"I prefer not to sign NDAs. If this is a requirement for you, there is a $10,000 fee to sign your NDA. You will need to sign my consulting agreement. It has confidentially agreement included."
He then has a very simple work-for-hire contract that includes an NDA.
There's something appealing about this approach, because reading arcane contracts while a project is still being spec'ed is quite annoying. So instead he shifts the burden to the client. But, obviously, many clients won't swallow that.
"In most legal systems, confidentiality is part of hiring someone."
I assume you're talking about European systems, in which case it's not true, at least not to a significant extent. And when you hire a contractor it's even less defined - a contractor can freely talk about what kind of work he did for a company, right down into quite specific detail, without a proper NDA or clause to that extent in the contract.
I think the part that shocks me the most is the fact that he has a client who is willing to pay him at this rate for 3 hours. I can see the benefits of doing this, but lets be frank here unless you're good and have the proof to back up the rate then you'll be laughed at by everyone for charging so much and be undercut. It's more than obvious Sam is more than just mediocre and can justify this hourly fee, I wish I could do the same myself.
You can and should charge at least $225/hour if you are a competent software person. There are far less competent software people then there are mediocre lawyers, and mediocre lawyers can charge $225/hour.
Edit: I did a Google image search on it. Here's the stock photo page: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-58442602/stock-photo-male-pr.... "computer hacker in black shirt working at laptops" -- I wonder what the annual salary of black-shirted computer hacker is. BLS doesn't seem to have stats on that one.
HN's patio11 (if memory serves) has made a strong case in the past for charging by the day or by the week or by the job ... pretty much anything other than by the hour. Ex.: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909480
I'm thinking lawyers might, by the nature of their profession, provide more value than devs though, since they can keep you out of jail or prevent you from being seriously screwed in a deal, while a dev is mostly just increasing your revenue/profits by extending your software. Also, lawyers are able to provide value within relatively small timeframes (compared to developing something meaningful), which makes high hourly rates more acceptable to clients (as clients are mostly interested in "how much for not going to jail" total amount, not the hourly rate)
Well I'd better get moving on Provolone... I can't wait to be charging $1000/hr.
Seriously though, that's pretty stellar if he can pull if off, and someone that's knowledgeable and creative enough is certainly worth it to get things going in the right direction.
What is the average hourly rate for high-level engineering consultation? It seems that's the service he's offering, and I don't really think he is overcharging.
It's a PR stunt, and a pretty lame one at that. And he should be building a massively cross-platform data sync framework (ala Dropbox, but not just files) -- not a to-do app whose defining feature is sync.
Good marketing ploy. Causes people to freak out for a minute with thoughts like "is this a trend? Can this rate be sustained? Am I behind?". And here I am commenting, so he wins.
All that said, please keep in mind:
1. Gravity still exists, financially and otherwise. Reality too.
2. Strong teams still win. "Pay me $1000/hr with $10,000 NDA bonus or I'll be in my trailer" might get press, but the assumptions and arrogance behind it won't make meaning over the mid or long terms.
3. CheddarApp is just ok. As a card carrying yearly CheddarApp subscriber, I can say that I've used it for a week and meh. I'm hoping he gets enough press to get enough people to put $20 on the table to build out that spartan feature set.
4. Employers can pay what they want. In the end, if someone thinks they can get ROI on $1000 an hour, why not. God bless America, right?
CheddarApp is just ok. As a card carrying yearly CheddarApp subscriber, I can say that I've used it for a week and meh.
I'm all for bringing up programmers' hourly rates but I think I'd want to have a little bigger feather in my cap than another to-do app before I tried a ploy like this.
According to the About page [1], he created one of the first third-party iOS apps [2] which now has usage numbers in the millions, worked at the creators [3] of Hipstamatic [4] (a fairly well-known iOS app), has contributed a sizeable amount of open-source code [5], and has worked on a number of other projects [6].
I agree. There are people with far superior resumes who will work for less. Frankly, I think he realizes that he won't get much work charging what he is going to charge. This seems to be a publicity stunt and nothing more.
If a decent to-do app is enough advertisement to be able to justify an hourly rate of $1000 (or even 1/4 that), I've been doing something really wrong.
