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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

The only way for a "consultant" to average 38.8h per week is to either have a full time contract or to work 50+ hours a week. There's overhead in consulting, bookkeeping, marketing, sales, etc. There's no way you can bill an average of 38.8h a week unless you're working really high hours and I don't understand how that could be an average across the industry.

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I had a hard time just getting over 22h per week. Its one of the reasons I switched to weekly billing.

On average a lot of the legit consultancies (not including recruiter shops) ask their employees to bill 32h per week.

We are very upfront with clients that they cannot book us 40h a week, because everything else means that I cannot shift the work of synchronizing with my colleagues, organizational stuff and the whole thing of "being a company" to one day in the week. My pitch is: "either, you get us 4 focused days a week or I have to do my company stuff from your office". Exceptions are short stretches of full on-site work. Works very well, I must say.

On the other hand, I once had a agency billing: "Assembling Desk". The employee in question was a very honest book-keeper, that was his first day in the company and management didn't check and billed. We replied by asking whether the employee is sitting well and healthy ;).

a consultancy employee doesn't have to do business development, marketing, accounts payable/receivable/collections. A freelance consultant does. In most cases an employed "consultant" should be able "bill" 32 hours per week.

I wonder if they're including people who have a full-time salaried position with the job title of "Consultant" in this mix. It would make the numbers make more sense.

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