431–440 of 458 posts
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No matter what you think you are selling, you are always selling the buyer's experience. And for some work, framed the right way, high prices improve the experience.
It absolutely does. Some expensive things aren't all that high quality. It's just expensive for the sake of being expensive.
It is question of marketing.
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I left government work a while back for the private sector. The nice thing about SCIF work is the privacy and autonomy :)
not to mention you cant really be distracted by the internet ...
> The designer had sent me some Adobe Illustrator files, and I couldn't open it on the MacBook.
Can't you just change the file extension to pdf to open an Adobe Illustrator file?
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This is misguided anger at best, and trolling at worst. What were you hoping to achieve with this?
Oh, it was perhaps some cathartic snark that doesn't add much to the overall discussion, but considering that the majority of comments on articles like these tend to be made up of people glorifying such income, talking about why such income isn't enough, hoping to someday have such an income, or otherwise somehow on the hedonic treadmill that makes programmers some of the wealthiest workers that have ever existed on…
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This is a classic example of a Veblen good [1]. "Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. Some goods become more desirable because of their high prices." The suits are expensive, so they must be good. It's also a status signal to others that you can afford such g…
As the Director of Technology at a non-profit organization, how am I supposed to staff software engineering resources when these pricing practices like these are commonplace in the for-profit world? How am I supposed to make an argument to the board that a single technology staff member, let alone a working team, is 5x-10x more valuable than the rest of the workforce? I'm going to admit it - it's hard to see stuff li…
I guess you are frustrated because your company doesn't make much money on technology. If the company has a positive ROI on tech, then you wouldn't be frustrated, because more you invest, more you get out. Most companies doesn't need made-to-measure technology solutions.
A valuable lesson I learned at a young age from one of my first 'customers' when doing computer repair jobs for friends and neighbours was is that you don't get paid for what you can or do but for the value you add or time (money) you save someone. Most of the time the problems I had to solve where easy ones. Install printer, update software, remove toolbars, email settings, etc. All 5 minute work jobs, seldom totall…
The (probably apocryphal) Picasso napkin story: Picasso is sitting in a Paris cafe when a fan approaches the artist and asks that he make a quick sketch on a paper napkin. Picasso acquiesces, draws his dove and promptly hands it back to his admirer along with an ask for a rather large sum of money. The fan is flummoxed. “How can you ask for so much? It took you only a minute to draw this.” To which Picasso replies, "…
> "Oh, two days! The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!"
> "No;-I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."
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Corporations lobby the government to change laws to boost their profit. Those laws are enforced by guns. It is a myth that corporations like free markets.
Which law forces me to pay google money?
I've got similar experiences working for corporate clients, but it was legal work, not tech stuff. It was a bit more complex than the equivalent of a static HTML, but something that anyone with an IQ of > 90 could learn in less than half a year. There were days when I'd charge clients $15k... for a day's work. This wouldn't have been possible if I worked on-site. But I was essentially completing $15k of contracted wo…
> $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in total. This sounds like a SaaS waiting to happen.
If you have an extremely high-margin service, e.g. perform bill $10k of work for $100 of salary, there's absolutely no incentive to automate things on the seller's side. It essentially means hiring someone to build out a (software) solution to squeeze the $100 into a dollar of payments on a cloud provider. All you're doing is raising your margin from 99% to 99.99%, it's meaningless, your profits increases by 1%, assuming the Capex for development was zero. And given this is typically a low-volume kind of transaction, with considerable development costs to build a Saas solution, this assumption is way too generous.
It's exactly these kinds of services which are completely fine to have humans perform.
It's the type of legal work where you bill $200 for a simple contract review and have to pay a paralegal say $100 for the work, which would be great to automate to a $1 of AWS payments. Here you're increasing margins from 50% to 99%, doubling profits. Any development costs can be averaged out to approach zero, as document review is a high-volume task in any organisation.
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These types of gigs are more about who you know rather than the work that gets done. I'm guessing that you didn't just cold interview for this work, right?
$15k per day billable for legal work sounds exactly like biglaw, and you don't cold interview for that.
For some background info for the person you're replying to... I can easily name a whole range of colleagues with whom I could easily complete $1m per person / annum of work (about $4k a day) in billable time.
The problem is you don't get the work without the company name.
Even having worked in this business, with clients trusting me on a personal level who'd love to grant me the work even if I worked as an independent contractor... my clients are other fortune 500 companies, sales goes through a process, which has all kinds of checks and balances in place. For example, if you have no certification for data security (i.e., audited on e.g. ISO2700-1/2), you don't stand a chance to say receive sensitive due diligence docs in order to perform legal work. Performing such an audit can easily cost hundreds of thousands a year, just to pay the auditor. Building an internal framework to comply with standards, regulations etc, costs way more. This makes it impossible for small firms or contractors to compete as they can't average out a $100k audit over $50m in revenues.
Not all work has these requirements of course. But in some fields, and some clients do. Building an internal software tool for a national seller of paint products, fine as an independent contractor. Trying to win a government tender for a tool that handles personal data, extremely likely you won't be considered without working for an organisation that has 10 certifications in place that cost >$1m a year to renew. In my line of work, it'd be very tricky to sell my work to clients as an independent.