However, the $10,000 fee (or at least some significant fee) for signing an NDA bonus is fairly reasonable. Most NDAs are usually unnecessary, inappropriately scoped, and force the person signing it to take on a substantial legal liability - I wish more people would refuse to sign them or require compensation for doing so.
But isn't that the Clients' problem?. His blog post is very clear, he claims he has some specific optimization skills on iOS apps and they're worth $1000.I have no idea or experience on iOS to judge whether he's right. Also do note, he may have other references that vouch for his skillset(optimization of iOS apps.
Actually my guess is that he honestly doesn't really want any consulting gigs and previously wasn't advertising a rate, but due to his involvement with some high profile projects got a constant stream of offers he brushed off by quoting ridiculously high rates, then found out that some would accept those rates and some of the projects were genuinely interesting.
Is $1000/hr really a fuck-you rate for IT? Coming from finance and eyeballing management consulting rates that are a healthy multiple of those I didn't get the marketing ploy at first.
Yes, $1000/hr really is a fuck you rate for software development.
Most software development projects are months/years long and there are huge context switching costs when trying to swap a new developer in for an old one so you tend to get stuck with the same contractor for the duration which means you're committing to paying someone $1000/hr for months/years. This is quite different than finance/legal where maybe you just need some expert's time for literally like an hour.
There are some situations like the one he referenced where you're just doing 3 hours of optimization or whatever to an existing codebase but projects like that are few and far between (and I'm guessing the person paying for them will often be disappointed... I'm sure Sam is a great programmer, but 3 hours isn't much time to devote to making really substantial optimizations to an existing codebase nor to train another programmer how to do them him/herself).
If you look at what he is selling in his blog though it's a few hours of consulting time here and there as a mentor, imparting expertise on others.
I don't think $1000/hr is a fuck you rate for expert assistance of that sort. I don't know if I would consider him an expert worthy of hiring at that rate but I could see others doing it.
Here's a case where I could see $1k/hr making a big difference (granted I think the customer only paid $200/hr for this but it would have been work $1k/hr if necessay). We had a stored procedure that was performing really badly, and needed some advice on what to do better. I spoke with a database expert for approx an hour and he explained what was probably happening and gave me some pointers to fixing it. If I was trying to fix it on my own, it would have been a week's effort at least because the problem was not in a single statement but poor performance as an emergent property of several hundred or thousand statements running in a specific order and throwing off caching.
Are we talking about $X000/hr for a single finance/consulting professional's time? That rate seems rather unbelievable, but maybe only senior folk in the top-tier firms get to charge that? Are market conditions in finance/consulting just that skewed towards the suppliers?
Yes, that kind of rate is only for partner-level time at a Big 4/Big 3 type shop--and those guys aren't billing more than a few hours a week typically. Even then, $1k/hour is pretty high.
Now, it's not uncommon at all for the staff folks who are on the ground 40+ hours a week to be billed out at anywhere from 200-600/hour. But >$1k? Very rare.
If there's a growing trend for the rising demand of waffles, we'd be selling machinery to make waffles instead and ebooks and courses on how to get rich making waffles.
The article is a waste of time. It's just a newly minted consultant waxing lyrical about being a newly minted consultant. Good for him if he can make it work (I'd never be able to) but this is just what a high end consultancy would charge for offering the same kind of services, nothing surprising.
Holy cow. If CheddarApp justifies a $1000/hour rate, then good programmers could easily justify $100k/hour or better.
Lawyers who handle multimillion dollar deals can justify $1000/hour. Security specialists can justify $1000/hour. Some guy who makes a mediocre todo list application can't.
You don't get it. he can charge whatever he wants to. Nothing stops him for charging $10,000 per hour, just like Lady Gaga or Biber or some other crazy POPular artist would.
Its really not about how much he asks; its about how many people can answer it. He tries to go against the current and assume 1 gig at $1,000/hr is better than 5 gigs at $200. It makes sense. I would love to see people paying for my work 5x more than average, I think I would be more excited too.
Also the guy doesnt seem cocky. He mentioned twice that this is too much to pay anyways.
It's my experience that most IT professionals grossly undercharge.
