"im so great at coding because i've spent so little of my life doing it! that makes me better, qed"
huh?
Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
31–40 of 156 posts
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#32That’s a little like hearing what Brad Pitt got paid for his last movie and wondering why the producer didn’t instead hire Brad Pitman for scale. Oh you’ve never heard of Brad Pitman? You’re not familiar with his work? But you are familiar with Brad Pitt’s work, right? After all, he’s an experienced actor and producer with not one, but two, Academy Award nominations and a portfolio full of household names. Bzzzt. Hor…
They might turn out in droves because he offered a $30,000 dollar prize for solving a puzzle in his app "Puzzlloto". Which has been pulled from the app store...
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
A few? One? I'd venture the guess the number is very small or perhaps even zero. At that rate he'd burn through a reasonable budget for an iPhone app within weeks. And I mean the entire budget, which would normally include graphics design and backend work. I have no doubts he could get an app off the ground faster than most teams - given he lives up to his bold claims, which is entirely possible. But as with every so…
I don't think you're supposed to hire him to build a whole app.
You hire him to give advice for an hour or two so you get pointed in the right direction, or review some code, or fix one bug your team is stuck on, or he can help you find the right cheaper person to hire.
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#34Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified.
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-...
Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#35Does anyone here really know if the author is serious? I honestly can't tell, having never heard of this guy, if this is an instance of Poe's Law or Stephen Wolfram-style megalomania (well, at least Wolfram has more to show than "not one, but two number one titles on the App Store").
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#36He'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.
can you elaborate?
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#37This is coming from the dude who used to work for free and live in Wil Shipley's basement? Wow.
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#38Interesting approach to customer acquisition. After taxes he'd be sitting on just over a million a year without working much more than 40 hours a week. But maybe his pricing is predicated on the desire to not work 40 hour weeks?
You don't get 1k an hour without high high availability
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#39Wow, 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…
Tangential, but I feel compelled to note that: * I have never met Zed * Like many others I have heard all sorts of stories about him * People are capable of change * In my recent experience Zed has always seemed civil, thoughtful and passionate about code He may have been a jerk in the past, I can't speak to that, but he seems like a decent guy now. Yours, the anti-pigeonholing squad
[deleted]
Re: Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marginal tax rates being high is a great idea. I'd be with you if people with high salaries spent all, or virtually all, of their salary. But they don't. In this economy we need more money being spent. When things are doing well again, you could try to make a case for the rich being richer, but it's a strange cause to take up.
> In this economy we need more money being spent. Economic activity is not economic productivity . Spending money doesn't make us richer. Producing does. Encouraging people to work more would help the economy; encouraging to people to spend more would only help to the extent that it stimulates people to produce stuff for sale.
Fascinating definitions but this has more than a whiff of crack pottery. Few things encourage economic activity (and productivity) like a rich person coming with an open wallet.
How are people to work more when there's not money to pay them?