
This is how much tech consultants make per hour now. - Ritournelle
http://news.dice.com/2014/04/09/tech-consultants-prepare-get-paid-work-harder-ever/
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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."

~~~
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.

~~~
aculver
Because I'm fortunate to have a circle of developer friends where there is no
longer any taboo talking about rates and salaries and no one is charging less
than $100/hr. Maybe even $130/hr now. My rate is now $200/hr for one-off iOS
and Ruby on Rails projects, up from $120/hr when I started working
independently in the summer of 2012, and I still have to refer folks to
qualified friends.

The taboo of talking about salaries and rates is something that only benefits
the people employing you and maybe a handful of employees, but never benefits
employees at large. As a manager I remember finding out how much my employees
were underpaid vs. another friend's team in a different division and after
bringing up the issue with my director or VP a company-wide memo went out
telling all managers and directors to stop talking about salaries across
divisions. I wonder why.

~~~
danielweber
How geographically widespread is your circle of friends? It was the "anywhere
in the world" part I was wondering about, not the fact that your friends can
discuss wages.

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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.

~~~
timo614
There's also the self employment tax to consider for contractors working for
themselves in the US.

Employers pay 7.65% and you pay 7.65%. If you're on your own in addition to
the income tax you have to pay you also need to pay the whole 15.3% of it. To
compare salaries between a person working for themself and someone working for
a company it should be taken into account since it's a big chunk of the money
you're making.

~~~
noodle
I was sort of spitball including that in there in my calculations, but yes.
This is an important thing for people to understand when dealing with or
becoming a contractor/freelancer.

I think that a lot of people don't realize things like this when they do their
back of the napkin calculations for freelancers/contractors. $50/hour != $100k
salary.

~~~
j45
In addition to assumptions of napkin salaries, the numbers could work in a
place with very low taxes (10% on profit under a few hundred thousand), or
friendlier contractor taxation locales, like Canada where you can do some
reasonable income splitting between personal and corporation expenses.

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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.

~~~
iamthepieman
ok granted. The last part of the article provides some generic useful tips on
being a consultant. I was referring to the statistics and graphs which provide
no context when I said it was useless.

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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.

~~~
Argorak
We are very upfront with clients that they cannot book us 40h a week, because
everything else means that I cannot shift the work of synchronizing with my
colleagues, organizational stuff and the whole thing of "being a company" to
one day in the week. My pitch is: "either, you get us 4 focused days a week or
I have to do my company stuff from your office". Exceptions are short
stretches of full on-site work. Works very well, I must say.

On the other hand, I once had a agency billing: "Assembling Desk". The
employee in question was a very honest book-keeper, that was his first day in
the company and management didn't check and billed. We replied by asking
whether the employee is sitting well and healthy ;).

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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.

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

[http://www.modis.com/clients/salary-
guide/downloads/2013-sal...](http://www.modis.com/clients/salary-
guide/downloads/2013-salary-guide-for-it-professionals.pdf)

~~~
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...

~~~
will_work4tears
I looked under Web Developer and I'm getting underpaid based on almost all
definitions. The closest I came to (but still somewhat under) is Webmaster
(small company). I'm so glad that's not my title though.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

~~~
dodders
Wall St consultants (let alone HFT 'experts') should make somewhere close to
double that. The same is true for London/Frankfurt/Singapore/Hong Kong
financial industry consultants.

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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.

