A fixed price on somebody else's engine
Most of the work I still do is small. Somebody rings, wants one thing added to a site, and I work out how long it takes and what it costs. That part of the trade has not changed in years. What has changed is what I am asked to put inside the job.
Nearly every small request lands on a model now. The interesting half of the feature is not code I write. It is a call out to somebody else's system, wired into the middle of a thing I hand over as finished. The client pays me for a week of my time. The engine underneath comes with terms I did not write, a price I do not set, and a life I cannot promise.
I can price my own week. I cannot price any of that. So the quote has a soft spot in it, and the soft spot is the bit the client wants. I write a fixed number down for a job that depends on something outside the room, and I know it as I write it. Nothing dishonest in that. I am just less comfortable signing it than I used to be.
What I do about it is build the parts I can hold. Where a small model on my own machine will do the job, that is what goes in, even when the hosted one is better and would save me a fortnight. Where the job needs the big tools, I keep the model behind a wall of my own code, so the feature is still mine to move when the ground shifts. It is slower and it earns no thanks. It is the version I can put my name to.
What I cannot put in a quote is what the client is left holding. The job is done, the invoice is paid, and a month on the price of the clever half moves, or the whole thing gets retired. None of that is my week's work going wrong. It is somebody else's decision arriving on a doorstep I built, and I am the one who gets the phone call.
I have written more of those notes into my own handover documents than I expected to, made up out of watching the ground move.
So the small jobs still get quoted, and the hedge goes in wherever there is room for it. Nobody buys a hedge, and it has never won me the work on price. It is what I put in anyway, because I would rather hand over something that still runs after I have been paid and gone.