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One Thousand Dollars an Hour

samsoff.es

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Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#41

Post by noonespecial »

Usually, when you get to the stage where you charge this kind of money, you are really charging not for the work, but all of the work that you've done before and the experience that came with it. An hour with someone worth their salt can easily save you 20 hours paying the $50/hour developer types.

You don't hire these guys to build your project, just to point you in the right direction. The real question is "does this particular guy have $1000/hour advice to offer". His customers ultimately decide this.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#42

Post by rachelbythebay »

Pay me the right amount of money and you too can have many of my cycles devoted to solving your problems. Exactly how much money depends on what the problem is. Or, you know, you can just pay me to learn (really, internalize) your stuff and point out problems or potential problems. I tend to find things in complicated systems. It's what I do.

I'm dead serious. Bring it on.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#43

Post by aaronbrethorst »

danso wrote: post #29
vegas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The main reason for the rapid growth is a large increase in the demand for computer software." http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s... http://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm

How is the stock photo for the software dev page not yet a meme?

That is a glorious mustache.

Edit: I did a Google image search on it. Here's the stock photo page: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-58442602/stock-photo-male-pr.... "computer hacker in black shirt working at laptops" -- I wonder what the annual salary of black-shirted computer hacker is. BLS doesn't seem to have stats on that one.

Here he is looking manic: http://www.123rf.com/photo_7515672_computer-hacker-in-black-...

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#44

Post by oinksoft »

danso wrote: post #37

I 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.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#45

Post by georgemcbay »

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 just need some expert's time for literally like an hour.

There are some situations like the one he referenced where you're just doing 3 hours of optimization or whatever to an existing codebase but projects like that are few and far between (and I'm guessing the person paying for them will often be disappointed... I'm sure Sam is a great programmer, but 3 hours isn't much time to devote to making really substantial optimizations to an existing codebase nor to train another programmer how to do them him/herself).

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#47

Post by nostrademons »

robryan wrote: post #28

The challenge is to fill hours at a rate like that. Sure if you don't need to consult at all and you manage to fill a few hours a month at this rate then power to you. For most freelancers though, they need to fill a lot more hours.

He doesn't want to fill hours. He wants to be working on his startup. But if he can pull in $3K by showing up for a morning, it's not really a bad deal.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#48

Post by brc »

joering2 wrote: post #30
rprasad wrote: post #26

Holy 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.

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 you're not a corporate consultant getting charged out at $400+ per hour, you're probably undercharging.

To be clear, I'm talking about consultant type work here, not 'code me a CRUD app on an hourly rate'.

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