, you have X hours you can bill. Once an hour is gone, it is gone forever. You can never make it up.
>
>John,
>This assumes you do Time and Material work and not Fixed Price. We'll have to talk sometime about the Virtual Man-hour (something I pitched to a former boss of mine). ;-)

Well there was a thing called norm-hour, which was the basic calculation unit in physical production (assembly lines, car repair etc) back home. This meant that there is some normative catalogue, where each operation is normed (carburetor change 3 hours, wall painting 0.25 hours per square meter etc). Anyone who knows how to do it faster was still entitled to calculate the norm hours into the price, and the slower ones actually got paid less per actual hour.

Now this could be done in any industry where technology is stable and the procedures are predefined - how many new inventions does it take to replace a tire? - but it can hardly apply to this business where technologies change anually. By the time any of computing work is normed, it would be obsolete. If a form takes 5 minutes per control, plus 20 minutes per custom method in any control, any guy who would write a builder to cram this custom coude in a minute would soon be doing 20 norm hours in 8 physical hours. And there's the rub - we do want this guy to do it faster, but then how do we encourage him to do it, and still not overpay him?

The only rule here is that people will always do what is paid best - which is not always the same as what the employer needs, but then it's the employer who dictates what is paid. It's hard to be wise here.