I just wish that if people who have been consulting for a relatively short time themselves want to share their advice with others who might be thinking of going down that path, they would give some sort of meaningful context to guide those other people about what to expect in practice. Otherwise, we're going to have a whole load of people who were actually on perfectly respectable if not exceptional rates, who were happy doing the work they were doing, whose clients were happy with the work they were doing, and who can't conveniently tie their personal contribution to an X% increase in the total profits of their clients, yet who then think they should be charging 10x as much and start going after new clients with unrealistic expectations. In most places, the software development industry is still quite a small world, and I'm genuinely concerned that such an approach is going to damage young developers' careers.
To be frank, I'm deeply skeptical about the current round of Tim Ferriss-style "Make More Money Than God In Five Minutes" discussions on HN. There are some interesting perspectives, and I'm certainly not criticising Patrick or any of the other guys for volunteering their points of view. But I do think quite a lot of that advice is going to be hard for many people to apply in practice, because the context won't be the same, and I do think it's borderline irresponsible to push the advice in as general and unqualified a form as sometimes happens, even if it happens with the best of intentions.