Get a plumber around. Chances are he'll charge you more for fixing your toilet than you will to build him a website. Both are equally easy jobs using off-the-shelf components.
As an experiment, I had someone ask me recently for an hourly quote to do some work. I didn't really feel like it, so I quoted double the normal rate. They didn't even blink.
If you're not a corporate consultant getting charged out at $400+ per hour, you're probably undercharging.
To be clear, I'm talking about consultant type work here, not 'code me a CRUD app on an hourly rate'.
You might be under-estimating the incredible demand for mobile developers right now... especially talented mobile app developers who have proven themselves capable of building a well-built, polished iOS app.
Right now, the mobile dev market might actually allow a rate like this.
I think security tops out at between 500-600; at that level, we're at a "scanning electron microscope" level of sophistication; this is "design verification for billion dollar cryptosystems" territory.
With the guy I know who charges like that (although usually more like $50k-100k/mo, for about 50% fulltime), the price also includes his million dollar lab. (SEM, FIB Workstation, ...)
At these rates you're also getting access to cryptanalysis.
While I don't doubt that there are security projects that work out to more than $1000/hr, top-tier security people do not as a rule bill anything like that.
For what it's worth: neither do top-tier BigLaw lawyers.
Top Bay Area law partners are $800/hr, although they're really soft on how they bill (I've never actually gotten a bill from ours; probably not until Series A, and partner work is minimal compared to $200/hr associates, and board meetings are free).
I've personally never seen >$450 for security, except for people who have huge expenses bundled in doing the work, so it's not really labor. $100-200 is more normal for long engagements, $200-300 for shorter. (the most I ever billed was $350/hr x 4hrs).
The funny thing is paying high rates for someone actually good for a few days is certainly cheaper than staffing up a huge project with a bunch of $35-55/hr idiots, but there are companies who just won't pay even $250/hr for people actually doing the work, so they end up doing this.
Plenty of M&A lawyers bill $1000/hour. Hell, Big 4 accountants who handle M&A bill $1000/hour and get away with it.
You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.
I'm sure there's a class of M&A laywer, or at least a class of M&A project, where rates can be backed out to 4 figures an hour. But my numbers come in part from recently being a party to a BigLaw-mediated M&A transaction.
(Hopefully this doesn't sound argumentative; I believe you. Just supplying a data point. Overall point: $1k/hr is very very high.)
The OP didn't say the Cheddar App justifies the rate. He/she just said he/she would rather use the (high) rate to weed out boring projects to focus on his/her own projects
And he/she doesn't have to justify that rate to everyone. If people hire him/her at that rate, it's justified.
a bit off topic.. but I found this he/she thing really annoying.
I don't like the singular they. I find it far more annoying than the generic he or the construct of he or she.
The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English one either uses wer (counterpart to wif, survives in werewolf, which is why I joke that all werewolves are by definition male) or wapman which is the counterpart of wifman.
This led to an interesting problem. If you are talking about a specific woman and have perfect gender agreement, then "he" has to be used to refer to "woman." That makes things hard to read and so Old English has a rule which is that you ignore the grammatical gender of the word when you refer to a specific person. If we applied this to modern English we'd have amazing constructs like:
"I went to the store and the woman at the cash register told me that I needed to give her an extra $5."
vs
"Any woman thinking about getting married should make sure that he has some level of financial independence first."
The first is specific while the second is generic. He in the second refers to "any woman" not her prospective spouse!
Similarly "My wife says she isn't up to coming to the party this weekend" but "A wife today still finds it has to do a majority of the housework."
I don't like mixing numbers though. If "they" is an acceptable singular why isn't "it's" an acceptable possessive?
As a clarification, it isn't clear that the rule is universally followed but at least from the areas of Old English literature I have read it is the clearly most common way to use gendered pronouns at least in prosaic contexts.
Sure. One can avoid using gendered pronouns in generic contexts. As a writer, one doesn't have to use them at all if one doesn't want. Indeed "one" makes a fine indefinite pronoun when used properly.
My own style is to use he as super-generic (i.e. bordering on the proverbial), "one" as personal, shared person perspective generic ("one" in this case doesn't differentiate between first and third person, and has some aspects of second person imperative thrown in), and "he or she" as highly descriptive generic.
