51–60 of 115 posts
I did a couple of Ruby trainings in last 6 months for $8000/day (2 total, so it was a bit more than $30k). I wrote a book (free, 400 page) about Ruby. I do it with my partner, I'm happy to pay 20% for all unrelated stuff (organizing, filling in gaps, communicating with people, etc).
Lawyer (corporate/VC/M&A) for $495 per hour, with discounts offered if they have me on retainer. Python/Django/React.js developer for $295 per hour. I offer both of these together at a blended rate to folks who need both a lawyer and a software developer.
Strange intersection, but can you give examples?
I'm a Site Reliability engineer. I help startups figure out how to deploy to the cloud. My rate is $250, though I'm wondering if I should raise it again due to inflation.
Generally, how do you find clients and startups to help?
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$300/hr for your time is a steal.
Feel free to steal from me. ;-) As a practical matter: If I were a full time consultant I probably would charge more, but I would also be spending some of my time making sure I had a full pipeline of gigs lined up. The fact that my marketing process is about as lean as it gets -- people send me emails from time to time -- means I don't have to cover that sort of overhead.
The fact that you're not booked wall-to-wall while underbidding the market for the expertise you're selling to this extent should be a lesson to everyone about price competition.
You're happy! I'm not criticizing you. I'm literally just saying that your rate is a steal. It is way, way under the market. People should take you up on it.
I’ve shifted to bidding fixed rate on projects around a defined scope. It’s a lot more work upfront to define a clear statement of work, but it has allowed me to stay above USD$200/hr without customers batting an eye - whereas my rate was consistently a sticking point in negotiations. My consulting mostly focuses around IT/digital strategy and the work product usually involves connecting together incumbent systems, a…
I've never seen a project where the customer knew what they wanted clearly enough to have a SOW with a fixed scope. The work always expands. Maybe I've been doing something wrong. How are you doing during the pandemic, which makes in-person meetings and on-site work difficult?
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You could probably charge a good bit more. Our customers are at 14k week rate for good quality pen testing, app sec, device hacking, sec eng, red teams etc. Edit: and I know friends at big firm with crypto services specialty and they charge a looot more. $400-$500/hr. They stay pretty busy.
I'm fairly good at crypto (not as good as Colin of course) but I think that's not of that much help in general security stuff. Pen testing = knowing all the bugs and code smells in the popular Javascript frameworks, 0 days in a zillion libraries like log4j, etc. I'm basically resigned that the modern web is bloaty buggy crap and so I haven't found it worthwhile to get too familiar with its workings. I have gotten som…
Exactly. I won't touch gigs like that; the closest I'll get is to make a point about "keep your system at minimalist as possible" during general security review.
Heck, I'm unlikely to even take code review gigs any more -- IIRC the last time I did one of those it was reviewing STUD before Bump released it.
Develop complete products of healthy complexity. Very wide range - enterprise backends, complex multimedia front ends, device control, firmware etc. etc. Located in Toronto, Canada. $100/hr or better say around $200K/year give or take as each contract is rather long term engagement. Typical would be 6-12 month first version with restricting functionality. Year for maturing. Another year support, transition to mainten…
Just starting out and I like your style. I would love to know more. My email is in my profile. - Young eng in the GTA
Is there anything in particular you are looking for?
I do occasional consulting in cryptography and security design, and anything related to FreeBSD/EC2. $300/hour with discounts for open source, startups based in Canada, longer engagements, and anything which particularly piques my interest.
You interested in being a sub contractor? Only half joking... Seriously though, one of the most powerful tools in consulting is a deep rolodex of unique talent. You never want to be in the position of telling a client you can't help them. You should always be honest, but you should also be prepared. Someone could probably put together a pretty nice consulting association/firm with contacts made here on HN.
Seriously though, I wouldn't want to give up any of the flexibility I currently have, which includes both absolute veto over customers and projects, and "best effort" availability which ranges from "reply within 5 minutes because I happened to be checking my email" to "I'm busy with the baby today while my wife plays an orchestra gig" and in the extreme case "I'm tracking down a FreeBSD bug this week; hopefully I'll get around to helping you next week".
This may be incompatible with being contracted out by an agency.