This is how much tech consultants make per hour now.

[jasonkester]

Public service announcement: Tech Consultants don't make $40/hr.

If you're a skilled, experienced developer and you find somebody trying to pay you less than $75/hour to program computers on a contract basis, regardless of where in the world you live, say no.

There do exist people who work for rates less than that. They're either called "employees" and receive benefits, or they're called "people being taken advantage of."

[benjohnson]

I charge $47 per hour - even do business apps in any of the rather-awesome frameworks at that price.

Because my rates are so low, I don't have to spend time making mockups, bid proposals, or have to deal with the know-it-all nephew. I also get to work on fun "what-if" projects and my customers happily pay their bills.

The dirty secret is that I charge for hosting - 60% of my income comes from hosting for solutions made in the past, and I don't even have to lift a finger.... well unless someone finds out about an SSL vulnerability. :)

[dclowd9901]

Especially if you're working independently. You've gotta cover all your costs, including insurance and retirement. That usually puts a well oiled consultant up over the $150/hr mark.

[c0w]

You vastly underestimate the number of highly qualified developers in the world looking for work, and my opinion you vastly overestimate the value of your work. I would never pay your rate. Programming is a commodity. I hire PhD's from Asia and Eastern Europe for less than what would be considered minimum wage in the United States. An order of magnitude cheaper than what I assume your asking rate is. They produce great code and deliver in a reasonable timeframe. Calling this outsourcing exploitative is incredibly ignorant.

[danielweber]

regardless of where in the world you live, say no.

How do you know this? I've gotten pushback in a top-20 (but not top-5) US city on that, even for appsec work.

[lnanek2]

They must not be talking about developers alone. The only developers who work that cheap are remote from other countries. I could see it maybe for IT people who wipe hard drives in computer labs or something like that, and who don't bill directly, but are paid by an agency that bills and takes a cut.

[reboog711]

Is a "Tech Consultant" the same thing as a programmer?

I read that article under the assumption that a "Tech consultant" was someone who gave high level strategic advice.

[Although I'd expect those folks to charge a ton more than a programmer]

[mcmillion]

I tried this for over a year and remained unemployed. Finally gave in for a $15/hr gig. It very much depends on where you live. The pool of clients in this region is very dry, and no one is willing to pay.

[mcv]

Or students making a bit of extra money.

[j45]

That's what an average consultant likely makes as a salary.

$42/hr * ~1980 work hours in a year = $83,160

The caveat here is being a technology consultant is relative to the types of technology problems you're consulting for. Tech Conusltants can much more so today be generalists without much depth in a particular tech skill as the average geek might define. Ie., get your company setup in the cloud using basic cloud services. As a result I do see this position opening up to technically inclined folks in general.

A rule of thumb I've found that can be accurate is you should/can charge about $10/hr for every year of experience you have, and should be working for clients or employers that see value in paying for that kind of experience. At some point that might transition from being an employee to a contractor, and ultimately a consultant.

The lower the hanging fruit, the more the rates lower. Focusing less on technology, and more on business strategy which uses technology as a tool has helped keep my rate fair, and high enough to do quality work.

[noodle]

> That's what an average consultant likely makes as a salary.

No, that is what a highly productive (100% utilized) consultant at $42/h makes as revenue. If you were to convert it into something comparable to a salary and account for realistic work schedule it would probably end up being in the 60-70k range.

[vijayr]

Focusing less on technology, and more on business strategy which uses technology as a tool

How does one go about doing this (other than spending a decade working in a particular domain)? Do you follow any plan, certification etc?

[rmcastil]

> A rule of thumb I've found that can be accurate is you should/can charge about $10/hr for every year of experience you have, and should be working for clients or employers that see value in paying for that kind of experience.

This seems REALLY conservative IMO. If I went with this model when I started consulting I would have quickly gone out of business. Have you had clients that ever said your rates were too high?

[dclowd9901]

I count 2080 work hours... where are your other 100 going?

52x5x8 = 2080

[iamthepieman]

This is mostly a useless article. What does the 42 an hour represent? Is it for independent contractors filing 10-99's and is that their bill rate or their EBITDA or their net income?

Is it the average for salaried workers? (avg hours per year divided by salary).

Did the average hours worked include only billable time or time spent on administrative tasks, company meetings and sales calls?

Did they include part time workers and did they properly weight their contribution to the averages or just lump them in?

[j45]

I disagree.

Any conversation about learning to provide, and communicate value is valuable. If it's not through one particular lens, be it yours, or mine, it doesn't mean everyone has no lessons to learn that you have not learnt. 42 an hour represents an exchange of value for a customer.

After a decade of doing this, there's as many opinions about consulting as there are consultants, myself included.

Having tried hourly, monthly retainers, fixed fee, and contingency based pricing, they all have their merits relative to your skills and ability to deliver value.

