10 ms·

Mike Lee on why he can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development

109 points by adamhowell 16y ago

angrycoder 16y ago
Say what you want about his ego, but this article will stick. When some biz guy or PM has his back against the wall with a horrible, failing project that just won't work, calling in the 1k an hour iPhone guy won't sound like a bad idea.
- statictype 16y ago
  Assuming 1K per hour iPhone guy is willing to take on your failing horrible project.... which of course he may since 1k per hour iPhone guy probably doesn't get a lot of contracts anyway... :)
andreyf 16y ago
Wow, he might be good at programming, but from his writing, he sure seems like a jerk (Zed Shaw's long lost twin?). I've known many professionals who, being very good at what they do, charge both less and more than $1k/hour, but none of them would ever mention their rate in public, much less feel the need to explain why they deserve it. On the other hand, this is great PR for software engineers: a couple more posts like this, and I'll be able to double my rate and still seem like a deal by comparison :)
- patio11 16y ago
  I am sort of torn. Lets not be the bucket of crabs, who have to pull down anyone threatening to leave the bucket. Engineers need to learn to be comfortable with business. Part of that is professionalism, which cuts against talking rates too loudly. Part of it is being uttetly unembarrassed to say that, yes, you are priced at what the market will bear and the market will bear an awful lot.
  - alttab 16y ago
    I'll agree with the bucket of crabs comment, as we all tend to do this. However, I'm not going to hire this guy not because he is too expensive, but because he has no problem branding himself as a douche.
  - donaq 16y ago
    Another reason not to be the bucket of crabs, guided strictly by self-interest, is that if one person declares that he's charging a big sum for doing something and consistently getting paid, it will raise the bar for the entire industry. In other words, if you're a good iPhone developer, you can also raise your rates while still giving your customers a discount compared to that Mike Lee guy.
- alexkiwi 16y ago
  I'm not so sure I would want to work with this guy, Zed Shaw on the other hand was one of the nicest people I've ever gotten an e-mail from
  - agotterer 16y ago
    I met Zed in person a few months ago at a meetup. I had an awesome 45 min chat about everything technology. What a nice guy. I wish him all the best. Mike Lee's blog title is "motherfucker". From that alone you can derive what type of person you're about to do business with. Theres no question his experience and skills are incredible. Fact of the matter is there are other successful app developers who likely have a resume that is comparable. Think of it like dating. Would you date the hottest girl if she had a shitty personality? Maybe :)
    - kenshi 16y ago
      Do you really think you can derive the character of a person based on the title of their blog? Seems pretty damned shallow to me.
      - natrius 16y ago
        Life is full of uncertainties. Our job is to assign probabilities to outcomes and use those probabilities to make choices. I don't think it's unreasonable for that piece of evidence to increase the probability of his disagreeableness in someone's mind.
      - waterlesscloud 16y ago
        Why is it shallow? It's a facade he has deliberately chosen to present to the world. That choice implies things, and he's either aware of that fact or utterly clueless. Note that I'm not saying anything about what conclusion I draw from that fact, just that it's a fact.
        kenshi 16y ago
        Because that line of thinking implies there is a link between style of expression (external presentation) and character values (morals etc). It's like judging someone's character by how they dress (e.g. suit == good, dependable etc).
- Adaptive 16y ago
  Tangential, but I feel compelled to note that: * I have never met Zed * Like many others I have heard all sorts of stories about him * People are capable of change * In my recent experience Zed has always seemed civil, thoughtful and passionate about code He may have been a jerk in the past, I can't speak to that, but he seems like a decent guy now. Yours, the anti-pigeonholing squad
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - andreyf 16y ago
    Err, I meant to make it clear that I'm comparing their public writing style, not how they are in person.
  - ahoyhere 16y ago
    He's always been 98% civil, thoughtful and friendly in person. That doesn't mean he won't point out if you or somebody else is being a moron or a dickhead, but he does it judiciously. Zed, like so many other successful writers (e.g. Mark Twain, Churchill, every famous playwright people quote on their blogs) has made a career out of being a sharp-witted asshole in print.
- mpk 16y ago
  I really don't get why it's generally assumed that Zed is an asshole. I exchanged a few technical emails with him when he was just getting started on Mongrel (v1) and his replies were always friendly (as well as being relevant). He's put a lot of code out there and the parts that I have used have been great. Remember when Bear Stearns fell? He was leading some Rails project there at the time (IIRC) and he used his hacker media fame to get his team members new jobs before himself. No idea how that panned out, but that doesn't exactly sound like asshole behavior to me. Yes I know he puts out rants from time to time. They make for fun and educational reading. As far as I'm concerned a good cathartic rant every now and again speaks for a person, though I wouldn't recommend everybody to go out and put it all online. (It seems to have worked wonders for Zed, though :).
  - sjs 16y ago
    Because most of us don't know him and his online persona is pure asshole. It's that simple. I've read that he's a nice guy in person all over the place and that's great, good for him. He writes like a spoiled, attention-grabbing 15 year old, and he's very insulting and arrogant. Then we have to read about it on news.yc and reddit for a week after every rant. I mean look at this thread, one mention of the guy and all of us are talking about him instead of the topic at hand. Someone described him as poison and I agree 100% with that assessment.
