Is $1000/hr really a fuck-you rate for IT? Coming from finance and eyeballing management consulting rates that are a healthy multiple of those I didn't get the marketing ploy at first.
Yes, $1000/hr really is a fuck you rate for software development.
Most software development projects are months/years long and there are huge context switching costs when trying to swap a new developer in for an old one so you tend to get stuck with the same contractor for the duration which means you're committing to paying someone $1000/hr for months/years. This is quite different than finance/legal where maybe you just need some expert's time for literally like an hour.
There are some situations like the one he referenced where you're just doing 3 hours of optimization or whatever to an existing codebase but projects like that are few and far between (and I'm guessing the person paying for them will often be disappointed... I'm sure Sam is a great programmer, but 3 hours isn't much time to devote to making really substantial optimizations to an existing codebase nor to train another programmer how to do them him/herself).
If you look at what he is selling in his blog though it's a few hours of consulting time here and there as a mentor, imparting expertise on others.
I don't think $1000/hr is a fuck you rate for expert assistance of that sort. I don't know if I would consider him an expert worthy of hiring at that rate but I could see others doing it.
Here's a case where I could see $1k/hr making a big difference (granted I think the customer only paid $200/hr for this but it would have been work $1k/hr if necessay). We had a stored procedure that was performing really badly, and needed some advice on what to do better. I spoke with a database expert for approx an hour and he explained what was probably happening and gave me some pointers to fixing it. If I was trying to fix it on my own, it would have been a week's effort at least because the problem was not in a single statement but poor performance as an emergent property of several hundred or thousand statements running in a specific order and throwing off caching.
Are we talking about $X000/hr for a single finance/consulting professional's time? That rate seems rather unbelievable, but maybe only senior folk in the top-tier firms get to charge that? Are market conditions in finance/consulting just that skewed towards the suppliers?
Yes, that kind of rate is only for partner-level time at a Big 4/Big 3 type shop--and those guys aren't billing more than a few hours a week typically. Even then, $1k/hour is pretty high.
Now, it's not uncommon at all for the staff folks who are on the ground 40+ hours a week to be billed out at anywhere from 200-600/hour. But >$1k? Very rare.