It works very well. I use "one" most often, "he or she" rarely, and "he" only occasionally. What I hate doing however is having to explain that by "man" I mean it in its original sense. That's why I prefer to say salesman over salesperson, etc. -man never carried with it gender assumptions. If it did, we wouldn't have the root in the word "woman." Now -wif did. Which is one reason why referring to an "alewife" as a female bartender is somewhat archaic.
What I hate doing however is having to explain that by "man" I mean it in its original sense
That's because the meaning has changed, and also the sexism of the term is better understood. If you're American, do you also use the term 'negro' to refer to black people? It's a neutral and descriptive term in medical parlance, but it's a clear case of a word having more impact than its roots back in the day.
So trying to shoehorn in an out-of-date definition is changing the modern meaning of the word, just the same as repurposing 'they'. In truth, I think you're just being stubborn about wanting to use sexist language, since you don't seem to have too much of a problem with using all the borrowed words and grammar we've gained since the 'alewife' days.
The challenge is to fill hours at a rate like that. Sure if you don't need to consult at all and you manage to fill a few hours a month at this rate then power to you.
For most freelancers though, they need to fill a lot more hours.
He doesn't want to fill hours. He wants to be working on his startup. But if he can pull in $3K by showing up for a morning, it's not really a bad deal.
Even if I was willing to pay this rate, I would worry whether his mind was really in it. For $1000/hr you would want someone with pretty specific skills really switched on and ready to work.
I don't think the rate is unreasonable, given the value of great advice. But I could see some internal techies at a company scoffing at a consultant who is using Rails to run his personal blog: https://github.com/samsoffes/samsoff.es
I'm not defending that scoffing, mind you, as playing around with frameworks is good initiative...but anyone who's been burned by a consultant/vendor who recommended a bazooka to kill a mosquito will be wary.
What's wrong with using Rails to run your blog? If your website is built on a given web framework, it is often more sensible to run the blog on that than to introduce a standalone blog engine.
> This is my new blog in Rails 3.1. I moved my blog to Jekyll a few months ago and really missed playing with a Rails app, so I'm moving it back and starting from scratch.
It was surprising to me too, I work as a consultant and am regularly billed out at up to $400/hr. I have a resume and a "consulting resume", which is a list of all the projects I've been staffed at for my current employer with the company name's redacted.
People are willing to pay the high rates because you bring a wide range of knowledge about how other companies have done things, your level of technical skills is usually secondary.
The dirty little secret of consulting is that at a high level everyone is obsessed with NDAs and the like, even to the point of not letting you claim we've worked for them in any capacity, however once they've got you there they want you to name names. When it comes down to making a choice between several options, the option that company X chose is seen as the "safer" one.
Edit: after re-reading, I wanted to be clear that I wasn't suggesting that consultants do (or should) divulge this information; my emphasis should have been more on the experience vs. skills part.
I used to be billed out at $325/hour as a junior programmer and it wasn't until later that I fully understood why.
It's not your "wide range of knowledge" but rather the risk profile of your employer. Some RFP's demand that the consultancy have 10k+ employees, 20+ years in business, and so on. Some of these requirements are government mandated, some process mandated, etc.
In other words, if you, with all your knowledge, were to strike out on your own, you would find yourself quite unable to bill at $400/hour, even if you were to be hired by the very same clients (which is not going to happen because they are paying the higher rate specifically so that they can get the low risk profile as per above).
In my experience, $400/hour at a large consultancy translates into ~$150/hour as a sole consultant, wide as your knowledge may be.
Usually, when you get to the stage where you charge this kind of money, you are really charging not for the work, but all of the work that you've done before and the experience that came with it. An hour with someone worth their salt can easily save you 20 hours paying the $50/hour developer types.
You don't hire these guys to build your project, just to point you in the right direction. The real question is "does this particular guy have $1000/hour advice to offer". His customers ultimately decide this.
woman is strolling through a local park, when she happens upon Pablo Picasso sitting on a bench. Struck by her good fortune, she summons the courage to speak to him.
“Excuse me. You’re Pablo Picasso right?”
The man smiles.
“Would it be possible to have you sketch my portrait? I’ll pay.”