    - elliottkember 16y ago
      From memory, I think it says somewhere on his blog that the whole tone is just an act. It gets him a lot of publicity, and sometimes he says some interesting things. I'd be willing to bet he's a really nice guy. In my book, it takes a lot of nice to take yourself so lightly.
alanthonyc 16y ago
tldr: Mike Lee is the Brad Pitt of programmers. :/
- wmf 16y ago
  No, it's even better: he's the Brad Pitt and the Wolf (from Pulp Fiction) of iProgrammers. I always thought being the Wolf would be an interesting job; certainly stressful but never a dull moment.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Not to diss your comment, because I don't intend that, but it got me to thinking. I hereby propose we all stop using this "tldr" or "TL;DR" meme that keeps popping up on every other web posting lately because it's an unnecessarily opaque code, and not very readable, in my opinion. Instead, how about instead we start doing something like this: summary: <whatever>
  - corin_ 16y ago
    tldr: stop using tldr
nolane 16y ago
The Dunning–Kruger effect at work.
- proee 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- Silhouette 16y ago
  Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who hires him?
- ramchip 16y ago
  You can say a lot of things about the guy, but I don't think you can call him incompetent without at least a little justification. I think the Dunning–Kruger effect/paper is one the most abusively reposted things on HN and Reddit.
  - JohnnyBrown 16y ago
    The Dunning-Kruger effect: If you aren't practicing it, start.
_delirium 16y ago
I'd be curious if he actually can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development. It sounds like it's deliberately less than his time-filling rate: he doesn't get fully booked weeks at that rate. In fact he seems to imply that his schedule is so empty that he's likely to be free on any given day to start working on a new project immediately. That's certainly a reasonable strategy, since sometimes the money-maximizing rate is not the same as the one that fills your schedule. But, how empty exactly is his schedule? Are we talking 10 hours/wk billed on average? Or are we talking no work most weeks, with the occasional job every few months?
- xenophanes 16y ago
  Working 10 hrs a week at 1k/hr would be awesome. Saving time is better than maximizing money.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Sure, but that's the part I'm wondering about. 10 hrs/wk at $1k/hr would be great (~$500k/yr for part-time work!), but, say, 1hr/wk on average wouldn't be too good, even at that rate. And I read his post as having an undercurrent of being more, "I'm trying to convince you paying me $1k/hr is a good idea" rather than "there are actually a lot of people already paying me $1k/hr". Has he gotten dozens of contracts at that rate? A few? One?
    - moe 16y ago
      A few? One? I'd venture the guess the number is very small or perhaps even zero. At that rate he'd burn through a reasonable budget for an iPhone app within weeks. And I mean the entire budget, which would normally include graphics design and backend work. I have no doubts he could get an app off the ground faster than most teams - given he lives up to his bold claims, which is entirely possible. But as with every software project that's only a very small part of the story. The elephant in the room is maintenance and ongoing development. If you have $500k and were to launch a business around an iPhone app what would you rather do? Give most of that money to a single person, get your app in 8 weeks and call it a day? Or would you rather hire a team, pay significantly less for the initial launch, get it in perhaps 16 weeks, but then still have money in the bank and a committed team for further steps? Hiring this guy at that rate just seems like a bad business decision for pretty much any project. If anyone does then, well, kudos to him for parting the dumb from their money.
quan 16y ago
The "motherfucker" page doesn't load, maybe I can help him with some web development at only $1,000/hr
- peng 16y ago
  Coral cache: http://le.mu.rs.nyud.net/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/24_What_money_can_buy.html http://le.mu.rs.nyud.net/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/2... Still takes forever to load, but you can speed up the process using Readability.
- alexkiwi 16y ago
  Maybe he should make his blog an iphone app instead, the root URL took me 5 minutes to load
- code_duck 16y ago
  He clearly could benefit from my CSS consultation, offered at only $200 an hour.
- gxti 16y ago
  Loads instantly here, but is completely blank with javascript blocked. That's how you know he's a true professional.
ryanjmo 16y ago
It also sounds like he can convince you that if you don't go with him you are going to have problems and then you are going to have to hire him eventually anyway. Being able to convince people not to look around at other options is a very good way to drive your price up. I'm surprised he didn't make that point in the article; it certainly is related to why he can charge so much...
kevinpet 16y ago
If the best are 10x as productive as the mediocre, I don't see a problem with this. Of course, you might say that the $120 bulk of freelance programmers are already a notch above mediocre and maybe $500/hr is more reasonable, but whatever the market will bear. It's a good argument to cut top marginal tax rate so that he has an incentive to take more work than he's willing to at $500/hr after taxes (assuming he's in the US).
- rortian 16y ago
  Marginal tax rates being high is a great idea. I'd be with you if people with high salaries spent all, or virtually all, of their salary. But they don't. In this economy we need more money being spent. When things are doing well again, you could try to make a case for the rich being richer, but it's a strange cause to take up.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    They're also exceptionally low, currently. There are no rates above 35%, whereas they used to be above 70% back in the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Ford/Carter/early-Reagan days. But I suppose which rates and which kinds of incentives count as too high / too low is always relative and subjective...
