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One Thousand Dollars an Hour

samsoff.es

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Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#111

Post by PakG1 »

Swizec wrote: post #94
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…

You obviously don't watch enough sitcoms if you didn't know that would work. Ok, granted, I saw this and until I visited the US I didn't believe it would work (it wouldn't in most doors I've seen). But in the US, we tried, it opened every locked door in the house. So yeah, the lesson to be learned from this is next time to at least try some hair brained ideas before calling someone. :)

I have watched enough mechanics open a car door locked with the keys inside. I still can't do it on my own though. Call a professional, the guy gets it done in seconds (plus the time it takes for him to travel to wherever I am). Some things, even if you possess the knowledge, you may not possess the skill.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#112

Post by smiler »

lgieron wrote: post #104
vegas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can and should charge at least $225/hour if you are a competent software person. There are far less competent software people then there are mediocre lawyers, and mediocre lawyers can charge $225/hour.

I'm thinking lawyers might, by the nature of their profession, provide more value than devs though, since they can keep you out of jail or prevent you from being seriously screwed in a deal, while a dev is mostly just increasing your revenue/profits by extending your software. Also, lawyers are able to provide value within relatively small timeframes (compared to developing something meaningful), which makes high hou…

There's plenty of software required to track / audit what's happening in a business in order to comply with plenty of legislation

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#113

Post by vacri »

einhverfr wrote: post #99
btilly wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a bit off topic.. but I found this he/she thing really annoying. Then use singular they. See http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... for verification that this is acceptable English.

I don't like the singular they. I find it far more annoying than the generic he or the construct of he or she. The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English…

Etymology aside, what's your suggestion for a workable replacement to "they"?

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#114

Post by einhverfr »

nicky0 wrote: post #101
einhverfr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the singular they. I find it far more annoying than the generic he or the construct of he or she. The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English…

Does it have a "rule" like that really? Isn't grammar just a description of the patterns we see in languages?

Rule in the descriptivist sense.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#115

Post by einhverfr »

vacri wrote: post #113
einhverfr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the singular they. I find it far more annoying than the generic he or the construct of he or she. The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English…

Etymology aside, what's your suggestion for a workable replacement to "they"?

Sure. One can avoid using gendered pronouns in generic contexts. As a writer, one doesn't have to use them at all if one doesn't want. Indeed "one" makes a fine indefinite pronoun when used properly.

My own style is to use he as super-generic (i.e. bordering on the proverbial), "one" as personal, shared person perspective generic ("one" in this case doesn't differentiate between first and third person, and has some aspects of second person imperative thrown in), and "he or she" as highly descriptive generic.

It works very well. I use "one" most often, "he or she" rarely, and "he" only occasionally. What I hate doing however is having to explain that by "man" I mean it in its original sense. That's why I prefer to say salesman over salesperson, etc. -man never carried with it gender assumptions. If it did, we wouldn't have the root in the word "woman." Now -wif did. Which is one reason why referring to an "alewife" as a female bartender is somewhat archaic.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#116

Post by colkassad »

brc wrote: post #48
joering2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get it. he can charge whatever he wants to. Nothing stops him for charging $10,000 per hour, just like Lady Gaga or Biber or some other crazy POPular artist would. Its really not about how much he asks; its about how many people can answer it. He tries to go against the current and assume 1 gig at $1,000/hr is better than 5 gigs at $200. It makes sense. I would love to see people paying for my work 5x more…

It's my experience that most IT professionals grossly undercharge. Get a plumber around. Chances are he'll charge you more for fixing your toilet than you will to build him a website. Both are equally easy jobs using off-the-shelf components. As an experiment, I had someone ask me recently for an hourly quote to do some work. I didn't really feel like it, so I quoted double the normal rate. They didn't even blink. If…

How much would you charge to code a CRUD app?

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#117

Post by einhverfr »

georgemcbay wrote: post #45
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20

Is $1000/hr really a fuck-you rate for IT? Coming from finance and eyeballing management consulting rates that are a healthy multiple of those I didn't get the marketing ploy at first.

Yes, $1000/hr really is a fuck you rate for software development. Most software development projects are months/years long and there are huge context switching costs when trying to swap a new developer in for an old one so you tend to get stuck with the same contractor for the duration which means you're committing to paying someone $1000/hr for months/years. This is quite different than finance/legal where maybe you…

If you look at what he is selling in his blog though it's a few hours of consulting time here and there as a mentor, imparting expertise on others.

I don't think $1000/hr is a fuck you rate for expert assistance of that sort. I don't know if I would consider him an expert worthy of hiring at that rate but I could see others doing it.

Here's a case where I could see $1k/hr making a big difference (granted I think the customer only paid $200/hr for this but it would have been work $1k/hr if necessay). We had a stored procedure that was performing really badly, and needed some advice on what to do better. I spoke with a database expert for approx an hour and he explained what was probably happening and gave me some pointers to fixing it. If I was trying to fix it on my own, it would have been a week's effort at least because the problem was not in a single statement but poor performance as an emergent property of several hundred or thousand statements running in a specific order and throwing off caching.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#118

Post by nwp »

My issue with this has less to do with the rate and more to do with the overall tone of it. Sam has done some excellent work, no doubt, and should charge whatever rate he finds appropriate. However, the presentation of this is likened to a gold cufflink clad lawyer with a monogramed shirt who proclaims with a laugh, "I don't get out of bed for less than a grand an hour," as he sips the brandy and takes a draw on the Cuban cigar before expelling its smoke in your face.
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