Picasso accepts the offer.
He considers the woman carefully for a few moments and then takes out a pen and paper. He quickly sketches a single line on the page.
He takes one last look at the page and hands it to the woman.
“That’s incredible!” She says. “You’ve managed to capture my essence in a single stroke of the pen.”
“That will be $5,000,” Picasso replies.
“$5,000? But it only took you seconds to draw it!”
About a year ago I was locked out of my house and had to call an emergency locksmith - the cost was around $150. He turned up and inserted a piece of rigid plastic into the gap between door and frame, opening the lock. The process took 5 seconds, and I immediately realized that, given the knowledge that this would work, I could have opened the door myself using a credit card. But I didn't possess that knowledge, and the value of gaining access to my home was worth what I paid. I had paid not for hours worked, but for experience.
You obviously don't watch enough sitcoms if you didn't know that would work.
Ok, granted, I saw this and until I visited the US I didn't believe it would work (it wouldn't in most doors I've seen). But in the US, we tried, it opened every locked door in the house.
So yeah, the lesson to be learned from this is next time to at least try some hair brained ideas before calling someone. :)
I have watched enough mechanics open a car door locked with the keys inside. I still can't do it on my own though. Call a professional, the guy gets it done in seconds (plus the time it takes for him to travel to wherever I am). Some things, even if you possess the knowledge, you may not possess the skill.
Locksmiths are sort of a weird case: you can learn to open 95%+ of commercially relevant locks with $100 of tools and less than an hour of training. The biggest reason it costs $150 and not $25 is that your locality makes it illegal to advertise as a locksmith, and illegal to possess locksmithing tools, without certification. There's a nebulous security rationale for this, because apparently normal people can be allowed to own credit cards and compressed air cans but if we allow them to open locks for money as well then they'll burglarize every house in sight.
"The biggest reason it costs $150 and not $25 is that your locality makes it illegal to advertise as a locksmith, and illegal to possess locksmithing tools, without certification."
I'd say the number of shady "locksmiths" in the phonebook that only know how to drill and replace locks should alter that assumption somewhat.
It very much depends on which locality you are in. In plenty of places it is legal to own locksmithing tools. You can find many videos of lockpicking on youtube.
If locksmithing tools are outlawed, then only outlaws will have locksmithing tools.
From that perspective, the ban makes sense, kind of. If the police catch a burglar with locksmithing tools, then he's automatically a criminal, even if they can't prove he broke into anybody's houses. What if he's not a burglar? Well, law-abiding citizens by definition wouldn't have those tools, unless they have the appropriate certification, which the police can of course check.
It serves as a convenient filter to lower the bar to being able to arrest burglars. Of course, there's the question of whether there are legitimate reasons for non-certified people to have these tools, and whether the tradeoff is worth it (I'd certainly lean toward "no" there, since it seems like a big restriction of freedom for a minor gain), but on its face the prohibition is not completely absurd.
... and for the knowledge that you should probably replace your front door lock if it can be opened with a credit card in 5 seconds ... I would. But fortunately my lock's a bit more secure than that :)
Pay me the right amount of money and you too can have many of my cycles devoted to solving your problems. Exactly how much money depends on what the problem is. Or, you know, you can just pay me to learn (really, internalize) your stuff and point out problems or potential problems. I tend to find things in complicated systems. It's what I do.
I'm inclined to think that such amounts of money aren't paid for some things you find out in systems, but they are paid for you knowing every last bit of the system and giving advice on how to exploit it.
Controversial, just like he wants. I see the same things come out of dcurtis (in fact, the "minimalist" web design is eerily similar). Either way, very pretentious - but I wish him all the best.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] thread"I prefer not to sign NDAs. If this is a requirement for you, there is a $10,000 fee to sign your NDA. You will need to sign my consulting agreement. It has confidentially agreement included."
He then has a very simple work-for-hire contract that includes an NDA.
There's something appealing about this approach, because reading arcane contracts while a project is still being spec'ed is quite annoying. So instead he shifts the burden to the client. But, obviously, many clients won't swallow that.
I'm curious if he can make this work.
He is invincible, hence the rate.