    - WildUtah 16y ago
      Actually, under Eisenhower and Kennedy the top marginal rate was always between 91% and 95%. Then it was 70% until the early 1980s when it went down to 50%. That's just federal, not including state and city income taxes.
      - pingswept 16y ago
        I found this list of the historical tax rates fascinating: http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/151.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/151.html (Why they have to use "Macromedia Flash Paper " to show a list of numbers is beyond me.)
klochner 16y ago
I'm guessing this is more of a flat fee structure, and he's optimistically expecting it to work out to $1k/hour. You can write to my former coworkers in Apple’s Developer Technical Support, and they will point you toward a solution within three days. Or you can just call me and have it ready to resubmit by morning. . . . so what happens if it's not ready by morning? Is there a scenario where I'm dinged for $24k in a day while he's mainlining coffee & trying to debug my app?
elbrodeur 16y ago
Interesting approach to customer acquisition. After taxes he'd be sitting on just over a million a year without working much more than 40 hours a week. But maybe his pricing is predicated on the desire to not work 40 hour weeks?
- gte910h 16y ago
  You don't get 1k an hour without high high availability
- mkramlich 16y ago
  I'm guessing the latter. You sort of win either way with that approach: 1. seek $1000/hour and actually end up billing 40+ hrs/week at that rate: WIN all the way to the bank 2. seek $1000/hour, but then end up billing a few hours/month at that rate: still WIN because you can cover your cost of living and still have lots of free time and energy for other things
dasil003 16y ago
He's claiming his role in Tap Tap Revenge as justifying that rate. If all you know about his role at Tapulous is what's been written at TechCrunch that probably sounds impressive. Of course if you know some of the guys there who don't have a soapbox and a sycophantic following that's a pretty hilarious opener.
- marciovm123 16y ago
  can you elaborate?
  - dasil003 16y ago
    I'm not involved with Tapulous and therefore I'm not really at liberty to say. Actually I probably should have kept my mouth shut on this thread, because I despise when people do what I just did, but I just could not sit by while that credential got thrown out there as if Tap Tap Revenge was his brainchild or something.
    - dillydally 16y ago
      I don't know anyone inside Tapulous personally, so this is pure hearsay. Take it as you will. What I've heard is Mike thought Tap Tap was too low brow and that by focusing on that app to the exclusion of their other apps at the time (Twitterific and FriendBook) they were betraying his vision for the company. After he expressed his opinion about this he was asked to leave.
      - hboon 16y ago
        Did you mean Tweetsville or really, Twitterrific?
        dillydally 16y ago
        Sorry I meant Twinkle. Whatever Tapulous' Twitter client was.
    - 16y ago
mcantelon 16y ago
I'd like to hear from him in a month or so how it worked out.
mrshoe 16y ago
That’s a little like hearing what Brad Pitt got paid for his last movie and wondering why the producer didn’t instead hire Brad Pitman for scale. Oh you’ve never heard of Brad Pitman? You’re not familiar with his work? But you are familiar with Brad Pitt’s work, right? After all, he’s an experienced actor and producer with not one, but two, Academy Award nominations and a portfolio full of household names. Bzzzt. Horrible analogy. Brad Pitt isn't worth what he's worth because of his portfolio full of household names. He commands his rates because he is a household name. People will go see movies just because he's in them. He's not getting paid for talent, experience, or attractiveness. He's getting paid for his personal brand. That brand all but guarantees that the filmmakers will earn a handsome return on their investment. You, however, are an iPhone app developer. App purchasers have never heard of you. They will not turn out in droves to buy an app just because you worked on it.
- ros3 16y ago
  They might turn out in droves because he offered a $30,000 dollar prize for solving a puzzle in his app "Puzzlloto". Which has been pulled from the app store... http://puzzllotto.com/ http://puzzllotto.com/
- petercooper 16y ago
  He commands his rates because he is a household name. [..] You, however, are an iPhone app developer. App purchasers have never heard of you. They will not turn out in droves to buy an app just because you worked on it. I think his conclusion is wrong but the analogy is good. It's unnecessary to be literal with the term "household." Most of the world's top scientists, lawyers, and bankers aren't household names, yet they can command extremely high levels of respect and, often, grants or income due to being a "household name" in their field. I'm not arguing Mike is a "household name" amongst developers - he's not, IMHO - but there's no reason why a "household name" developer couldn't get the Brad Pitt treatment. John Carmack would have his arm bitten off if he were available at $1000/hr. Is Mike Lee the iPhone equivalent of John Carmack? No. If he were? His analogy seems OK to me.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
mikecane 16y ago
I don't know him, so I can only go by what he wrote there. So all I see are two things he cites as accomplishments, yet with that, he is nearly guaranteeing a hit. I don't know of anyone -- writer, filmmaker, etc -- who'd base any sort of track record on just two outings. Hell, even Spielberg had a bomb when he was hot: 1941. Here is Steve Jobs on designer Paul Rand, who Jobs wooed from IBM to have him design the NeXT logo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak So ask yourself, would Steve Jobs think the guy who wrote this post was worth the money he was asking?
- herdrick 16y ago
  Oh man, thanks for that link. Submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463114
vessenes 16y ago
