Earlier quoted context omitted.
About $350/hr
Data points to back that up? That sounds high for mobile dev.
I've heard around $250 is the ceiling, and that's for top-flight people physically in SF or NYC.
One Thousand Dollars an Hour
61–70 of 167 posts
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#62Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the guy I know who charges like that (although usually more like $50k-100k/mo, for about 50% fulltime), the price also includes his million dollar lab. (SEM, FIB Workstation, ...)
At these rates you're also getting access to cryptanalysis. While I don't doubt that there are security projects that work out to more than $1000/hr, top-tier security people do not as a rule bill anything like that. For what it's worth: neither do top-tier BigLaw lawyers.
Top Bay Area law partners are $800/hr, although they're really soft on how they bill (I've never actually gotten a bill from ours; probably not until Series A, and partner work is minimal compared to $200/hr associates, and board meetings are free).
I've personally never seen >$450 for security, except for people who have huge expenses bundled in doing the work, so it's not really labor. $100-200 is more normal for long engagements, $200-300 for shorter. (the most I ever billed was $350/hr x 4hrs).
The funny thing is paying high rates for someone actually good for a few days is certainly cheaper than staffing up a huge project with a bunch of $35-55/hr idiots, but there are companies who just won't pay even $250/hr for people actually doing the work, so they end up doing this.
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#64loser
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#65If his time was really worth $1000/hr, he wouldn't have time to write blog posts like this
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#66Also worth noting on his "hire me" page ( http://hire.samsoff.es/ ): "I prefer not to sign NDAs. If this is a requirement for you, there is a $10,000 fee to sign your NDA. You will need to sign my consulting agreement. It has confidentially agreement included." He then has a very simple work-for-hire contract that includes an NDA. There's something appealing about this approach, because reading arcane contracts while…
I'm pretty sure he doesn't care if it works, he is working on his own project. He is invincible, hence the rate.
Exactly. If the lucrativeness of his side project changes I'm sure his tune will soon follow.
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#67Holy cow. If CheddarApp justifies a $1000/hour rate, then good programmers could easily justify $100k/hour or better. Lawyers who handle multimillion dollar deals can justify $1000/hour. Security specialists can justify $1000/hour. Some guy who makes a mediocre todo list application can't.
[deleted]
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#68I don't think the rate is unreasonable, given the value of great advice. But I could see some internal techies at a company scoffing at a consultant who is using Rails to run his personal blog: https://github.com/samsoffes/samsoff.es I'm not defending that scoffing, mind you, as playing around with frameworks is good initiative...but anyone who's been burned by a consultant/vendor who recommended a bazooka to kill a…
What's wrong with using Rails to run your blog? If your website is built on a given web framework, it is often more sensible to run the blog on that than to introduce a standalone blog engine.
Because you can use octopress and only have to serve static files. https://github.com/epochwolf/epochwolf.com
Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour
#69This is conceited as fuck. Nice to-do app.
It's a PR stunt, and a pretty lame one at that. And he should be building a massively cross-platform data sync framework (ala Dropbox, but not just files) -- not a to-do app whose defining feature is sync.