I wanted to share a little piece we wrote as part of this whole fixed price vs hourly struggle that affects remote work. We used to hire developers on Upwork a lot in the past. We always had trouble deciding whether to pick “fixed price” or “hourly”. Fixed price is alluring since you only pay for quality work that you are satisfied with. But, it’s unfair to developers since estimating time precisely is a notoriously difficult thing to do. Moreover, we often found ourselves in the position where we kept having to add little bonuses to keep developers motivated to stick to a project rather than abandon it. So, we switched to hiring people by the hour. But we found developers were annoyed that the time tracking software was capturing their screen. And, some developers tracked exaggerated amounts of time to game the system. Inspired by the Pomodoro technique, we came up with a new technique of tracking time, that works well with our existing tools, namely Slack. I wanted to share the idea and get the community’s feedback on it: https://blog.learningdollars.com/2020/03/31/developer-time-tracking-using-slack-beyond-fixed-price-vs-hourly/