One day, Mr. Lee is going to feel deeply embarrassed that he wrote, and published that piece. Until then, I imagine he's going to get four or five clients a year, bill them 50,000 each, and laugh his way around Costa Rica.
jayruy 16y ago
"im so great at coding because i've spent so little of my life doing it! that makes me better, qed" huh?
- kevinskii 16y ago
  I don't think he's claiming to be a great coder, but rather a great app designer. And he's right, life experience can come in handy in that area.
  - jayruy 16y ago
    i consider myself more right-brain leaning than many in this field, but i still consider this nonsense. wtf does, for example, knocking about on foreign adventures have anything to do with making a great app? ok great, resourcefulness, but show me something relevant if you want $1k an hour if he has some experience other than coding that makes him so fit, he should mention it, but this is pure bravado, and that doesn't sit well with me
male_salmon 16y ago
Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-teacup.html http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-... Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.
fjh 16y ago
Does anyone here really know if the author is serious? I honestly can't tell, having never heard of this guy, if this is an instance of Poe's Law or Stephen Wolfram-style megalomania (well, at least Wolfram has more to show than "not one, but two number one titles on the App Store").
davisml 16y ago
This is coming from the dude who used to work for free and live in Wil Shipley's basement? Wow.
- davisml 16y ago
  http://blog.wearesakuzaku.com/lunch-with-you-mike-lee/ http://blog.wearesakuzaku.com/lunch-with-you-mike-lee/
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ary 16y ago
gracious |ˈgrā sh əs| adjective 1 courteous, kind, and pleasant : smiling and gracious in defeat. * pleasantly indulgent, esp. toward an inferior. * elegant and tasteful, esp. as exhibiting wealth or high social status
sachinag 16y ago
To everyone who thinks he's crazy, a single, solitary counter that is in no way indicative of a trend or a pattern: when it comes time to have someone build our iPhone app, I know who my first e-mail will be. You wanna know why? I know his rate without having to fill out a goddamn "contact me" form and his portfolio signals that he's worth the rate. Now, I have no idea how many hours it would take to build our app, but you're damn well sure I'm going to ask him to tell me. You not making as much? You hurting for clients? Well, maybe you should publish a rate and have an up-to-date portfolio on your website, not on Carbonmade or Forrst or Dribbble or wherever the hell the cool kids are these days. Cause I'll tell you: I've got cash to burn and I'm in the market for great developers and designers right now, and they're impossible to find, vet, and hire.
- smokey_the_bear 16y ago
  Really? We don't have a consulting page up at all, and we get contacted all the time for people looking to build navigation apps. If you look at similar apps in the app store, it's really easy to contact the developers. And it seems most developers charge between 75 and 250/hour. A wide range, yes, but certainly less than this guy.
- silencio 16y ago
  Really? It's that problematic to go talk to someone who'll want to talk to you about your needs and see what works out for both of you? You'd prefer the guy with that vague portfolio and a flat published rate instead? I don't publish my rate (let's just say it's not even half of $1k/hr except in extraordinary circumstances, like most developers I know consulting on non-specialized stuff), but I am at no shortage of clients right now. If I could actually slow my flow of emails from interested individuals, businesses, and recruiters for consulting and jobs, I'd be so happy... Anyway, I'm not denying Mike's claim to fame, and other than some of his nuttier blog posts/tweets he seems like a reasonable guy the few times I've met him in passing. But I'd want to do a little more research into a person's background before jumping on the bandwagon and assuming what he's done in the past is going to help you towards whatever goal you might have. And this is why I call his portfolio vague. While it might work for the kind of work he's looking to do right now because his expertise as being part of the teams behind so many hits is exactly what he's selling, I'm not about to work with/hire someone as an actual developer (and not just consulting on The Big Picture of things) without more info on what exactly he did on those apps. (Though I'm sure if he ever did consider doing that that he'll kindly provide it to interested parties.) BTW, his $1k/hr rate blog post was originally about his plans to travel worldwide and to use limited consulting hours at that rate to help fund it. I don't think he's the one you're looking for to send your first email to if you need a talented developer to work longer term. If you are looking for long term work, @schwa, the guy that wrote that tweet that Mike screenshotted and included at the top of this blog post, maintains a list of experienced developers looking for work (http://toxicsoftware.com/i-wouldnt-hire-an-iphone-developer-who-charges-less-than-999-95hour/ http://toxicsoftware.com/i-wouldnt-hire-an-iphone-developer-...). Big Nerd Ranch, the company founded by Aaron Hillegass, the person that wrote the book on Cocoa Programming, also does consulting (http://www.bignerdranch.com/consulting http://www.bignerdranch.com/consulting). Iconfactory does UI/design work (http://iconfactory.com/design http://iconfactory.com/design). The list goes on and on.
inmygarage 16y ago
simple supply and demand issue that he's taking advantage of. the iphone is a fairly new platform and i'd say the number of true "platform experts" is very small so anything you can point to that differentiates is a reason to charge a crapton. haven't you seen all those crappy corporate apps? some companies will pay for a track record, and good for them/him.
petercooper 16y ago
Even if he doesn't get $1000/hr in the end, his statement is likely to be already doing some work in the form of anchoring. That is, $1000/hr seems ridiculous but you might now, as a client, feel like $250/hr isn't ridiculous.. yet if he'd said $250/hr at the start, that would have also seemed as crazy as $1000. This effect of price anchoring has been demonstrated a lot and it works, sadly.
