

Oracle Consulting Rate Card - pwim
http://www.cio.ny.gov/Contracts/ContractDocuments/OracleConsultingRateCardExhib9.pdf

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jasonkester
Seems quite reasonable.

I sell a white label version of one of my products (Twiddla), with an API for
integrating it into your site. From time to time I field requests from people
who want to build their thing on top of our platform, asking if we do
consulting.

I tell them yes, then quote what it would take to build what they want and 90%
of them have a heart attack on the spot.

"But we have this quote from another developer saying he can do the whole
thing for $1,500!"

I don't doubt it. But then I suspect his dev didn't build Twiddla. I did, so I
charge accordingly. I recommend having your own team do your integration since
really it's quite straightforward, but if you really need it to work right and
you need it fast, you can go straight to the source (but it'll cost you.)

It's the same thing with Oracle. Sure you can find a guy to build your thing
for $25/hr, and chances are he'll probably even do a good job. But if you want
to remove all the "probably's" from that sentence you can pay 10x as much and
have Oracle do it for you.

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munchhausen
> But if you want to remove all the "probably's" from that sentence you can
> pay 10x as much and have Oracle do it for you.

It looks like you're assuming that the guys Oracle sends out to do the job are
true domain experts, and that's a giant leap of faith.

~~~
rbanffy
You are also paying insurance. When the project fails and blame gets assigned,
you did the "right" thing.

If you hire an incompetent, it's your fault. If you hire Oracle and they send
you an incompetent, it's theirs. Good luck with getting the money back though.

~~~
ojosilva
You're not just getting insurance... if the project is delayed or just needs a
hand or two, Oracle will throw more people in to meet deadlines. If a
consultant leaves the project, they will be replaced to keep continuity. But
it all depends on how strategic an account you are to Oracle.

But yeah, nobody gets fired for hiring Oracle consultants.

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achille
Also note the Oracle supplied GSA (Federal) price list: (see page 21)

[http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-
pricelist-070...](http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-
pricelist-070605.pdf)

Which means that's the cheapest rate Oracle is allowed to give. By law.

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rdl
Those rates are about half of what I'd expect.

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beedogs
I don't see any date anywhere, though. Those rates could be from ten years
ago.

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toyg
Comparing to current Euro rates (which I know), they look about right at today
prices.

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dustingetz
for the multiple comments like "omg that's outrageous!", this blog post will
help understand the economics of consulting[1].

    
    
      [1] http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html

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brc
I need to charge people more for customisation and integration work.

I suck at charging people money for hourly work.

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kbob
I'd like to see the average salaries of the people providing this work. I
expect most of them are in the range of $40-80 per hour (annualized), or about
20% of the total.

If that number is right, the customer is paying 25% for the work, 25% for the
overhead of the consulting company, and 50% for the Oracle brand.

~~~
pilom
no that sounds about right. When you start consulting the recommended advice
is triple your hourly rate. 1x to pay you, 2x to cover your benefits, and 3x
to cover downtime between projects and when projects overrun. Consulting
companies usually charge their customers 2.5-3x their consultants hourly fees.

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tibbon
It seems I'm the only one shocked at how much this is.

Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me
reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that
might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made.

I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source
database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and
they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows
Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core
code of the product that often.

I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet.
We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated.
Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?

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Vivtek
Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be
doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the
size of your company.)

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tibbon
That's about what it seems to come down to. I have yet to hear a compelling
technical argument for Oracle aside from vague mentions like, "It's what an
enterprise uses" or "It's so strong it could run X"

But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook,
Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.

~~~
bmelton
There are two reasons most people use Oracle. In some cases, they have a
product that requires it, and doesn't support anything else. If this product
happens to be unique in the industry or core to their business, they will
generally happily pay the Oracle tax and be done with it.

The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people
in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent.
There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and
being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near
everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle.

It's the 'safe' choice if you can afford it.

~~~
tibbon
What does Oracle do that a programmer wouldn't write as compatible with other
databases? Just trying to figure out why a product wouldn't be written to work
with more things.

~~~
bmelton
Lots of things, really. They don't have a real 'limit' capability that I've
found that works in any way like mySQL's.

To mimic MySQL's "SELECT last_name FROM employees LIMIT 50,50" you have to do
something like this:

SELECT last_name FROM (SELECT last_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY
last_name) R FROM employees) WHERE R BETWEEN 51 and 100;

Aside from that, it's general operational differences and variations from the
SQL spec on a pretty grand scale. The flip side to that though is that most
serious Enterprise companies are generally using Oracle already anyway, so
it's safe to target Oracle or MS-SQL and know that almost all of your
customers will have one or both.

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bernardwilson
I was expecting that to be a list of really, really expensive rates.

That's actually pretty cheap.

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rythie
How did you get two urls in the title for this one?

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gala8y
Recently there were few (one for sure) postings with scribd.com listed in
parenthesis and they had nothing to do with scribd (they were all pdf's if i
remember correctly). This case sure is different - even stranger. Looks like
HN script is behaving.

edit: Fresh example from /newest list:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190866>

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jules
HN has been adding [scribd] links to pdfs for a very long time. Scribd is a YC
startup.

~~~
gala8y
Roger that. (Am kinda new here.)

Then, it looks like its uploading pdf to Scribd or looking for Scribd copy of
a posted pdf ...or does something completely different.

<http://www.scribd.com/vacuum>? sure sounds mystic.

Anyway, not much to discuss.

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waitwhat
I assume the script is called "vacuum" because it sucks in a url (and then
displays it.)

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shrikant
Yeah these are either old, or special rates for US Federal Whatevers.

I know quite a few senior (ish) consultants in Oracle who were billed at 3x
this.

It makes sense that they give the feds a different rate though - I would
assume federal contracts last much longer than a lay customer (3x longer?).

~~~
alttag
It may just depend on how the contracts were structured. For example, in the
OP, travel, room and board were billed separately.

As you pointed out too, this contract was for 10 years, so there was probably
a discount built in as part of a competitive bid.

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dantoomey
I think these rates are low (and probably old). I worked for a systems
integrator over 10 years ago and our bill rates for similar levels were
higher.

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suyash
Staff Consultant - 1-3 yrs of experience and the rate is $220/hr in NY. Wow, I
wish I had that job!

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dmor
I was expecting it to be more

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kahawe
What actually is "outrageous" about those rates is what will ends up in the
pocket of the poor sob who will be doing all the work... because it won't be
an actual Oracle employee but very likely just some small contractor.

I used to be a consultant working for a contractor for Sun (all big names in
consulting do this, however. saves their hr costs) and Sun charged the
customer about what you see on that card; the company I was working for,
however, would end up getting about or less than half of that.

All Sun was actually doing was providing a "project manager" I never saw and I
didn't get remotely the kind of information and access to information that
actual Sun techs would get and have. So ultimately they just sold their "good
name" and passed on the work and kept the lion's share and when one of the
projects went south (nobody effectively got the customer under control), they
made sure all their contracts were water-tight and passed all the blame right
down to us and we had to pay them back.

Consulting is dirty, dirty business and you'll be swimming with sharks much,
much bigger than you when working for the average small, highly effective and
flexible IT company. And yes, you will sell your soul more often than you
shall like.

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xxiao
wow, that's a lot more than an EE consultant can ever make.

