by Nextgrid | 2026-01-22 13:58:14+00:00
> And if no one takes your price, you fail as a business.

Vimeo employees and all the people part of the recent tech bloodbath experienced that too, but without even pocketing the upside beforehand. I'd argue that for anyone currently searching for a job, they will get a better ROI engaging in sales instead.

Any monkey can (and does) sling ChatGPT'd resumes at anything that moves, hoping to get the job and pocket enough salary before people catch on. That scam doesn't work with consultancy on a "paid on delivery" model, so the market there is much less crowded. There are different scams out there but those primarily target big companies.

> There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr"

We as techies know how the sausage is made and estimate a "fair" price based on the effort it would take us to do it. A car mechanic would probably also consider retail oil change prices to be unfair... because he's already invested in the knowledge and tooling and with those it's indeed a 5 min job.

From a business' perspective though, our work might as well be magic - we are writing prayers in an arcane language to make silicon come to life and do things that generate money for the business. It's magic that they have repeatedly failed to replicate for themselves. The latest fad is AI/LLMs and that will fail too - LLMs only work in the hands of a skilled operator - and otherwise fail disastrously and often generate extra remediation work on short notice.

If you worked in tech there's a good chance your past contributions are netting way more than 1k/hour to someone else already - so you can generate this value. The challenge now is to capture more of said value.

Nobody in their right mind will pay 10x market rate for no guarantee of result; see my other comments in this thread. This would open them up to the same scams that happen with permanent employees and third-world countries will be all over it the next day.

But if they are guaranteed a result then the calculus changes, they are no longer thinking of hourly rates but instead of as a fraction of the revenue enabled by your solution, and their risk is lowered to only the opportunity cost. This is a much better deal for the client. Your resulting hourly rate now purely depends on the value of the solution to the client divided by how quickly you can do the task.

You only explicitly quote the 10x market rate when you want the client to bounce because the job or client sounds like a nightmare. You will get some clients who are cheap and insist on an hourly rate to explicitly prevent you from playing the above game and earning the (much bigger) cut of the solution. The "fuck you" rate is for that, it's not expected to be taken, it's there to set a baseline price for your expertise and make the deals you offer sound more attractive in comparison.

It's basically all sales and reframing your work from salaried/hourly rate to how much your work is worth for potential clients (which doesn't scale linearly with time invested nor software complexity).

As to why am I giving you advice on how to compete with me? Because you're already competing with me by willing to settle for permanent employment market rate for the services I am offering. Encouraging you to charge more helps us both.