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Comment by bradlys | Hacker News Reader

This is just fantasy though. No one is offering $800k/yr at 20hr/week.

I suspect there are people who earn this. I doubt any of them are the traditional definition of "employee" though.

Consultant/Contractor might be the closest.

Yes - there are people who win the lottery too. My point is that there isn’t enough for this to really be a thing we should put up as anything but fantasy. If you think you’re gonna get a recruiter who lands this in your inbox - buy lottery tickets instead.

I see and agree.

But it does help to inform people the right way to proceed if 800k in 20hrs a week is their goal :)

As long as you do it whilst handing them a salt shaker.

Senior....

* Accountants doing company liquidations

* Trial lawyers

* Performance artists

Others I cannot think of. Pay rates over $1,000/hr are surprisingly common. Many of the recipients work fewer hours as a result

I've encountered shops billing $300+ per hour for fairly routine types of software work. And yeah, that's still pretty far away from the $800/hr or so that would be 800k for 20hr weeks, but we're not talking super specialists there. And you're not gonna take home all of that if you're just an employee at that shop, but if you go independent or start your own shop... you suddenly have a higher ceiling for basically just "doing the same thing you were already."

It does take a very specific additional skill set to build up a network of clients and have the patience for that to turn into something where you're regularly booked, but if money is the number one thing you want to optimize for, it's something you should investigate.

Bill out rate and pay the employee rate are entirely different things

If you own the shop, what you can pay yourself may be closer to the bill-out rate, at least I think that's the idea.

No one is offering those jobs, but they exist just the same.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-04/jim-si...

> He started at age 40 with no experience:

> It took him a while—he launched his fund in 1978 and it didn’t really click until about 1990—but he absolutely achieved his dream of making money without doing anything.

Jim Simons has about 250 iq points. He may seem like a normal(ish) person, but he ain't. I'm not sure that anyone should ever assume they'll figure anything out the way he did.

And, he had lots of experience with math - he was insanely great at it. And then he took it and applied it.

At one point the ancient Greek philosopher Thales took his (at the time extremely arcane) knowledge of weather patterns and managed to leverage that into great wealth by predicting the olive crops. Allegedly, he did this in response to a heckler who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth.

Thales was an all around great philosopher though, known to be one of the "seven sages" of ancient Athens. Amongst other feats, he managed to measure the height of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh when nobody else at the time could.

More importantly he learned how to manage genius. At his fund it’s not one or two people who are “the man”, each and every one of them are “the man”. This is what makes their outperformance so consistent. It’s incredibly hard to manage one genius in a room full of people across the IQ bell curve, let alone when all the employees (partners?) are in the 98th percentile..

Yup for sure. Nobody likes being managed by a relative fool, so you have about 10 people on planet earth who could have done the job. I'd guess it is waaaaay further out than 98th percentile though...

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