It all boils down to being able to add value in a productive way. I work fewer hours than I hever have, deliver bigger results than I ever have, and am making better money with better customers than I ever have. But, I started in the trenches like everyone. These details of how many hours and rates, and utilization rates are much more an issue without paying customers. I was very lucky to be able to get and keep long term customers, which I think is a topic unto itself worth learning more about forever.

[driverdan]

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.

[rmcastil]

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.

[noodle]

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.

[raamdev]

I started working as a tech consultant in my teens (not just building PCs for friends but actually developing relationships with local small businesses, translating tech-speak for them and advising them on the best course of action for things like servers, backups, security, and networking) and my hourly rate started at $35/hr.

Within a few years the demand for my services outstepped the number of hours in my day, so I pushed my rates up, peaking around $75/hr in my early 20s when I finally got sick of dealing with people who wanted a magician instead of a tech consultant.

That was about 10 years ago. I have friends who stuck with it and every single one of them makes more than $100/hr, so I laughed when I saw this article say, "the average hourly salary for tech consultants hit $42.17 in February—an all-time high."

It does say "average hourly salary", but I wonder what percentage of tech consultants work for a salary vs billing the client by the hour.

[cullenking]

A good friend of mine took a contract job (to be hired on fulltime within 3 months) for $30/hour, doing simple company support IT related stuff. He is most certainly considered a consultant. I think this is a very common case, 1-6 months as an outside contractor before being hired on fulltime. Lots of the listings on places like dice are specifically tagged as contract work, leading to fulltime.

[sciurus]

Here's a pretty comprehensive salary guide, including geographic adjustments.

http://www.modis.com/clients/salary-guide/downloads/2013-sal...

[nogridbag]

Thanks. I wonder how I stack up against other developers...

Let's see... Applications Engineer, well I do create web applications and I think I'm pretty dang good so I'll choose "V". Oh but wait, I'm also a programmer right? Or am I a software engineer? But I also "architect" most of our applications. Ugh...

[iamdave]

Heh. Ironic, a thread about consultant salaries and someone posts a link to the company I'm currently consulting.

[Moneta_xi]

This makes me feel good. Because once I adjusted the salary for living in NYC I am still above the average.

[dkrich]

It's very hard for me to take the info in this article seriously with a statement like this:

And given how that’s an average, it’s certain that many consultants are working far longer in order to keep their clients happy.

Well, yeah, and if my understanding of averages is correct, it's also true that many consultants are working far fewer hours. Compared to most jobs, certainly in the field of consulting, an average of 38.8 is pretty low.

[luch]

The second graph (on workweek in hours) is really dodgy : the y-axis range from 38 hours to ... 38.8 hours. Not really a change then.

Also I would have liked to have the spread on both graphs, with the 10/90 percentiles.

[leoedin]

The quality of data representation in mainstream journalism is really poor. I guess it's to be expected - most journalists don't really have much of a scientific background and so miss out on having graphing considerations hammered into them. Even publications like the Economist often squeeze and deceptively label graphs. It's a shame that the people informing the general public about science, technology and maths are so illiterate in it themselves.

[001sky]

According to a Dice analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly salary for tech consultants hit...

TLDR==> the data lacks suitable specificity to be interesting

[usernamepc]

I think they took IT staffing companies like Adecco, Manpower(contractors that work 40hrs/week at clients) instead of IT Consulting (Accenture, etc.) or freelance tech consultants to calculate this- It is too low for someone that calls themselves "tech consultant".

[daemonk]

What does a tech consultant do exactly?

[tensafefrogs]

1) Meet with business people. 2) Tell them they need to focus on [Insert current industry trend here] 3) ??? 4) Profit.

Currently mobile (apps, web) and cloud services.

[dkrich]

1) Meet with business people, 2) sell them on a solution that will save them time/money or increase sales/revenue, 3) very often implement the solution, 4) and maintain/add enhancements to said solution.

[at-fates-hands]

This also completely depends on the region.

This might be average in say the Midwest where the cost of living is much lower than say NYC or California. Most "consultants" I know on the West Coast are making more in the range of $85-$100/hour.

If I lived in NYC and was billing $40/hour, I'd practically be hovering on the unemployment line with the cost of living there.

[fasouto]

If you bill 38,8 hours/week you need to spend ~55 hours in front of the computer every week. Sometimes it's hard just to bill 30 hours... And $42/hour for US contractors it's surprisingly low.

[andykmaguire]

That massive looking graph increase is only $6 since 2006.

[ezrameanshelp]

Seems low.

[brianbreslin]

This is probably on an annualized basis ($80k/year) and focused more on IT networking/computer consultants than say software developers.

[gress]

I presume this actually means IT contractors.

[badman_ting]

If you're worth your salt, you can get more than $42. I don't really know what else to say.

[wmil]

It's average for "tech". I'm guessing that includes everything from Wall St HFT experts to some guy laying network cable.

[tomswartz07]

This makes me sad in my public school district job. I make about 1/2 of industry standard.

[star0zero]

I'm inclined to agree with the consensus here, so far. As soon as I saw that 38.8 hours a week was the consideration for "long hours", the rest of the article became suspect.