- pmcginn 16y ago
  That's a great point, and makes even more sense when you consider the examples he provides for why someone should contact him for an hour of his time. If he can really do everything he listed in one hour per task, he deserves the $1,000. On the other hand, if he spends 2-4 hours on it but "only" bills the client for 1, he seems like both a rockstar and a value.
food 16y ago
what a douche
koeselitz 16y ago
I'm pretty sure the real drawback of coding for $1000 an hour is you're never actually allowed to shut up it.
sharpn 16y ago
There are no testimonials on his website. Just saying.
- danudey 16y ago
  He worked for Delicious Monster and Tapulous, well-known names in the Mac/iPhone dev community. Also, Apple hired him to build their Mobile Store app, which is pretty significant because I'm sure they have a lot of talented developers already.
  - sharpn 16y ago
    Fair enough then. I only came across the post through this site & couldn't see anything to substantiate his claims, but I guess they're a given.
  - silencio 16y ago
    He was already working for Apple before moving teams internally, probably because his DTS job wasn't working out or the perks of switching were too great, i.e. he started at DTS a year ago, and before that year was up he switched teams and then presumably quit altogether. He wasn't hired by Apple expressly to come impart his wisdom onto the team working on the app.
sbierwagen 16y ago
I like how I have to allow his domain in NoScript just to see the page text. Not that the site actually does anything in javascript, as far as I can tell, besides pointlessly slow down page rendering.
filosofo 16y ago
Slightly O/T, but can someone explain why with JavaScript disabled this blog post is completely invisible? I can't see any technical reason or understand why one would penalize NoScript users (like me).
pwim 16y ago
He isn't talking about charging $1,000/hr for coding. Rather, he is doing technical consulting. This means he should be able to deliver high value in a short time, and he'll only ever bill clients a couple hours at a time.
khangtoh 16y ago
It's not about how much you can or will charge, it's about how much you've actually sold.
aymeric 16y ago
I think this guy can have a positive impact on our industry if he reports back in a month or two and tell the world that he actually worked at that rate. The value of IT consultants could be perceive differently.
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nir 16y ago
Seems to me the promise here isn't just "I'll build you a great app" but "I'll get your app in the Apple Store" (hence mentions of the author's positive record and connections with Apple) - in essence, it's a combination of a lobbyist/developer, and lobbyists do charge $1000/hr. Apple has an approval process reminiscent of a third world beaurocracy, decisions are unpredictable, timelines unknown and the entire process is completely opaque to the outsider. Around such systems you often find people with good connections offering their services in ensuring proper treatment, for a handsome fee.
10ren 16y ago
Of course he can charge $1,000/hr. So can I, or so can any man; but will clients come when he advertises it?
cool-RR 16y ago
Can someone please explain why when I zoom in with Chrome on this page the text size remains the same? I've never seen anything like it.
ahoyhere 16y ago
Well, aren't we a feisty bucket of crabs. (patio11 brought up this metaphor - and it's perfect.) People, if you're here on HN, you spend a lot of time devoted to reading about the importance of confidence. That it's the entrepreneur's stock in trade. Hell, maybe you even write your own blog posts about the importance of confidence & post them here, hoping for attention. But what do you do when the chips are down and you come across somebody who truly embodies them? Clatter your claws and try to pull them back in: "HA HA" "Oh so he's like Brad Pitt now?" "Wow, 2 app store hits, whatever" "Hope he likes having no clients!" "I would never hire him" "DOUCHE!" "What a jerk" "I'm gonna judge him just by this essay and assume that he has none of the actual qualifications or experience he mentions" The power of belief-action congruity at work. Or not. If you want to be successful, and you believe having confidence is part of that, then you better figure out of your words and your deeds line up. Because if they don't, you are never going to get what _you_ want. Now, I've never charged $1k/hr... but almost. And if you return true business value, that is totally a reasonable number. Remember - it's all about the value returned. That's another HN belief, isn't it? When I returned to consulting after two years in traditional employment, after many years of lackluster freelancing, I raised my rates from $80 to $200 to $250 to $300 to $400 and beyond. My last project came damn close to $1k/hr after all said & done. And you know what? My clients loved it. They kept coming back for more. They loved my work and thought the prices were reasonable, because there's nobody out there doing what I do in that price point. (My only true competition in that space was Stamen - a mid-sized agency compared to little old me and my husband, an intimate 2-person team. Who competes with Mike Lee on what he offers in that blog post?) I would keep raising my rates and I would have started talking about it, too, except that I don't want to consult any more. The more you charge, the more people need you, the harder it is to say no to projects that promise to put a quick $40k in your pocket. The moral of the story is: most freelancers are lazy, unprofessional, with their interests completely divided, and have little to no real-life experience to back up their years spent coding in the basement. They undercharge, take on too much, and then produce merely mediocre work. They have no true value proposition other than a body that types the special arcane symbols, and asks the client the occasional question. They have no connections. Believe it or not, there are many companies out there who will gladly pay for an experience that is entirely the opposite of that.

