Every freelancer who has found a way to explain why maintainable software is better, and why less code is better than more code, and why they spend less time than other person X, has thus also found a way to increase their rate by a handsome factor.
Unfortunately this is only possible for entrepreneurs. In a traditional employment situation your rate is defined by other people. They do define it as a business value (Google engineer makes more money than a government engineer), but they present it to their employees as a rate-per-time because that makes them easier to manage and more interchangeable.
Point is, at the end of the day, your pay is always judged based on the value you provide, not the time you put in.
This holds true in most things. Quality is really hard to measure. It is much easier to say 'well, our start-up worked 15 hours per day, who could blame us for failing?'
It is a particularly American mindset that hard work is the only thing that matters. In the valley, you'll hear people say all the time that execution is the only thing that matters. It sounds great because it superficially appears measurable.
Unfortunately, you can spend a long time executing well on a dumb idea. Color is an example off the top of my head. Beautiful application, worked really well, but ultimately sharing images with the people that happen to be around you isn't something the people want.
Sure, we can all aspire to living the 4-hour work week but not everyone is Tim Ferriss and not everyone can or should live on selling digital products online either. Software needs to be written, products have to be designed and produced.
The question is: Why are these things measured in hours wasted during their creation instead of the actual business value that's been generated?
Why do we measure the work of a freelance software developer in terms of hourly payments instead of the value she creates? Of all things creating software should be measured by something else than the hours wasted during the process. Measuring output this way certainly is the easy way out. It provides some well-known and commonly shared standard.
However, it also promotes lazy thinking. In this kind of framework the programmer who develops software by using anti-patterns copiously is rewarded because he makes sure he can waste even more hours on maintaining this software in order to get paid even more. Basically, in this mindset writing maintainable software is as valuable as copying and pasting 'System.out.println("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.)"' all day.
The problem with software in particular is of course that buying and selling software this way is not only well-established but it's also difficult to measure the business value beforehand.
Nevertheless, while I certainly haven't found a real solution to this problem I keep thinking there has to be a better way of measuring the value of work. Any thoughts?