Ask HN: What is the highest consulting rate that you have come across, in tech?

[akudha]

After reading through https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28336318, I was curious how much people charge for their services. I found someone charging $350 per hour for webflow consulting, which was quite a surprise to me (never imagined such high rates were possible).

What are some examples of high/very high consulting rates that you know of? What is the area of expertise in such cases?

Edit : I am more curious about one man shops (or very small firms) and individuals/freelancers. I know big consulting companies charge ungodly amounts of money while paying a fraction of it to their employees.

[eastbayjake]

It wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't immediately point you to @patio11's authoritative post about why developers should indeed imagine such high rates: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

[danielvf]

Each US nuclear reactor has a planned shutdown every two years or so [1]. It's a crazy couple weeks, particularly since many outside technical crews brought in to work on the shutdown are already scheduled to go on to the next shutdown, and if the dates isn't hit, costs go sky high. Not to mention you've got a billion and half dollars worth of power generation sitting idle while it's down.

Since US plants are old, some of the control systems are purely mechanical. Think PID loops, but built out of spinning metal.

According to the legends circulating around Sunday afternoon barbecues near my local power plant, these require super-human skill to tune. Hordes of fresh engineering graduates wielding Matlab has been broken by the challenge, resulting in dreaded shutdown overruns. Also the difference between a well tuned control system and a oldish one makes a lot of financial difference in the operation of the plant for the next two years. Making a new digital control system would require an unthinkable recertification from the NRC, and is a total no-go.

And so the US nuclear infrastructure relies on a handful of old, retired engineers known as "witchdoctors". They show up for a week or less of a shutdown, tune the spinny bits to perfection, do it on schedule, every time. Vice-presidents tremble at their every whim. The fee for a tuning was rumored to be $250,000, and the witchdoctors then disappears back to one of his three homes in the Caribbean, or to some inaccessible mountain retreat.

(I, of course, cannot verify the truth of any of this. Just things I've heard.)

[1] https://www.roadtechs.com/shutdown/sched/outage-chart.html

[patio11]

This reminds me of Cobol Cowboys (actual motto: "It's not our first rodeo."), a consultancy of aging Cobol developers brought in by banks/etc when the systems which run the economy need maintenance work done on them.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841682627/cobol-cowboys-aim-t...

[The_DaveG]

This seems exceptionally realistic.

I’ve sat next to former employees who almost certainly get paid more than I do because they know the process and no one else can match that knowledge.

I generally don’t work nuclear plants, but in my experience they are a magnitude more expensive in everything.

Compared to the cost of downtime, it’s a small price to pay.

[josephmosby]

I've seen $600/hour rates for individual engineering work on mission-critical systems or high-revenue systems.

There are two massive factors impacting rates: sophistication of the buyer, and sophistication of the contractor.

I used to make $200/hour doing Drupal development for really small outfits: tiny real estate agents, restaurants, etc. My budget rarely went over $4000 and the sites were templated enough that 20 hours was honestly doable. They didn't want much and therefore wouldn't pay much because the return on investment for a website honestly isn't much for some of those places. Restaurants derive more foot traffic off Google Reviews than their own websites.

If you're dealing with a mission-critical system that costs you $100,000 per hour that it's down, then paying $1,000 per hour for someone to do it right is a no-brainer. However, that also means that the consultant has to inspire the confidence that they can get it under control. BCG/Bain/McKinsey/Deloitte/etc are masters at inspiring that confidence which is why their rates are so high.

[rsweeney21]

I run Facet (www.facet.net), we help software engineers find contract work and full-time jobs. We've worked with hundreds of companies and helped hundreds of contract developers find contract/consulting work.

Generally speaking, there is no limit to the rate you can charge per hour for highly specialized skills. But companies will only pay an exceptionally high hourly rate for very short term engagements. For short term engagements you are better off charging a fixed price for the project. It makes it easier for companies to translate what they are spending into the value they are receiving. Disclosing a $1,000/hr rate will be hard for anyone to swallow.

In the US, full-time, 40 hours a week contracting/consulting work pays $150-$225/hr for Senior to Principal level engineers.

Companies like IBM or Accenture will charge $300-$400/hr, but companies generally won't pay that for individuals.

Hope that helps!

[raincom]

There is an inverse relationship between the contract rate and the length of a contract. You can charge $350 per hour, such a contract doesn't last no more than 3 months. If you charge $150 per hour, it can last a year, even three years.

[andrewmcwatters]

Yeah, this should be a top comment. You shouldn't care so much about the hourly. You should care tremendously about how the contract contributes to your annual revenue.

I've made more off $100/hr engagements than I've seen orgs make at $175/hr, which are both entirely tame hourly rates. In today's market, there's no reason to go lower than $100/hr, IMO.

After that, you're squarely in Upwork or so territory.

[aynyc]

I never seen anything higher than $200 for general contracting based work. My friend who's a K8s expert charges around $350 per hour, usually when shit is on fire or initial configuration. However, he doesn't get 40-50 hours of work consistently. He works about 20 hours a week which is fine by him. If he wants to do 40hr/wk work, he gets about $150-$200 an hour.

Several of my college professors told me back in late 90s that they charge around $750 to $1,000 per hour for clean code/architecture/XXX on specific topics to companies.