109 points by adamhowell 16y ago

Say what you want about his ego, but this article will stick. When some biz guy or PM has his back against the wall with a horrible, failing project that just won't work, calling in the 1k an hour iPhone guy won't sound like a bad idea.

statictype 16y ago
Assuming 1K per hour iPhone guy is willing to take on your failing horrible project.... which of course he may since 1k per hour iPhone guy probably doesn't get a lot of contracts anyway... :)

andreyf 16y ago

Wow, he might be good at programming, but from his writing, he sure seems like a jerk (Zed Shaw's long lost twin?). I've known many professionals who, being very good at what they do, charge both less and more than $1k/hour, but none of them would ever mention their rate in public, much less feel the need to explain why they deserve it. On the other hand, this is great PR for software engineers: a couple more posts like this, and I'll be able to double my rate and still seem like a deal by comparison :)

patio11 16y ago
I am sort of torn. Lets not be the bucket of crabs, who have to pull down anyone threatening to leave the bucket. Engineers need to learn to be comfortable with business. Part of that is professionalism, which cuts against talking rates too loudly. Part of it is being uttetly unembarrassed to say that, yes, you are priced at what the market will bear and the market will bear an awful lot.
- alttab 16y ago
  I'll agree with the bucket of crabs comment, as we all tend to do this. However, I'm not going to hire this guy not because he is too expensive, but because he has no problem branding himself as a douche.
- donaq 16y ago
  Another reason not to be the bucket of crabs, guided strictly by self-interest, is that if one person declares that he's charging a big sum for doing something and consistently getting paid, it will raise the bar for the entire industry. In other words, if you're a good iPhone developer, you can also raise your rates while still giving your customers a discount compared to that Mike Lee guy.
alexkiwi 16y ago
I'm not so sure I would want to work with this guy, Zed Shaw on the other hand was one of the nicest people I've ever gotten an e-mail from
- agotterer 16y ago
  I met Zed in person a few months ago at a meetup. I had an awesome 45 min chat about everything technology. What a nice guy. I wish him all the best. Mike Lee's blog title is "motherfucker". From that alone you can derive what type of person you're about to do business with. Theres no question his experience and skills are incredible. Fact of the matter is there are other successful app developers who likely have a resume that is comparable. Think of it like dating. Would you date the hottest girl if she had a shitty personality? Maybe :)
  - kenshi 16y ago
    Do you really think you can derive the character of a person based on the title of their blog? Seems pretty damned shallow to me.
    - natrius 16y ago
      Life is full of uncertainties. Our job is to assign probabilities to outcomes and use those probabilities to make choices. I don't think it's unreasonable for that piece of evidence to increase the probability of his disagreeableness in someone's mind.
    - waterlesscloud 16y ago
      Why is it shallow? It's a facade he has deliberately chosen to present to the world. That choice implies things, and he's either aware of that fact or utterly clueless. Note that I'm not saying anything about what conclusion I draw from that fact, just that it's a fact.
      - kenshi 16y ago
        Because that line of thinking implies there is a link between style of expression (external presentation) and character values (morals etc). It's like judging someone's character by how they dress (e.g. suit == good, dependable etc).
Adaptive 16y ago
Tangential, but I feel compelled to note that: * I have never met Zed * Like many others I have heard all sorts of stories about him * People are capable of change * In my recent experience Zed has always seemed civil, thoughtful and passionate about code He may have been a jerk in the past, I can't speak to that, but he seems like a decent guy now. Yours, the anti-pigeonholing squad
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- andreyf 16y ago
  Err, I meant to make it clear that I'm comparing their public writing style, not how they are in person.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  He's always been 98% civil, thoughtful and friendly in person. That doesn't mean he won't point out if you or somebody else is being a moron or a dickhead, but he does it judiciously. Zed, like so many other successful writers (e.g. Mark Twain, Churchill, every famous playwright people quote on their blogs) has made a career out of being a sharp-witted asshole in print.
mpk 16y ago
I really don't get why it's generally assumed that Zed is an asshole. I exchanged a few technical emails with him when he was just getting started on Mongrel (v1) and his replies were always friendly (as well as being relevant). He's put a lot of code out there and the parts that I have used have been great. Remember when Bear Stearns fell? He was leading some Rails project there at the time (IIRC) and he used his hacker media fame to get his team members new jobs before himself. No idea how that panned out, but that doesn't exactly sound like asshole behavior to me. Yes I know he puts out rants from time to time. They make for fun and educational reading. As far as I'm concerned a good cathartic rant every now and again speaks for a person, though I wouldn't recommend everybody to go out and put it all online. (It seems to have worked wonders for Zed, though :).
- sjs 16y ago
  Because most of us don't know him and his online persona is pure asshole. It's that simple. I've read that he's a nice guy in person all over the place and that's great, good for him. He writes like a spoiled, attention-grabbing 15 year old, and he's very insulting and arrogant. Then we have to read about it on news.yc and reddit for a week after every rant. I mean look at this thread, one mention of the guy and all of us are talking about him instead of the topic at hand. Someone described him as poison and I agree 100% with that assessment.
  - elliottkember 16y ago
    From memory, I think it says somewhere on his blog that the whole tone is just an act. It gets him a lot of publicity, and sometimes he says some interesting things. I'd be willing to bet he's a really nice guy. In my book, it takes a lot of nice to take yourself so lightly.

alanthonyc 16y ago

tldr: Mike Lee is the Brad Pitt of programmers. :/

wmf 16y ago
No, it's even better: he's the Brad Pitt and the Wolf (from Pulp Fiction) of iProgrammers. I always thought being the Wolf would be an interesting job; certainly stressful but never a dull moment.
mkramlich 16y ago
Not to diss your comment, because I don't intend that, but it got me to thinking. I hereby propose we all stop using this "tldr" or "TL;DR" meme that keeps popping up on every other web posting lately because it's an unnecessarily opaque code, and not very readable, in my opinion. Instead, how about instead we start doing something like this: summary: <whatever>
- corin_ 16y ago
  tldr: stop using tldr

nolane 16y ago

The Dunning–Kruger effect at work.

proee 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Silhouette 16y ago
Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who hires him?
ramchip 16y ago
You can say a lot of things about the guy, but I don't think you can call him incompetent without at least a little justification. I think the Dunning–Kruger effect/paper is one the most abusively reposted things on HN and Reddit.
- JohnnyBrown 16y ago
  The Dunning-Kruger effect: If you aren't practicing it, start.

_delirium 16y ago

I'd be curious if he actually can charge $1,000/hr for iPhone development. It sounds like it's deliberately less than his time-filling rate: he doesn't get fully booked weeks at that rate. In fact he seems to imply that his schedule is so empty that he's likely to be free on any given day to start working on a new project immediately. That's certainly a reasonable strategy, since sometimes the money-maximizing rate is not the same as the one that fills your schedule. But, how empty exactly is his schedule? Are we talking 10 hours/wk billed on average? Or are we talking no work most weeks, with the occasional job every few months?

xenophanes 16y ago
Working 10 hrs a week at 1k/hr would be awesome. Saving time is better than maximizing money.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Sure, but that's the part I'm wondering about. 10 hrs/wk at $1k/hr would be great (~$500k/yr for part-time work!), but, say, 1hr/wk on average wouldn't be too good, even at that rate. And I read his post as having an undercurrent of being more, "I'm trying to convince you paying me $1k/hr is a good idea" rather than "there are actually a lot of people already paying me $1k/hr". Has he gotten dozens of contracts at that rate? A few? One?
  - moe 16y ago
    A few? One? I'd venture the guess the number is very small or perhaps even zero. At that rate he'd burn through a reasonable budget for an iPhone app within weeks. And I mean the entire budget, which would normally include graphics design and backend work. I have no doubts he could get an app off the ground faster than most teams - given he lives up to his bold claims, which is entirely possible. But as with every software project that's only a very small part of the story. The elephant in the room is maintenance and ongoing development. If you have $500k and were to launch a business around an iPhone app what would you rather do? Give most of that money to a single person, get your app in 8 weeks and call it a day? Or would you rather hire a team, pay significantly less for the initial launch, get it in perhaps 16 weeks, but then still have money in the bank and a committed team for further steps? Hiring this guy at that rate just seems like a bad business decision for pretty much any project. If anyone does then, well, kudos to him for parting the dumb from their money.

