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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>And yes. It does feel like being ripped off when someone puts ~30 minutes ($20 max) of Western labor into something and then turns around and charges me $800 for the privilege of supporting an American company.

So as a senior expert in your field, you make $20/hr? Because I don’t know any field that charges by the half hour, and I don’t know any senior engineers that make minimum wage to do their job but maybe you’re the first.

That’s not including the markup the company would need to add assuming you aren’t dealing with an independent contractor.

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> I don’t know any field that charges by the half hour

Not that it detracts from your overall point, but some of the best paid knowledge workers on the planet - lawyers - regularly bill out in 6-minute increments.

Yes, but while the increment is 0.1 hours, but that is not the minimum project size/billing, so you can't generally just order six minutes of advice.

Beyond that, just the average documented phenomenon of task switching is 20 minutes or 0.3hrs, so your "only six minute" project really costs the engineer 0.3+0.1+0.3 hours.

But sure, if you are in a long-term project (here defined as more than an hour or two total), you may see line items on your bill of 0.1 or 0.2 hours in a day for a quick call or something.

Are you such a knowledge worker? Could someone actually describe to you a problem worthy of your consideration, give you time to think/calculate, then describe a response in only six minutes? Sure, there might be some such edge cases, but commonly?

People who do electrical work are much underpaid when compared to software engineers. If you are one of those usd 300k FAANG interns you probably dont understand that lots of smart engineers rot doing difficult jobs.

Drive to analyze a broken electrical box at customer. Analyze what is wrong. Read the schematics. Repair it (without getting fried). 15 minute repair. 2 hour drive. Zero glory, just a shitty job.

Or exchange something that was manufactured wrong and test it. Climb to a wind turbine, open the box. Exchange a component. Test it. Climb to another 50 towers to fix same problem.

Testing short batches of custom products. The testers are paid more when compared to blue collars, but still earn shit. Also everyone assumes that they are "factory workers" while they program their elecronic testers in C++. Paid a fraction of what the FAANG intern earns.

Life is unfair to many many people. Looking at your post and above - it feels like you are some guys in IT who dont know how hard it is in other areas.

Other alternative are bookkeepers, who run books for multiple small customers. Get easy to impossible questions about tax law - all day every day. From your 200+ clients to whom you provide advice by phone. For which they dont want to pay.

A team of few accountants tries to book invoices and fill taxes from their clients, while being bombared by questions. Often super tough questions. Literally 0/10 experience for a knowledge worker. Every day.

Yes, this is the flip side, and it is very unfair.

While it is very unlikely that you'd be able to get and pay for only a six-minute increment of service from a professional, those pros put in a LOT of time outside the six-minute increments for which they are billed out.

An attny in the family has a specific external billing rate and required yearly billable hours to produce. Yet she is burdened with literally hundreds of hours of extra admin, firm, "culture & innovation", interruptions, etc. work (much of which should be done by paralegals, clerks etc.), for which no credit is given. I've seen similar in mech/elec engineering.

This is exactly true. These jobs can be very difficult and rarely pay well at all.

This is what I find so profoundly offensive when so many Western companies charge insane labor rates. I know for a fact that very little of that money is going to the person doing the work.

I'm not taking about hiring senior experts in their field.

I'm taking about working with someone who repeatedly moves materials through a long established process.

It can be arduous and unpleasant and rarely pays very much. We can debate the ethics of all that, but it's not reasonable IMO to pay pennies and charge 40x.

I know repair people who charge in 10 minute increments, rounded up, with no minimum.

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