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One Thousand Dollars an Hour

samsoff.es

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Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#141

Post by mikeash »

patio11 wrote: post #107
ladon86 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of dynamic exists in a few professions. About a year ago I was locked out of my house and had to call an emergency locksmith - the cost was around $150. He turned up and inserted a piece of rigid plastic into the gap between door and frame, opening the lock. The process took 5 seconds, and I immediately realized that, given the knowledge that this would work, I could have opened the door myself using a cred…

Locksmiths are sort of a weird case: you can learn to open 95%+ of commercially relevant locks with $100 of tools and less than an hour of training. The biggest reason it costs $150 and not $25 is that your locality makes it illegal to advertise as a locksmith, and illegal to possess locksmithing tools, without certification. There's a nebulous security rationale for this, because apparently normal people can be allo…

If locksmithing tools are outlawed, then only outlaws will have locksmithing tools.

From that perspective, the ban makes sense, kind of. If the police catch a burglar with locksmithing tools, then he's automatically a criminal, even if they can't prove he broke into anybody's houses. What if he's not a burglar? Well, law-abiding citizens by definition wouldn't have those tools, unless they have the appropriate certification, which the police can of course check.

It serves as a convenient filter to lower the bar to being able to arrest burglars. Of course, there's the question of whether there are legitimate reasons for non-certified people to have these tools, and whether the tradeoff is worth it (I'd certainly lean toward "no" there, since it seems like a big restriction of freedom for a minor gain), but on its face the prohibition is not completely absurd.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#143

Post by rayiner »

I don't think $1,000 an hour is unreasonable for an expert (I'll leave aside the judgment of whether this guy is such an expert or not). There are quite a few law firm partners that charge over $1,000 an hour for their services (http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/st_TOPRATE0...) (and that's just the small publicly-available slice of what is usually pretty guarded information).

The fact that people here on HN are reacting negatively to the rate reflects what I think is a cultural flaw in the developer community: programmers seem very reluctant to demand real money for their services. I rarely hear people complain that programmers are too expensive, even during this current boom. Given that people complain about everyone's rates: doctors, lawyers, plumbers, etc, that's almost a sure sign that programmers charge too little and expect too little.

Software is where the money is these days. Google, etc, have double the revenues per employee of any major investment bank. Yet, the culture on Wall Street is such that the investment banks (which are public companies too), pay out ~50% of revenues in compensation. There is no reason software development should be any different.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#144

Post by aangjie »

ruswick wrote: post #135
delinka wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...justify an hourly rate of $1000 (or even 1/4 that)" No. He didn't justify anything. He's limiting the type of clients that talk to him. Point: "This rate is designed to weed out less serious clients. [...] If anyone hires me to write code for $1000/hr, they are wasting their money."

You're missing the point. Clients can't justify hiring him for such an exorbitant rate because his claim to fame is somewhat mediocre.

But isn't that the Clients' problem?. His blog post is very clear, he claims he has some specific optimization skills on iOS apps and they're worth $1000.I have no idea or experience on iOS to judge whether he's right. Also do note, he may have other references that vouch for his skillset(optimization of iOS apps.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#145

Post by samstave »

1000/hr == ~2MM per year.

There are thousands upon thousands of people who make more than this annually.

I think one of the things that keep people self-limiting is looking at their income per hour. I have long stopped looking at my income per hour and focus on what I want to make annually.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#146

Post by rada »

gav wrote: post #122
jmduke wrote: post #39

Sam's resume: http://assets.samsoff.es/pdf/Sam%20Soffes%20Resume.pdf This, to me, is more surprising than the rate.

It was surprising to me too, I work as a consultant and am regularly billed out at up to $400/hr. I have a resume and a "consulting resume", which is a list of all the projects I've been staffed at for my current employer with the company name's redacted. People are willing to pay the high rates because you bring a wide range of knowledge about how other companies have done things, your level of technical skills is u…

I used to be billed out at $325/hour as a junior programmer and it wasn't until later that I fully understood why.

It's not your "wide range of knowledge" but rather the risk profile of your employer. Some RFP's demand that the consultancy have 10k+ employees, 20+ years in business, and so on. Some of these requirements are government mandated, some process mandated, etc.

In other words, if you, with all your knowledge, were to strike out on your own, you would find yourself quite unable to bill at $400/hour, even if you were to be hired by the very same clients (which is not going to happen because they are paying the higher rate specifically so that they can get the low risk profile as per above).

In my experience, $400/hour at a large consultancy translates into ~$150/hour as a sole consultant, wide as your knowledge may be.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#147

Post by rprasad »

tptacek wrote: post #60
rdl wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

Plenty of M&A lawyers bill $1000/hour. Hell, Big 4 accountants who handle M&A bill $1000/hour and get away with it.

You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#148

Post by goblin89 »

patio11 wrote: post #54

There exist many, many things one could do with a computer worth piles of money. Knight just blew $400 million in 45 minutes. What rate could you have charged them in the middle of that for credibly offering a fix? That's worth a few orders of magnitude more than a lot of work, but there are plenty of companies with revenues in the millions or tens of millions with very specialized IT needs. They might be unable to h…

However, I believe you have to be comfortable and convincingly experienced in that particular area in order to get such a contract. Which is not always an option since the area is ‘very specialized’.

Or you may be able to deal with wide range of IT problems that includes that area, but then there's a question of credibility—whether that particular area would seem like something you can deal with to company management, considering that you've never done exactly that thing before. In this case it seems that you either need strong reputation for dealing with different problems successfully, or some leads inside the company. (Either way is possible, of course, but apparently not as easy as it may seem on the first sight.)

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#149

Post by joshu »

mgkimsal wrote: post #120
joshu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waffles on demand? Waffles as a service?

Cloud waffles. No, no... WaffleCloud(tm). As a mobile service. Syncs with your whipped cream on-demand.

Waffles are a $10b annual business in the US alone. If we can get just 1% of that sector...

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#150

Post by tptacek »

rprasad wrote: post #147
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of M&A lawyers bill $1000/hour. Hell, Big 4 accountants who handle M&A bill $1000/hour and get away with it. You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.

I'm sure there's a class of M&A laywer, or at least a class of M&A project, where rates can be backed out to 4 figures an hour. But my numbers come in part from recently being a party to a BigLaw-mediated M&A transaction.

(Hopefully this doesn't sound argumentative; I believe you. Just supplying a data point. Overall point: $1k/hr is very very high.)

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