quan 16y ago

The "motherfucker" page doesn't load, maybe I can help him with some web development at only $1,000/hr

peng 16y ago
Coral cache: http://le.mu.rs.nyud.net/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/24_What_money_can_buy.html http://le.mu.rs.nyud.net/motherfucker/Index/Entries/2010/6/2... Still takes forever to load, but you can speed up the process using Readability.
alexkiwi 16y ago
Maybe he should make his blog an iphone app instead, the root URL took me 5 minutes to load
code_duck 16y ago
He clearly could benefit from my CSS consultation, offered at only $200 an hour.
gxti 16y ago
Loads instantly here, but is completely blank with javascript blocked. That's how you know he's a true professional.

ryanjmo 16y ago

It also sounds like he can convince you that if you don't go with him you are going to have problems and then you are going to have to hire him eventually anyway. Being able to convince people not to look around at other options is a very good way to drive your price up. I'm surprised he didn't make that point in the article; it certainly is related to why he can charge so much...

kevinpet 16y ago

If the best are 10x as productive as the mediocre, I don't see a problem with this. Of course, you might say that the $120 bulk of freelance programmers are already a notch above mediocre and maybe $500/hr is more reasonable, but whatever the market will bear. It's a good argument to cut top marginal tax rate so that he has an incentive to take more work than he's willing to at $500/hr after taxes (assuming he's in the US).

rortian 16y ago
Marginal tax rates being high is a great idea. I'd be with you if people with high salaries spent all, or virtually all, of their salary. But they don't. In this economy we need more money being spent. When things are doing well again, you could try to make a case for the rich being richer, but it's a strange cause to take up.
- _delirium 16y ago
  They're also exceptionally low, currently. There are no rates above 35%, whereas they used to be above 70% back in the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Ford/Carter/early-Reagan days. But I suppose which rates and which kinds of incentives count as too high / too low is always relative and subjective...
  - WildUtah 16y ago
    Actually, under Eisenhower and Kennedy the top marginal rate was always between 91% and 95%. Then it was 70% until the early 1980s when it went down to 50%. That's just federal, not including state and city income taxes.
    - pingswept 16y ago
      I found this list of the historical tax rates fascinating: http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/151.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/151.html (Why they have to use "Macromedia Flash Paper " to show a list of numbers is beyond me.)

klochner 16y ago

I'm guessing this is more of a flat fee structure, and he's optimistically expecting it to work out to $1k/hour. You can write to my former coworkers in Apple’s Developer Technical Support, and they will point you toward a solution within three days. Or you can just call me and have it ready to resubmit by morning. . . . so what happens if it's not ready by morning? Is there a scenario where I'm dinged for $24k in a day while he's mainlining coffee & trying to debug my app?

elbrodeur 16y ago

Interesting approach to customer acquisition. After taxes he'd be sitting on just over a million a year without working much more than 40 hours a week. But maybe his pricing is predicated on the desire to not work 40 hour weeks?

gte910h 16y ago
You don't get 1k an hour without high high availability
mkramlich 16y ago
I'm guessing the latter. You sort of win either way with that approach: 1. seek $1000/hour and actually end up billing 40+ hrs/week at that rate: WIN all the way to the bank 2. seek $1000/hour, but then end up billing a few hours/month at that rate: still WIN because you can cover your cost of living and still have lots of free time and energy for other things

dasil003 16y ago

He's claiming his role in Tap Tap Revenge as justifying that rate. If all you know about his role at Tapulous is what's been written at TechCrunch that probably sounds impressive. Of course if you know some of the guys there who don't have a soapbox and a sycophantic following that's a pretty hilarious opener.

marciovm123 16y ago
can you elaborate?
- dasil003 16y ago
  I'm not involved with Tapulous and therefore I'm not really at liberty to say. Actually I probably should have kept my mouth shut on this thread, because I despise when people do what I just did, but I just could not sit by while that credential got thrown out there as if Tap Tap Revenge was his brainchild or something.
  - dillydally 16y ago
    I don't know anyone inside Tapulous personally, so this is pure hearsay. Take it as you will. What I've heard is Mike thought Tap Tap was too low brow and that by focusing on that app to the exclusion of their other apps at the time (Twitterific and FriendBook) they were betraying his vision for the company. After he expressed his opinion about this he was asked to leave.
    - hboon 16y ago
      Did you mean Tweetsville or really, Twitterrific?
      - dillydally 16y ago
        Sorry I meant Twinkle. Whatever Tapulous' Twitter client was.
  - 16y ago

mcantelon 16y ago

I'd like to hear from him in a month or so how it worked out.

mrshoe 16y ago

That’s a little like hearing what Brad Pitt got paid for his last movie and wondering why the producer didn’t instead hire Brad Pitman for scale. Oh you’ve never heard of Brad Pitman? You’re not familiar with his work? But you are familiar with Brad Pitt’s work, right? After all, he’s an experienced actor and producer with not one, but two, Academy Award nominations and a portfolio full of household names. Bzzzt. Horrible analogy. Brad Pitt isn't worth what he's worth because of his portfolio full of household names. He commands his rates because he is a household name. People will go see movies just because he's in them. He's not getting paid for talent, experience, or attractiveness. He's getting paid for his personal brand. That brand all but guarantees that the filmmakers will earn a handsome return on their investment. You, however, are an iPhone app developer. App purchasers have never heard of you. They will not turn out in droves to buy an app just because you worked on it.

