More like a race to a more appropriate level.
$2K a day is $500K a year. For something that apparently a lot of people can do.
$2K a day is $500K a year. For something that apparently a lot of people can do.
In a previous role, I could bill out for up to $10k per day but that didn’t include travel time and were very intermittent types of jobs that I had to do a lot of free/lower rate work to be in a position to land.
Vaguely speaking, the impression I get is maybe you were doing senior-level "emergency fix the unfixable" type work, like recovering a petabyte-sized Oracle database that had chewed itself, or PMing an 11th-hour restructure of a 50% finished 10M-LOC project due in 4 hours. (I recall an uncitable story I read/heard somewhere about a bank that nearly missed a deadline and had 1000 developers working simultaneously to get the work done at the last minute)
(I can't figure out/guess what the lower-rate work might have been.)
To parent’s point, very specialized and experienced engineering consultants can make a lot. Even something like an expert witness report can be $4-5K per day.
But to repeat these tend to be gigs where this sort of click is running for a very small portion on 200 days per year. It’s not at all like regular contract work.