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Ask HN: What do you do and what's your consulting rate?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do and what's your consulting rate?

#26
Specialize in distributed systems, big data, etc.

My short term rate is $300/hr, $200/hr for longer term commitments and $500/hr + all expenses for on-site. Pre-pandemic on-site w/training was the most successful of all of these despite being the most expensive.

I did it full time for a while, these days I only do it on the side and only for projects that are worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do and what's your consulting rate?

#27
It was about 30k/week.

The tech side was almost irrelevant. In the end it was about helping the client document good requirements.

Which you could only do after getting a good understanding of their business ops/process, and identifying the gaps and the impact to resources.

Then you put down really good requirements (which is hard), and only then use that to engineer a solution that appropriately addressed the risk (balancing cost/disruption vs. mitigated impact).

That said, often the solution is tech agnostic. I was just as happy punting final implementation to either internal teams or doing it myself (which often involved sub contracting to a specialist).

That may sound like a lot, but it often involved travel, tools, specialized coms gear, etc.

You also have to factor in insurance, taxes, and a myriad of other expenses related to running your own business.

The sweet spot for me was 45k/week, but that normally involves subcontractor payments as well.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do and what's your consulting rate?

#28
I did backend development (typescript, graphql, prisma) and devops (kubernetes, terraform, gcp, aws) for two years. I started at 40$/h then finished at 75$/h (100$/h for short contracts).

I honestly got burned out by context switching (which I needed to do to fill my week). And it was somewhat easy to find contracts at 75$/h (I consider I am senior level) so I would consider either charging more or billing more hours (both of which I was not good at).

Based in Canada.

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