[rossdavidh]

So, there is a tradeoff in rate vs. several other factors. If you charge higher rates, you are more likely going to be working for financial or other large corporate firms. Maybe that's ok with you, but if you don't prefer that kind of customer, it's a thing to keep in mind.

Another factor is how much of the year you expect to be working. If you have a customer who's going to want 30+ hours a week for months, it would make sense not to charge as much as a customer who needs 4 hours work for an emergency bugfix.

That all said, hundreds of dollars per hour is something I have seen in database administrator contracting, especially on Oracle databases (where the customers tend to be large corporations).

[cercatrova]

I've seen tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, for simple changes. For example, if a company's system is well and truly fucked, people specialized in fixing it can charge insane amounts of money, simply because the company would be losing 10x their fee every hour that the mistake is not fixed.

[omarhaneef]

Just look at what other professional services firms charge (lawyers, mckinsey, etc) and there is no reason why the "top" tech consultants cannot charge something on that order.

If you count Ideo and Frog Design and BCG/Bain/McKinsey's tech branches as tech -- which I do -- then they already do.

[atonse]

Yes but it’s easier for people to justify in their minds “this lawyer costs $600 an hour but is going to save me tens of thousands from getting sued” vs a lot of stuff on the tech side that’s often harder to make a connection as to WHY hiring this expert on database multi-threading will result in higher revenues.

Also it’s just what people are used to. People are used to paying lawyers $300+ an hour so it’s slightly less shocking.

Not arguing against, just saying what I feel is why it’s different.

[crispyambulance]

The OP is specifically asking for what individuals charge and not consulting firms.

I think it's important to point out that part of the reason why individuals can charge rates comparable to large firms is that they offer a more personal experience. You end up with the person you talked to.

Moreover, individuals are better for jobs that have a smaller scope. A large consulting firm won't lift a finger for a "small job" unless it's a recurring/maintenance component of a much larger job or unless they can charge at truly insane rates (1000's per hour) which desperate clients are still happy to pay for sometimes.

[njoubert]

$1500/hr to $2000/hr was the going rate for Stanford professors to be expert witnesses on patent law cases when i was consulting at DLA Piper.

[browningstreet]

I know someone who billed $1500/hr, 40+ hours week, for years.. doing DB work. He had been an employee, offshored himself, and when company needed his services.. that was the rate he established.

[tootie]

Freelance rate or agency? I worked at an agency where we charged not only the cost of a person, but the overhead of running the agency. I think my personal rate as a tech director was as high as like $450/hr which was close to the peak of what we charged for any role. Some of the account managers were close to $500 but they only billed 8 hrs/week to a given client at most.

A top shelf creative director could get similar or even more. Webflow expertise however seems pretty ridiculous. I can get that out of Ukraine for like $25/hr.

[flippy_flops]

Several jobs ago we had an external hard drive that was plugged in under an IT guys desk. Despite having a high end server room 50 feet away, all of our companies main financial/etc files were stored exclusively on that hard drive. It crashed and brought the $80M company to its knees.

Basically the shared drive was much easier to use so everyone ended up using it over time.

Ended up paying a data recovery group $5k/hr to recover what they could.

[protomyth]

I remember a person in the 90's charging $250/hr to run automated tests (he did the setup/runs on 200+ pcs). Really nice guy.

The state of North Dakota was paying $200+/hr for SAP developers at one point. Not sure the why or how of that one, just saw it advertised on the state website.

[larrik]

I knew someone who would make 5 figures for a one day presentation to random companies. I wish I had actual details, but she was one of the richest people I've known personally (outside of customers). She somehow converted her programming career into that.

[dudul]

Talks and trainings can indeed be very lucrative.

[gompertz]

We live in a world where a fence builder or even a handyman wants $100/hr, and at least 2 or 3 hours minimum call out rate. That should put it into perspective that highly technically skilled labor such as computing science should be beyond these rates.

[karmicthreat]

I had a quote that I think was around 600$/Hr. This was for someone to build and tune a PID model for an IMU we were using.

Admittedly the person had a ton of experience doing this, so they were probably well worth the money.

[factorialboy]

Charge them based on the value you offer, not the effort you put in.

[andrey_utkin]

Agree. Also, I am amazed why so much fixation on hourly billing. This guy seems right: https://podcast.ditchinghourly.com/about

[rossdavidh]

In many cases, it is not possible for you to know what value they will get out of the project, especially at the very beginning when you need to say what your rate is.

[jareklupinski]

I'm able to charge around that (sometimes higher) solo because I have 10+ years of demonstrable experience (public github repos and working online demos) and can also speak to intricacies of the current market in a few niches I'm personally passionnate about (electronics, radio, biomedical).

Word-of-mouth spreads fast after the first few good engagements, so I imagine most other people in this position don't need to advertise their rates since they're already booked back-to-back :)

[satisfice]

$30,000 per week for software testing training and consulting in Abu Dhabi.

Short term gig, though. Most I have made long term was $300/hr as an expert witness.

[UncleMeat]

I've seen $1000+/h for

1. Somebody with both a PhD in CS and a JD consulting on privacy law

2. Faculty at a top university being an expert witness in a legal case