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Comment by rokhayakebe | Hacker News Reader

$300/hour? That is one of the highest paying job i ever heard of.

Better to go to law school and specialize. I once worked with a big time tech lawyer. For three hours work, we paid him what I made pre-tax in two weeks, and I wasn't doing terribly for that point in my life.

Pretty sure he's not getting beat up by any pimps when he strolls into work each day, either.

He worked really hard, too. I mean, I wasn't paying the bills, but he definitely seemed worth the cash. Filed some awesome stuff for us -- you don't often read legalese that entertaining.

There is a difference between 'charge-out hourly rate' and 'hourly rate of pay'. Even high end lawyers are unlikely to be paid more than one-third of their charge out rate, unless they're partners (ie, business 'owners').

You probably took that into consideration with your response - I'm not disagreeing with you, just making it clearer.

And yes, there are many jobs where the pay rate exceeds $300 / hour. In my field (business coaching - no formal qualifications necessary, though they may help) a Harvard Business Review study found the average charge-out rate is $500/hr, the top measure is $2400/hr, and most practitioners work solo so don't split that fee with anyone else.

I find this true for just about every professional services field. Hiring a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a consultant often comes at a rate multiple times their own salaries.

But the difference is that the lawyer was probably working 50-60 billable hours a week, whereas an escort (or a business coach, presumably) will work significantly less than that.

If you can bill $craploads per hour, why work 50-60 hours a week? I'd work 30. Maybe 20.

Yes, this is what economists call the "backwards-bending supply curve for labor". Turns out if you pay people craploads per hour, you get fewer hours out of them, not more. This is unlike every other supply curve--if you pay $1,000 per hour of labor you get less labor than if you pay $100 per hour of labor, but if you pay $1,000 per gross of self-sealing stem bolts you get way, way, way more self-sealing stem bolts than if you pay $100 per gross of self-sealing stem bolts.

The worst you get from ordinary supply curves is diminishing returns. If you paid $1,000,000 per bushel of apples, well, you're just throwing away money--I'm sure we'd max out the earth's apple-growing capacity well before $500,000 per bushel. Labor's the only supply curve that actually bends back.

Lawyers don't even pocket the majority of their rate prorata.

You can get that if you pick an enterprise product (e.g. SAP, IBM products, etc.), specialize in it and consult (not contract!). Though getting pounded by strangers might be easier and more rewarding.

Yeah, if you can find 8 billable hours/day, every business day; otherwise, it's not really fair to make a meaningful comparison to a "job."

True, you need to find enough hours, but it doesn't need to be 40 hours a week. The article lists her yearly total as greater than $200,000; while that means she is only working 10-15 hours a week, it still compares favorably to other "professional" jobs.

So many jobs that pay that sort of cash. They're just not easy to get. It's that old 10,000 hours of practice thing again. If you're willing to build up a lot of experience in an arcane technical field that is in continuous demand, you can easily get that sort of cash, particularly in short-term fly-in-and-fix-the-thing gigs.

I know of COBOL programmers in a bank that make $150/hr because they are irreplaceable now.

Another way to look at things is that a lot of speaking roles pay in the 000's for a 1 hour talk. Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour.

  Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour.

Your assumption is way off. I have read from professional public speakers that for every minute of a speech, they will prepare on average about 1 hour. A 60 minute speech would have about 60 hours of preparation behind it.

I am practising public speaking and while I haven't done longer speeches, my experience shows about the same ratio.

Whilst I'm sure that's true on technical areas of great detail, a lot of celebrity speakers turn up and do the same talk over and over again. This is particularly true in the case of someone with a story to tell, ie, war hero, ex politician, ex founder with a big IPO, etc.

Your point stands - I was just throwing figures around.

I'm doing my first conference presentations in two months time, and I expect to take probably 40-60 hours to present two 60 minute sessions. And I don't get paid for it at all!

I met a COBOL programmer from a bank a few months ago. He was driving a taxi.

He didn't know how to sell himself, then.

I've seen job postings here in Uruguay that pay 4x the average local programming wage for anyone that knows COBOL decently (about U$ 3000 monthly)

He might even be willing to relocate here for that money (you can live princely here with that much). It was for state telecom company ANTEL, last year (I learned some COBOL at university, but not enough) .

It might not be hard for him to relocate to Uruguay; he lives here in Buenos Aires. But he might have other problems that are at the root of being a COBOL programmer (e.g. lack of interest in new things, lack of aptitude for programming, I have no idea) and he was about a month away from retiring anyway.

These are the billable hours. I would guess that the time spent finding good clients is about the same again. So make that $150/hour. Still good, but in the same range as a technical consultant with 5-10 years experience.

...who is also spending non-billable time finding good clients.

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