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Comment by rawnlq | Hacker News Reader

Making the company money is the not the only factor is it? Any engineer at google/facebook/etc are probabilistically making the company multiple millions per year too (terrible estimate from revenue divided by headcount). But probably only a handful of them would ever be able to demand the rate you charge because they are replaceable.

How do you make sure the company won't just take your advice and hire a guy to do this for 90k/yr instead of letting you work on it for three weeks?

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If they thought they could take a proposal and productionize it with someone available for hire at a total cost of $140k in their first year and that they’re capable of finding, closing, and managing that person then a) my blog is free and you’re welcome to it and b) they would have more than one email written. But for whatever reason they have not made that hire, as evidenced by having no emails actually traversing the interwebs.

People occasionally took my proposals and productionized them with existing or (much more annoyingly) new staff. Oh well. That’s one reason I charged what I charged; the sales process assumes 1 to 3 “actually nope we decided we don’t need you” per engagement which happens.

Great point - most people are not aware that finding good personnel to hire is like diving for pearls.

By far, the majority of consulting engagements I’ve seen or participated in (Big 4 and freelance) are things that could easily be done if the company hired a few folks, for much less pay than this. Simple number crunching, tedious paperwork review, trivial integrations/dev work.. I would hazard a guess that at least 50% of all enterprise consulting spend goes to these tasks.

However the indisputable fact is that these companies are willing to shell out for this stuff, whether because they think it’s temporary work (cheaper to hire Patrick than an FTE who you then have to keep paying or dispose of) or they’re paying for the top-of-Hill expertise (eg. paying a Big 4 where you get 10 hours of a partner’s time/expertise at 1k/hour and then 300 hours of 23yo grunt labor).

There could be a ton of reasons from covering one's behind to how things look on the books etc.

Who is the 23yo?

From the age - a fresh college graduate recruited into the consultancy employee/meat grinder.

Exactly. And not just one, each partner had a battalion of them.

Because they don't need a full time person to achieve the results and it would be silly to shell out more money and try to train somebody to do something that they've clearly failed to do in the past. If my car needs $1000 of repairs, I'm not going to shop around for a class to teach me how to repair cars - especially if, like your example, it costs more than just getting it fixed.

You don't. You just pick the ones that are in a hiring freeze or actually see the value of what you can demonstrably deliver in a quick turnaround time

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