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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?

#81

Post by bitexploder »

nataz wrote: post #41
bitexploder wrote: post #16

14k week rate. We do infosec consulting. High end boutique. App sec, pen testing, reversing, IoT/device hacking etc.

You mention 14k/week. You also mention "we". If you don't mind me asking - How many people involved per job, and was that 14k per person or all inclusive.

14k is one consultants rate. Engagements are 2-6 weeks, 1-3 people typically. Bigger engagements happen often enough. Blended bill rate is lower with legacy customers, new customer bill rate is 14k/wk. Some discounts possible here and there, for purchasing a lot of work, allowing logo use, etc.

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

#82

Post by ggillas »

yrral wrote: post #11
ggillas wrote: post #8

Design blockchain token economic models. Paid in % of total token supply. Prior, consulted on intellectual property strategy $550/hr.

Sorry for all the questions but: Generally what percentage of the total supply do you get? Do you have a lockup period? Are these primarily defi protocols? Can you disclose what projects you worked on?

Most projects put 12 month or greater lockups on tokens (which I'd recommend for both vesting considerations and protections for the protocol against dumping).

The standard YC advisor templates are fairly easy to translate to token-based compensation and are battle tested.

Just like advisor compensation in stock, both the protocol and the advisor should weight the advisory scope, how early the project is, and determine fair %s from there.

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

#83

Post by hkhanna »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #52
hkhanna wrote: post #24

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.

> folks who need both a lawyer and a software developer Strange intersection, but can you give examples?

The most common case is very early stage technology startups where most of their employees wear many hats. They usually have no legal counsel and maybe 1 or 2 developers including a CTO. They need help on everything from employment agreements, fundraising and NDAs to building the newest API endpoint or Airflow DAG.

It's a little strange at first to have someone doing very different jobs for them simultaneously, but when you're that early stage and having difficulty hiring, it's a blessing once you realize I'm highly experienced and hard-working at both.

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

#84

Post by ethbr0 »

rhizome wrote: post #76
throwaway81523 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I'll usually do an initial phone consultation for free, but anything more expensive would be billed. The issue is that there is not usually a well-defined problem. There is a general goal that takes some iterations to accomplish, with the customer concocting new features and requirements as development progresses. Of course everyone says to build some padding into the schedule for that, but they think of expan…

The standard advice is that you're the one coming up with the list of tasks required to achieve an agreed upon goal, and concocted features to be added are a new, additional contract. Stick to your list, practice establishing boundaries. If you're just working on whatever their whims bring to the table on any given day and can't control the tasks and outcomes to which you've already agreed, you aren't a contractor, y…

In my experience, requirements gathering and obtaining project design consensus is a huge part of the value add from a consultant.

(1) You're usually better at it than they are, because they're hiring a consultant in the first place. (2) You're outside of their political network, and can thus be a more neutral, objective arbiter. Invaluable! (3) You're looking at the problem with fresh eyes, whereas they're looking at it with a history of counterparty relationships, failed or successful previous projects, etc.

Furthermore, requirements gathering and obtaining project design consensus is going to happen at some point. Better you verify that it happens as fully as possible, as early as possible, versus trusting the client that they've done it accurately and sufficiently.

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

#85

Post by ethbr0 »

seanwilson wrote: post #64
throwaway81523 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I've never seen a project where the customer knew what they wanted clearly enough to have a SOW with a fixed scope. Not sure if you do this but that's why you really should charge for helping with the requirements gathering and solution design, it's really valuable to pin down what the problem is and know that what you're going to build will fix it properly. It also means you're not in a rush to throw out an estima…

The "when to throw out an estimate" is something I've evolved on a lot in my career. Initially, naive happy path. After that, happy path + some overly-large fuzzy padding number.

Now, I push back on PMs who ask for an estimate at an unknowable point in the project.

The problem is not estimating work. The problem is estimating work volume risk (the range of work the project might take). And the only thing that can decrease that is prototyping and similar.

I work in somewhat of a sub-niche (automation), so have a larger than average number of black-box, outside-of-my-control, unchangeable components. But I've come around to believing modified spiral [0] is a better approach when risk dominates.

Sometimes, the right answer to "How long will this take?" is "It will take this long to get an answer to that question."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model

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

#87

Post by chad_strategic »

hkhanna wrote: post #24

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.

Just out of curiosity... what kind of project require a lawyer and a developer on the same job?

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

#88

Post by ethbr0 »

tptacek wrote: post #55
cperciva wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I had cryptography work, I would! My strategy is to go way out of my way to make sure I don't have cryptography work to bid out. :) 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…

Reading between the lines here too, but worth emphasizing "anything which particularly piques my interest" & "would also be spending some of my time making sure I had a full pipeline of gigs lined up."

Correct me if I'm wrong Colin, but I'm assuming some of the discount between max_rate and your rate is the value you see in not having to spend time on boring projects and hustling a constant stream of gigs. Aka discount for quality of life and work.

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

#89

Post by ethbr0 »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #48
RomanPushkin wrote: post #10

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).

Holy cow, that is great, I had no idea that trainings paid so well. I taught a Python class for free which makes me think I could do traiinings. Was there a lot of specialized stuff in your Ruby trainings? I had figured doing that type of stuff got at best normal hourly rates. Maybe I should pursue this type of thing more.

Training speaks to the truism in consulting rates -- you can only command up to the value you deliver to the customer.

With training, you're playing one of the strongest cards: delivering value to many people at the same time, where your time required scales sub-linearly with the number of people.

Consequently, the more people, the more value to the customer, the more they can realistically pay you and still get good value for their money. Win/win.

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

#90

Post by _em_ »

Sytten wrote: post #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…

How can you find jobs in Canada. I have been trying to find some side cnosulting work but i am not sure which avenues to start from.
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