In most legal systems, confidentiality is part of hiring someone. You often sign an NDA nevertheless but its value is mostly declarational.
I assume you're talking about European systems, in which case it's not true, at least not to a significant extent. And when you hire a contractor it's even less defined - a contractor can freely talk about what kind of work he did for a company, right down into quite specific detail, without a proper NDA or clause to that extent in the contract.
"The guy who makes this app charges $1000/hr, he must be amazing!"
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm
Edit: I did a Google image search on it. Here's the stock photo page: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-58442602/stock-photo-male-pr.... "computer hacker in black shirt working at laptops" -- I wonder what the annual salary of black-shirted computer hacker is. BLS doesn't seem to have stats on that one.
Here he is looking manic: http://www.123rf.com/photo_7515672_computer-hacker-in-black-...
Seriously though, that's pretty stellar if he can pull if off, and someone that's knowledgeable and creative enough is certainly worth it to get things going in the right direction.
If the client thinks you're worth it, no amount is too high.
come on bro...
It doesn't pretend to be something else or more, so the 'glorified' here is meaningless.
That said, it doesn't matter what Cheddar is. He asks for that pay for iOS consulting in general, not for recreating his own app.
All that said, please keep in mind:
1. Gravity still exists, financially and otherwise. Reality too.
2. Strong teams still win. "Pay me $1000/hr with $10,000 NDA bonus or I'll be in my trailer" might get press, but the assumptions and arrogance behind it won't make meaning over the mid or long terms.
3. CheddarApp is just ok. As a card carrying yearly CheddarApp subscriber, I can say that I've used it for a week and meh. I'm hoping he gets enough press to get enough people to put $20 on the table to build out that spartan feature set.
4. Employers can pay what they want. In the end, if someone thinks they can get ROI on $1000 an hour, why not. God bless America, right?
I'm all for bringing up programmers' hourly rates but I think I'd want to have a little bigger feather in my cap than another to-do app before I tried a ploy like this.
[1] http://samsoff.es/about [2] http://www.youversion.com/mobile [3] http://heysynthetic.com/ [4] http://hipstamatic.com/ [5] https://github.com/samsoffes [6] http://samsoff.es/projects
However, the $10,000 fee (or at least some significant fee) for signing an NDA bonus is fairly reasonable. Most NDAs are usually unnecessary, inappropriately scoped, and force the person signing it to take on a substantial legal liability - I wish more people would refuse to sign them or require compensation for doing so.
No. He didn't justify anything. He's limiting the type of clients that talk to him.
Point: "This rate is designed to weed out less serious clients. [...] If anyone hires me to write code for $1000/hr, they are wasting their money."
Most software development projects are months/years long and there are huge context switching costs when trying to swap a new developer in for an old one so you tend to get stuck with the same contractor for the duration which means you're committing to paying someone $1000/hr for months/years. This is quite different than finance/legal where maybe you just need some expert's time for literally like an hour.
There are some situations like the one he referenced where you're just doing 3 hours of optimization or whatever to an existing codebase but projects like that are few and far between (and I'm guessing the person paying for them will often be disappointed... I'm sure Sam is a great programmer, but 3 hours isn't much time to devote to making really substantial optimizations to an existing codebase nor to train another programmer how to do them him/herself).
I don't think $1000/hr is a fuck you rate for expert assistance of that sort. I don't know if I would consider him an expert worthy of hiring at that rate but I could see others doing it.
Here's a case where I could see $1k/hr making a big difference (granted I think the customer only paid $200/hr for this but it would have been work $1k/hr if necessay). We had a stored procedure that was performing really badly, and needed some advice on what to do better. I spoke with a database expert for approx an hour and he explained what was probably happening and gave me some pointers to fixing it. If I was trying to fix it on my own, it would have been a week's effort at least because the problem was not in a single statement but poor performance as an emergent property of several hundred or thousand statements running in a specific order and throwing off caching.
Now, it's not uncommon at all for the staff folks who are on the ground 40+ hours a week to be billed out at anywhere from 200-600/hour. But >$1k? Very rare.
This will allow you to create high syrup capacity waffles from an array of lower-quality waffles.
No, no... WaffleCloud(tm). As a mobile service. Syncs with your whipped cream on-demand.
