Comment by cityzen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cityzen | Hacker News Reader

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Read the blog post I linked to. There is a section that specifically says "What I did to earn those rates" that does not mention AT ALL that he is spending half/one third/some/very little money on travel and expenses. I've been independent for nearly 20 years and I rarely include travel and expenses into this big bucket called "RATE". The more I think about it, if a significant amount of that money was used for expenses than it makes the whole thing look quite bad.

He even says at one point, "Spoiler alert: there is virtually no difference in the mechanics of work done between $100 an hour, $200 an hour, and $30k a week — all of the leveling up there is in sophistication on who you go after, what engagements you propose and deliver, and how you package things for clients." which would lead me to believe that he's just charging $30k a week, just as he would charge $100/hour.

I think people need to just take this stuff with a grain of salt. i have worked with quite a few large companies over the years and I don't believe any of them would pay $30k a week for: "I combined a modest amount of programming skill (typically Rails, Ruby, and Javascript) with substantial experience with using engineering skills to move marketing/sales levers, including by doing SEO, email marketing, A/B testing, (light) UX design (typically around high-value parts of a SaaS business like signup flows or purchasing pathways), etc. I turned down essentially any gig which was strictly engineering in character and rather aggressively went after bigger projects which were “closer to the money” every couple of months.". That said, I could very easily see a company hiring someone for a $30k contract to do those things, the weekly rate just seems extremely misleading to people that are struggling to charge even $100/hr (which is not a bad rate by any means).

I used to work in software training. We charged $4k/day as a base rate. Travel was charged separately. Most contracts were M-F. That's $20k/week, and that doesn't count that your employees weren't doing their jobs for that week, they were learning stuff. Also, literally our entire curriculum was open source, so it's not like that was secret sauce.

Yeah, it's not the exact skills you're talking about, but it's similar.

I guess I'm also confused about "I don't believe any of them would pay $30k a week for" vs "I could very easily see a company hiring someone for a $30k contract to do those things". Isn't hiring someone on a contract to do these things for a week consulting?

Key point is in your opening, "I used to work in software training. WE charged $4k/day" which would lead me to believe this was a company and not a person. In that instance, training, it makes complete sense to charge those kinds of rates.

My point about $30k a week is that if ONE person walked into a room and said, "Hi, I'm Bob, this is what I do and my rate is $30k a week" it wouldn't fly very far. Now, If ONE person walked into a room and said, "Hi, I'm Bob, this is what I do and it's going to cost you $30k" is very different, whether it takes 30 minutes, one week or a year.

From my experience, many people read Patrick's blog and similar blogs to try and understand the economics of how to make more money as an independent developer. At some point this stuff becomes more about luck than it is about actual development economics. The boring companies most developers have the "privilege" of working with just don't have the ability to make these connections and justify budgets like this, worded in the context of "this is my rate per week"

The company was two people, then three. That's all the bigger it was. You can do the same thing as a one-person company. The distinction isn't that large. (I did not make that much money but first, I was a special case and second, this is about price, not about wages.)

And I do think this advice is applicable to non-training stuff, but Patrick already wrote about it at length so I won't get into that here :)

> whether it takes 30 minutes, one week or a year.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying.

>I guess I'm also confused about "I don't believe any of them would pay $30k a week for" vs "I could very easily see a company hiring someone for a $30k contract to do those things".

I think cityzen mean $30k a week vs. $30k total. The wording was maybe a little loose, but that is what I gathered from it.

For F-500 corporations, a $10k day delivering a training course with assessments isn't unheard of. But nobody is close to 100% utilized doing that work.

Absolutely. We _definitely_ weren't near 100% utilized.

I actually think that might be why bootcamps became an attractive proposition; it's much easier when you're selling months at a time rather than weeks or days at a time, in a sense.

I worked in consulting/training for 4 years now, but if this work would be 100% utilized, i would have quit after one year. So the rates must be high to allow for just 50% utilization or even less.

Yes, this too. I assume all three of us can agree that building salable courseware is demanding and sometimes tedious, and that actually delivering a course is fucking grueling, even when you're having fun doing it (which is not every time).

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