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Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

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11–20 of 156 posts

Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

#11
If the best are 10x as productive as the mediocre, I don't see a problem with this. Of course, you might say that the $120 bulk of freelance programmers are already a notch above mediocre and maybe $500/hr is more reasonable, but whatever the market will bear.

It's a good argument to cut top marginal tax rate so that he has an incentive to take more work than he's willing to at $500/hr after taxes (assuming he's in the US).

Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

#12
I'm guessing this is more of a flat fee structure, and he's optimistically expecting it to work out to $1k/hour.

   You can write to my former coworkers in Apple’s 
   Developer Technical Support, and they will point you 
   toward a solution within three days. Or you can just 
   call me and have it ready to resubmit by morning.
. . . so what happens if it's not ready by morning?

Is there a scenario where I'm dinged for $24k in a day while he's mainlining coffee & trying to debug my app?

Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

#13
post #8

The "motherfucker" page doesn't load, maybe I can help him with some web development at only $1,000/hr

Coral cache: http://le.mu.rs.nyud.net/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/2...

Still takes forever to load, but you can speed up the process using Readability.

Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

#15

I'd be curious if he actually can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development. It sounds like it's deliberately less than his time-filling rate: he doesn't get fully booked weeks at that rate. In fact he seems to imply that his schedule is so empty that he's likely to be free on any given day to start working on a new project immediately. That's certainly a reasonable strategy, since sometimes the money-maximizing rate i…

Working 10 hrs a week at 1k/hr would be awesome. Saving time is better than maximizing money.

Sure, but that's the part I'm wondering about. 10 hrs/wk at $1k/hr would be great (~$500k/yr for part-time work!), but, say, 1hr/wk on average wouldn't be too good, even at that rate. And I read his post as having an undercurrent of being more, "I'm trying to convince you paying me $1k/hr is a good idea" rather than "there are actually a lot of people already paying me $1k/hr". Has he gotten dozens of contracts at that rate? A few? One?

Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

#16
post #2

Wow, he might be good at programming, but from his writing, he sure seems like a jerk (Zed Shaw's long lost twin?). I've known many professionals who, being very good at what they do, charge both less and more than $1k/hour, but none of them would ever mention their rate in public, much less feel the need to explain why they deserve it. On the other hand, this is great PR for software engineers: a couple more posts l…

I'm not so sure I would want to work with this guy, Zed Shaw on the other hand was one of the nicest people I've ever gotten an e-mail from

Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

#20
He's claiming his role in Tap Tap Revenge as justifying that rate. If all you know about his role at Tapulous is what's been written at TechCrunch that probably sounds impressive. Of course if you know some of the guys there who don't have a soapbox and a sycophantic following that's a pretty hilarious opener.
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