Industry Standard - Software Developer's Utilization?

Not sure if this is the right place to post this but I have gotten a
lot of intelligent feedback from this group before so I will start here
first...

Does anyone know what an "industry standard" utilization rate would be
for software developers?  I know this is a very, very open-ended
question.  The reason I ask is that I currently work at a small
consulting firm that expects our developers to be billable on projects
95% of the time.  To me this seems a bit outrageous.  At previous
companies the expectation has always been more around 80%.  Even if we
have tons of work to do it just seems ridiculous to expect 95%
billability.  Am I just lazy?  Maybe if I was working on a huge
multi-year government contract then I could easily be 100% billable - I
would always just put 8 hours down on my time sheet even if I didn't
really get much done that day.  But we have a lot of small contracts
with small businesses and there just isn't that much room for billing
time when you don't get much done in a day.

What is realistic in terms of productivity from a software developer in
an 8 hour day?  When I put together a project plan I look at discrete
tasks and the estimates for each task and then try to add up the
individual estimates to come up with the total time required.  But I
feel like I am being unrealistic in that I am expecting a 100%
productivity rate.

Is the answer that I just have to build more time into my time
estimates to account for someone only being productive 80% of the time?
Or does the company need to up it's billing rates to account for the
fact that a developer may bill 20% of his time to overhead?  Or do I
just need to shut up and work harder?! :)

Thanks for any input,
Corey

(If this should be posted on a different group please let me know and I
will post again elsewhere)

theburnetts wrote:

> Not sure if this is the right place to post this but I have gotten a
> lot of intelligent feedback from this group before so I will start here
> first...
>
> Does anyone know what an "industry standard" utilization rate would be
> for software developers?  I know this is a very, very open-ended
> question.  The reason I ask is that I currently work at a small
> consulting firm that expects our developers to be billable on projects
> 95% of the time.  To me this seems a bit outrageous.  At previous
> companies the expectation has always been more around 80%.  Even if we
> have tons of work to do it just seems ridiculous to expect 95%
> billability.  Am I just lazy?

Read /Slack/ by Tom DeMarco.

Google has an excellent policy - one day in 5, developers work on whatever
they feel like. (I suppose they are not allowed to work on Yahoo or MSN;)

You are being screwed. Work reasonable hours, and make absolutely certain
that many coworkers could take over for your role if you were out for a day,
or a w.

--
Phlip
http://industrialxp.org/community/b...tUserInterfaces