Lawyers who handle multimillion dollar deals can justify $1000/hour. Security specialists can justify $1000/hour. Some guy who makes a mediocre todo list application can't.
Its really not about how much he asks; its about how many people can answer it. He tries to go against the current and assume 1 gig at $1,000/hr is better than 5 gigs at $200. It makes sense. I would love to see people paying for my work 5x more than average, I think I would be more excited too.
Also the guy doesnt seem cocky. He mentioned twice that this is too much to pay anyways.
Get a plumber around. Chances are he'll charge you more for fixing your toilet than you will to build him a website. Both are equally easy jobs using off-the-shelf components.
As an experiment, I had someone ask me recently for an hourly quote to do some work. I didn't really feel like it, so I quoted double the normal rate. They didn't even blink.
If you're not a corporate consultant getting charged out at $400+ per hour, you're probably undercharging.
To be clear, I'm talking about consultant type work here, not 'code me a CRUD app on an hourly rate'.
The reality is he's in a position to not need work, and is able to afford turning down 95% of potential employers. Good.
While I don't doubt that there are security projects that work out to more than $1000/hr, top-tier security people do not as a rule bill anything like that.
For what it's worth: neither do top-tier BigLaw lawyers.
I've personally never seen >$450 for security, except for people who have huge expenses bundled in doing the work, so it's not really labor. $100-200 is more normal for long engagements, $200-300 for shorter. (the most I ever billed was $350/hr x 4hrs).
The funny thing is paying high rates for someone actually good for a few days is certainly cheaper than staffing up a huge project with a bunch of $35-55/hr idiots, but there are companies who just won't pay even $250/hr for people actually doing the work, so they end up doing this.
You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.
(Hopefully this doesn't sound argumentative; I believe you. Just supplying a data point. Overall point: $1k/hr is very very high.)
Right now, the mobile dev market might actually allow a rate like this.
And he/she doesn't have to justify that rate to everyone. If people hire him/her at that rate, it's justified.
a bit off topic.. but I found this he/she thing really annoying.
Then use singular they. See http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... for verification that this is acceptable English.
The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English one either uses wer (counterpart to wif, survives in werewolf, which is why I joke that all werewolves are by definition male) or wapman which is the counterpart of wifman.
This led to an interesting problem. If you are talking about a specific woman and have perfect gender agreement, then "he" has to be used to refer to "woman." That makes things hard to read and so Old English has a rule which is that you ignore the grammatical gender of the word when you refer to a specific person. If we applied this to modern English we'd have amazing constructs like:
"I went to the store and the woman at the cash register told me that I needed to give her an extra $5."
vs
"Any woman thinking about getting married should make sure that he has some level of financial independence first."
The first is specific while the second is generic. He in the second refers to "any woman" not her prospective spouse!
Similarly "My wife says she isn't up to coming to the party this weekend" but "A wife today still finds it has to do a majority of the housework."
I don't like mixing numbers though. If "they" is an acceptable singular why isn't "it's" an acceptable possessive?
My own style is to use he as super-generic (i.e. bordering on the proverbial), "one" as personal, shared person perspective generic ("one" in this case doesn't differentiate between first and third person, and has some aspects of second person imperative thrown in), and "he or she" as highly descriptive generic.
It works very well. I use "one" most often, "he or she" rarely, and "he" only occasionally. What I hate doing however is having to explain that by "man" I mean it in its original sense. That's why I prefer to say salesman over salesperson, etc. -man never carried with it gender assumptions. If it did, we wouldn't have the root in the word "woman." Now -wif did. Which is one reason why referring to an "alewife" as a female bartender is somewhat archaic.
That's because the meaning has changed, and also the sexism of the term is better understood. If you're American, do you also use the term 'negro' to refer to black people? It's a neutral and descriptive term in medical parlance, but it's a clear case of a word having more impact than its roots back in the day.
So trying to shoehorn in an out-of-date definition is changing the modern meaning of the word, just the same as repurposing 'they'. In truth, I think you're just being stubborn about wanting to use sexist language, since you don't seem to have too much of a problem with using all the borrowed words and grammar we've gained since the 'alewife' days.