Lawyers who handle multimillion dollar deals can justify $1000/hour. Security specialists can justify $1000/hour. Some guy who makes a mediocre todo list application can't.
Its really not about how much he asks; its about how many people can answer it. He tries to go against the current and assume 1 gig at $1,000/hr is better than 5 gigs at $200. It makes sense. I would love to see people paying for my work 5x more than average, I think I would be more excited too.
Also the guy doesnt seem cocky. He mentioned twice that this is too much to pay anyways.
The reality is he's in a position to not need work, and is able to afford turning down 95% of potential employers. Good.
Get a plumber around. Chances are he'll charge you more for fixing your toilet than you will to build him a website. Both are equally easy jobs using off-the-shelf components.
As an experiment, I had someone ask me recently for an hourly quote to do some work. I didn't really feel like it, so I quoted double the normal rate. They didn't even blink.
If you're not a corporate consultant getting charged out at $400+ per hour, you're probably undercharging.
To be clear, I'm talking about consultant type work here, not 'code me a CRUD app on an hourly rate'.
Right now, the mobile dev market might actually allow a rate like this.
While I don't doubt that there are security projects that work out to more than $1000/hr, top-tier security people do not as a rule bill anything like that.
For what it's worth: neither do top-tier BigLaw lawyers.
I've personally never seen >$450 for security, except for people who have huge expenses bundled in doing the work, so it's not really labor. $100-200 is more normal for long engagements, $200-300 for shorter. (the most I ever billed was $350/hr x 4hrs).
The funny thing is paying high rates for someone actually good for a few days is certainly cheaper than staffing up a huge project with a bunch of $35-55/hr idiots, but there are companies who just won't pay even $250/hr for people actually doing the work, so they end up doing this.
You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.
(Hopefully this doesn't sound argumentative; I believe you. Just supplying a data point. Overall point: $1k/hr is very very high.)
And he/she doesn't have to justify that rate to everyone. If people hire him/her at that rate, it's justified.
a bit off topic.. but I found this he/she thing really annoying.
Then use singular they. See http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... for verification that this is acceptable English.
The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English one either uses wer (counterpart to wif, survives in werewolf, which is why I joke that all werewolves are by definition male) or wapman which is the counterpart of wifman.
This led to an interesting problem. If you are talking about a specific woman and have perfect gender agreement, then "he" has to be used to refer to "woman." That makes things hard to read and so Old English has a rule which is that you ignore the grammatical gender of the word when you refer to a specific person. If we applied this to modern English we'd have amazing constructs like:
"I went to the store and the woman at the cash register told me that I needed to give her an extra $5."
vs
"Any woman thinking about getting married should make sure that he has some level of financial independence first."
The first is specific while the second is generic. He in the second refers to "any woman" not her prospective spouse!
Similarly "My wife says she isn't up to coming to the party this weekend" but "A wife today still finds it has to do a majority of the housework."
I don't like mixing numbers though. If "they" is an acceptable singular why isn't "it's" an acceptable possessive?
My own style is to use he as super-generic (i.e. bordering on the proverbial), "one" as personal, shared person perspective generic ("one" in this case doesn't differentiate between first and third person, and has some aspects of second person imperative thrown in), and "he or she" as highly descriptive generic.
It works very well. I use "one" most often, "he or she" rarely, and "he" only occasionally. What I hate doing however is having to explain that by "man" I mean it in its original sense. That's why I prefer to say salesman over salesperson, etc. -man never carried with it gender assumptions. If it did, we wouldn't have the root in the word "woman." Now -wif did. Which is one reason why referring to an "alewife" as a female bartender is somewhat archaic.
That's because the meaning has changed, and also the sexism of the term is better understood. If you're American, do you also use the term 'negro' to refer to black people? It's a neutral and descriptive term in medical parlance, but it's a clear case of a word having more impact than its roots back in the day.
So trying to shoehorn in an out-of-date definition is changing the modern meaning of the word, just the same as repurposing 'they'. In truth, I think you're just being stubborn about wanting to use sexist language, since you don't seem to have too much of a problem with using all the borrowed words and grammar we've gained since the 'alewife' days.
