Ask HN: What do you do and what's your consulting rate?

Feel free to steal from me. ;-)

As a practical matter: If I were a full time consultant I probably would charge more, but I would also be spending some of my time making sure I had a full pipeline of gigs lined up. The fact that my marketing process is about as lean as it gets -- people send me emails from time to time -- means I don't have to cover that sort of overhead.

Patio11 is typing...

As long as I get paid, I don't really mind who writes the checks. ;-)

Seriously though, I wouldn't want to give up any of the flexibility I currently have, which includes both absolute veto over customers and projects, and "best effort" availability which ranges from "reply within 5 minutes because I happened to be checking my email" to "I'm busy with the baby today while my wife plays an orchestra gig" and in the extreme case "I'm tracking down a FreeBSD bug this week; hopefully I'll get around to helping you next week".

This may be incompatible with being contracted out by an agency.

I'm fairly good at crypto (not as good as Colin of course) but I think that's not of that much help in general security stuff. Pen testing = knowing all the bugs and code smells in the popular Javascript frameworks, 0 days in a zillion libraries like log4j, etc. I'm basically resigned that the modern web is bloaty buggy crap and so I haven't found it worthwhile to get too familiar with its workings. I have gotten some fairly pure crypto gigs here and there, but I think wider security, especially web security, is a much bigger and messier subject.

Well, there are a couple components to that:

- Because of my focus in particular industries, I tend to start projects already having a baseline of understanding of what my customers need.

- You can write a fixed price contract that leaves room for a customer to change their mind / not know what they want. If you articulate very clearly in the SOW what you will deliver for the fixed price, then you leave yourself open to issue change orders as the scope evolves. Of course, you need to be careful how militant you are here, because issuing a change order for every minor thing won't help you get repeat business. To hedge against this, I tend to include a bucket of hours for arbitrary changes. This gives the customer some room to change their mind still without allowing them to derive and negotiate against an hourly rate.

- In my experience, fixed price allows me to 2x or more the hourly rate I would otherwise be able to charge, so if I do a bad job at writing an SOW then I have a lot of breathing room between what I'm getting paid and what I likely would have gotten paid had I billed hourly.

RE: Pandemic: I don't develop the work product on customer sites, so I'm only really there for meetings (so a lot during discovery and a lot during delivery). I've found that it's been pretty easy to migrate this to Zoom/Meet albeit with a bit more friction. It's a lot more difficult doing discovery remotely, but I find running workshops in Miro has been invaluable to ensure I'm capturing everybody's voice.

> I've never seen a project where the customer knew what they wanted clearly enough to have a SOW with a fixed scope.

Not sure if you do this but that's why you really should charge for helping with the requirements gathering and solution design, it's really valuable to pin down what the problem is and know that what you're going to build will fix it properly. It also means you're not in a rush to throw out an estimate with limited information. Better for both sides.

The most common case is very early stage technology startups where most of their employees wear many hats. They usually have no legal counsel and maybe 1 or 2 developers including a CTO. They need help on everything from employment agreements, fundraising and NDAs to building the newest API endpoint or Airflow DAG.

It's a little strange at first to have someone doing very different jobs for them simultaneously, but when you're that early stage and having difficulty hiring, it's a blessing once you realize I'm highly experienced and hard-working at both.

Any software company with competitors.

Training speaks to the truism in consulting rates -- you can only command up to the value you deliver to the customer.

With training, you're playing one of the strongest cards: delivering value to many people at the same time, where your time required scales sub-linearly with the number of people.

Consequently, the more people, the more value to the customer, the more they can realistically pay you and still get good value for their money. Win/win.

I follow "20 + 20 + break" approach. My father used it for 30+ years (professor of physics and CS).

It means 20 minutes of theory, 20 minutes of practice, 10-minute break. It can be 25 + 25 + 5, or something along these lines. I never do more than 25. The bottom line is that people are getting bored after more than 20 minutes of theory.

Good luck!

I dont like big frameworks like django, I worked with python and flask in the past. Why?

I was employed for 6 years at company in Toronto until 2000. The company was a consulting business oriented towards delivering complete solutions (products for clients). I saw their ad and just walked into their office. Chatted for a bit with the receptionist who'd also doubled as assistant to CEO got her interested to the point that she brought me to a CEO (company was very small by then). When they hired me, I very quickly have progressed from a developer to a lead architect. While working there I proved myself as creative solution provider and the stuff I've done impressed our clients (those included guys like Bell). All of this came at a price. I got sort of burnout and have decided to do it on my own. Since I already had a reputation and have met many people it was not long before I nailed my first deal. Somebody recommended me to a self-funded startup who knew the business had an idea for a product but had zero experience in developing. We've met. We liked each other. I hired another programmer as single me was not enough and have delivered first prototype in 3 months. The rest is history. I just kept going like this. I've had ups and downs. I gained money, I lost money but overall, I am doing ok. I also have my own products that bring me some money. If you are looking to get a job / contract I am 100% ok for a current contract so no help on that side unfortunately.

Is there anything in particular you are looking for?

More likely to be a tech lead in those cases, or to be helping hold the project together while they are hiring a full time resource. Also in certain cases the companies are so far from ideal states that a lot of good can be done in 6 months. Overall, I agree that most times it won't make sense for a company to plan on switching dev managers or tech leads after < 6 months, but again that assumes ideal conditions or options.

14k is one consultants rate. Engagements are 2-6 weeks, 1-3 people typically. Bigger engagements happen often enough. Blended bill rate is lower with legacy customers, new customer bill rate is 14k/wk. Some discounts possible here and there, for purchasing a lot of work, allowing logo use, etc.

Most projects put 12 month or greater lockups on tokens (which I'd recommend for both vesting considerations and protections for the protocol against dumping).

The standard YC advisor templates are fairly easy to translate to token-based compensation and are battle tested.

Just like advisor compensation in stock, both the protocol and the advisor should weight the advisory scope, how early the project is, and determine fair %s from there.

Yep, I'm always open to new opportunities, but to manage my own sanity and time, I keep my client list short and have a robust set of referrals if I'm already working on an incident. Almost all of the work I take is after hours and weekends as that's where my flexibility is.

I like the idea of working for a consulting firm as needed but it feels like most of those companies only want full-time commitments and I'm rather attached to my current position.

Please do. Decidedly unhip email in profile.

I've had a bunch of success from the Monthly Freelancer thread, and a little from networking and going to local meetups and such.

its crypto. there is a very good chance its all three...