> but for an existing vendor relationship I think adding a few billable hours for "I found this issue in your network and documented and reported it for you" to an existing contract is not particularly unreasonable.

Billing for random things outside of the agreed upon scope of work is actually unreasonable. It’s something covered in every contracting agreement I’ve ever been a part of.

Maybe they could point to some contract that maybe would have covered it, but when your contractors start billing you for sending quick emails about unrelated things you didn’t ask them to look into, it’s not a good sign. When contractors bill for quick emails they don’t bill for the 3.7 minutes it took to write, they round up to some bigger number like an hour.

Anecdotally, every time I’ve encountered contractors who started billing per individual communication that they initiated (not something requested) or started finding new things to bill us for that we didn’t ask, it was a sign that we were a target being milked for billable hours. Some contractors have a lightbulb moment when they think nobody is scrutinizing their billing and think they discovered an almost infinite money glitch by initiating new things that they can bill for. None of the good contractors I’ve worked with over the years would even think to bill for an individual short email.

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chaps 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They initially hired me to do "network security" work. Another similar email-then-bill situation is me responding to them telling them why I won't, under any circumstances, figure out who wrote a Glassdoor review.

A lot of it is about setting boundaries with the client. If I have a conversation with you a handful of times to remove password from a whiteboard and you don't do it, that's a big deal and would professionally impact me if something bad happened. Cause like, your client's clients includes Coinbase. Like another person commented -- I really should have just dropped them as a client because the professional risk was too high.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Another similar email-then-bill situation is me responding to them

That’s not what I’m talking about.

Responding to a company is responding to a request they made for your time.

That said, most contractors I’ve worked with would not bill for a short email saying they’re unable or unwilling to do some work as a professional courtesy. The contractors who literally bill and round up for every email are usually going out of their way to maximize billing, which is eventually accounted for in the rates we’re willing to pay for them. We learn quickly that certain contractors will bill and round up for everything, so the most we’re willing to entertain as an hourly rate for them is lower as we know they’re going to send arbitrarily higher amounts of hours over.

	▲	chaps 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, that's not me. They were more than welcome to fire me as a client. I've been oncall for long enough in my career to know that a "quick email" is not, really, a "quick" email. It can completely derail everything you do for the day. If on-request work takes five minutes to write an email, then that time includes reading the email, thinking about the email, responding to the email, the cost of derailment of other contract work, the cost of getting back into that other contract work, the research needed to tell them "no". Again, it's about setting boundaries with the client.

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Tostino 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I hope some people post up outside your office. You probably have some secrets just laying around with that attitude. Could be quite profitable.

"Let's defend Coinbase, that small little startup!"

Maybe just stop being a boot licker? It seems pathetic from the outside.