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Comment by benaston | Hacker News Reader

Off topic and a little nosey, but what skills do you have that command 650/day?

I don't believe, in the last 15 years, I've ever hired a contractor, for any IT work, from Jira consulting to installing telephone lines, (and certainly not any type of skilled development coding) that charged less than $800/day.

Usually a contractor charges from $150 - $200/hour, with a discount if you need them for more than a couple weeks.

It was £650 a day, not $ - so about US$1000

You know that every year the USD gets inflated more? A person making $100k salary gets paid about 400/day (I just divided by 260) with holidays and no breaks. 650/day for freelance where the pay is not consistent sounds pretty modest to me. Really the way inflation and money printing and the market for money has been going these days we should all be getting paid a LOT more. But we will just continue to be happy with our 50-200k salaries as the rich 1% keeps gathering more and more of it.

Just being pedantic here - grand parent post mentions £650 a day, which is around $1000 per day depending on the prevailing exchange rate.

It's in GBP, so £650/day is actually $285,356.50. I wouldn't call that modest in the least.

It's also $137/hr or $121/hr, depending on whether you assume 8- or 9-hour workdays. In IT consulting, these are not high rates.

Also keep in mind: A day rate implies consultant (i.e. non-employee) work, which further implies <100% utilization. Assuming he only works weekdays and takes 4 weeks of vacation (comparable to working at a BigCo), 80% utilization gets you to ~192 days, or $210k.

That's probably optimistic, though. This math further assumes he is able to sell 80% of his time in the 20% of his nonbillable time, and that he doesn't lose any billable time due to scheduling issues (i.e. each client is ready to go as soon as he is). Depending on his business, he'll have to spend some cash on overhead (accountants, lawyers, etc.).

Yep. If you charge ~$x/h as a freelancer you're probably taking home a similar amount to someone making $xK/year once you hit your stride and have a lot of contacts coming to you with work (which can take years to build up).

My brother works as an IT project manager consultant for big old companies that will remain nameless. Daily rate something like £450-500, so call it $750.

Under utilisation is true enough, but you also have to take into account the tax efficiencies you can put in place as a freelancer (in the UK at least), which means he's still well enough off to have a Porsche 911 and a flat in the Swiss Alps.

Nice work if you can get it.

its not even the 1 percent. Its more like the .1 percent. according to forbes: An entry ticket to the 1% starts with an annual income of about $394,000 (says Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) or about $1.5 million in liquid assets (my zestimate). Post-tax and retirement savings, that’s about $220,000 a year while they are working. These are national norms. If they happen to live on the coasts or near a major urban center, as is more than likely, they might need twice as much money to crash into the 1% by local standards.

Good point. It is definitely a smaller portion of the population that is really pulling the strings with money. I guess I could just say Wall Street? The banks? Regardless, I wouldn't say the lower 1% that makes this sort of middle class money that you are talking about are completely innocent. I'm sure many of them are government or government-funded private business employees, and I'm sure many of them aren't doing important work that is worth the fat wallets they are building thanks to the people who do control the money.

However, I'm also not denying that there are many highly influential, priceless, people getting paid these high salaries that are greatly beneficial to our society and have legitimately earned their fortunes. It's just unfortunate that everything is being done to support the continuation of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. However, thanks to some people, the entire world can become richer.

Java Enterprise, Spring, JMS, Messaging and a couple of large Java based ecommerce platforms although I spend more time actually leading projects than I do writing code now.

Most good Java guys that I know take around £500 - 700 per day in the enterprise, telco, banking and ecommerce space.

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