For most freelancers though, they need to fill a lot more hours.
http://le.mu.rs/motherfucker/Entries/2010/6/24_What_money_ca...
I'm not defending that scoffing, mind you, as playing around with frameworks is good initiative...but anyone who's been burned by a consultant/vendor who recommended a bazooka to kill a mosquito will be wary.
> This is my new blog in Rails 3.1. I moved my blog to Jekyll a few months ago and really missed playing with a Rails app, so I'm moving it back and starting from scratch.
http://assets.samsoff.es/pdf/Sam%20Soffes%20Resume.pdf
This, to me, is more surprising than the rate.
I don't think he understands what the word all means. Just me 2cents.
People are willing to pay the high rates because you bring a wide range of knowledge about how other companies have done things, your level of technical skills is usually secondary.
The dirty little secret of consulting is that at a high level everyone is obsessed with NDAs and the like, even to the point of not letting you claim we've worked for them in any capacity, however once they've got you there they want you to name names. When it comes down to making a choice between several options, the option that company X chose is seen as the "safer" one.
Edit: after re-reading, I wanted to be clear that I wasn't suggesting that consultants do (or should) divulge this information; my emphasis should have been more on the experience vs. skills part.
It's not your "wide range of knowledge" but rather the risk profile of your employer. Some RFP's demand that the consultancy have 10k+ employees, 20+ years in business, and so on. Some of these requirements are government mandated, some process mandated, etc.
In other words, if you, with all your knowledge, were to strike out on your own, you would find yourself quite unable to bill at $400/hour, even if you were to be hired by the very same clients (which is not going to happen because they are paying the higher rate specifically so that they can get the low risk profile as per above).
In my experience, $400/hour at a large consultancy translates into ~$150/hour as a sole consultant, wide as your knowledge may be.
You don't hire these guys to build your project, just to point you in the right direction. The real question is "does this particular guy have $1000/hour advice to offer". His customers ultimately decide this.
woman is strolling through a local park, when she happens upon Pablo Picasso sitting on a bench. Struck by her good fortune, she summons the courage to speak to him.
“Excuse me. You’re Pablo Picasso right?”
The man smiles.
“Would it be possible to have you sketch my portrait? I’ll pay.”
Picasso accepts the offer.
He considers the woman carefully for a few moments and then takes out a pen and paper. He quickly sketches a single line on the page.
He takes one last look at the page and hands it to the woman.
“That’s incredible!” She says. “You’ve managed to capture my essence in a single stroke of the pen.” “That will be $5,000,” Picasso replies.
“$5,000? But it only took you seconds to draw it!”
“Actually, my dear, it took me my whole life.”
(from http://morethanaliving.com/2007/03/20/pablo-picasso-anecdote...
About a year ago I was locked out of my house and had to call an emergency locksmith - the cost was around $150. He turned up and inserted a piece of rigid plastic into the gap between door and frame, opening the lock. The process took 5 seconds, and I immediately realized that, given the knowledge that this would work, I could have opened the door myself using a credit card. But I didn't possess that knowledge, and the value of gaining access to my home was worth what I paid. I had paid not for hours worked, but for experience.
Ok, granted, I saw this and until I visited the US I didn't believe it would work (it wouldn't in most doors I've seen). But in the US, we tried, it opened every locked door in the house.
So yeah, the lesson to be learned from this is next time to at least try some hair brained ideas before calling someone. :)
I'd say the number of shady "locksmiths" in the phonebook that only know how to drill and replace locks should alter that assumption somewhat.
From that perspective, the ban makes sense, kind of. If the police catch a burglar with locksmithing tools, then he's automatically a criminal, even if they can't prove he broke into anybody's houses. What if he's not a burglar? Well, law-abiding citizens by definition wouldn't have those tools, unless they have the appropriate certification, which the police can of course check.
It serves as a convenient filter to lower the bar to being able to arrest burglars. Of course, there's the question of whether there are legitimate reasons for non-certified people to have these tools, and whether the tradeoff is worth it (I'd certainly lean toward "no" there, since it seems like a big restriction of freedom for a minor gain), but on its face the prohibition is not completely absurd.
I'm dead serious. Bring it on.