ros3 16y ago
They might turn out in droves because he offered a $30,000 dollar prize for solving a puzzle in his app "Puzzlloto". Which has been pulled from the app store... http://puzzllotto.com/ http://puzzllotto.com/
petercooper 16y ago
He commands his rates because he is a household name. [..] You, however, are an iPhone app developer. App purchasers have never heard of you. They will not turn out in droves to buy an app just because you worked on it. I think his conclusion is wrong but the analogy is good. It's unnecessary to be literal with the term "household." Most of the world's top scientists, lawyers, and bankers aren't household names, yet they can command extremely high levels of respect and, often, grants or income due to being a "household name" in their field. I'm not arguing Mike is a "household name" amongst developers - he's not, IMHO - but there's no reason why a "household name" developer couldn't get the Brad Pitt treatment. John Carmack would have his arm bitten off if he were available at $1000/hr. Is Mike Lee the iPhone equivalent of John Carmack? No. If he were? His analogy seems OK to me.
- mkramlich 16y ago

mikecane 16y ago

I don't know him, so I can only go by what he wrote there. So all I see are two things he cites as accomplishments, yet with that, he is nearly guaranteeing a hit. I don't know of anyone -- writer, filmmaker, etc -- who'd base any sort of track record on just two outings. Hell, even Spielberg had a bomb when he was hot: 1941. Here is Steve Jobs on designer Paul Rand, who Jobs wooed from IBM to have him design the NeXT logo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak So ask yourself, would Steve Jobs think the guy who wrote this post was worth the money he was asking?

herdrick 16y ago
Oh man, thanks for that link. Submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463114

vessenes 16y ago

One day, Mr. Lee is going to feel deeply embarrassed that he wrote, and published that piece. Until then, I imagine he's going to get four or five clients a year, bill them 50,000 each, and laugh his way around Costa Rica.

jayruy 16y ago

"im so great at coding because i've spent so little of my life doing it! that makes me better, qed" huh?

kevinskii 16y ago
I don't think he's claiming to be a great coder, but rather a great app designer. And he's right, life experience can come in handy in that area.
- jayruy 16y ago
  i consider myself more right-brain leaning than many in this field, but i still consider this nonsense. wtf does, for example, knocking about on foreign adventures have anything to do with making a great app? ok great, resourcefulness, but show me something relevant if you want $1k an hour if he has some experience other than coding that makes him so fit, he should mention it, but this is pure bravado, and that doesn't sit well with me

male_salmon 16y ago

Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-teacup.html http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-... Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.

fjh 16y ago

Does anyone here really know if the author is serious? I honestly can't tell, having never heard of this guy, if this is an instance of Poe's Law or Stephen Wolfram-style megalomania (well, at least Wolfram has more to show than "not one, but two number one titles on the App Store").

davisml 16y ago

This is coming from the dude who used to work for free and live in Wil Shipley's basement? Wow.

davisml 16y ago
http://blog.wearesakuzaku.com/lunch-with-you-mike-lee/ http://blog.wearesakuzaku.com/lunch-with-you-mike-lee/

deleted 16y ago

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ary 16y ago

gracious |ˈgrā sh əs| adjective 1 courteous, kind, and pleasant : smiling and gracious in defeat. * pleasantly indulgent, esp. toward an inferior. * elegant and tasteful, esp. as exhibiting wealth or high social status

sachinag 16y ago

To everyone who thinks he's crazy, a single, solitary counter that is in no way indicative of a trend or a pattern: when it comes time to have someone build our iPhone app, I know who my first e-mail will be. You wanna know why? I know his rate without having to fill out a goddamn "contact me" form and his portfolio signals that he's worth the rate. Now, I have no idea how many hours it would take to build our app, but you're damn well sure I'm going to ask him to tell me. You not making as much? You hurting for clients? Well, maybe you should publish a rate and have an up-to-date portfolio on your website, not on Carbonmade or Forrst or Dribbble or wherever the hell the cool kids are these days. Cause I'll tell you: I've got cash to burn and I'm in the market for great developers and designers right now, and they're impossible to find, vet, and hire.

smokey_the_bear 16y ago
Really? We don't have a consulting page up at all, and we get contacted all the time for people looking to build navigation apps. If you look at similar apps in the app store, it's really easy to contact the developers. And it seems most developers charge between 75 and 250/hour. A wide range, yes, but certainly less than this guy.
silencio 16y ago
Really? It's that problematic to go talk to someone who'll want to talk to you about your needs and see what works out for both of you? You'd prefer the guy with that vague portfolio and a flat published rate instead? I don't publish my rate (let's just say it's not even half of $1k/hr except in extraordinary circumstances, like most developers I know consulting on non-specialized stuff), but I am at no shortage of clients right now. If I could actually slow my flow of emails from interested individuals, businesses, and recruiters for consulting and jobs, I'd be so happy... Anyway, I'm not denying Mike's claim to fame, and other than some of his nuttier blog posts/tweets he seems like a reasonable guy the few times I've met him in passing. But I'd want to do a little more research into a person's background before jumping on the bandwagon and assuming what he's done in the past is going to help you towards whatever goal you might have. And this is why I call his portfolio vague. While it might work for the kind of work he's looking to do right now because his expertise as being part of the teams behind so many hits is exactly what he's selling, I'm not about to work with/hire someone as an actual developer (and not just consulting on The Big Picture of things) without more info on what exactly he did on those apps. (Though I'm sure if he ever did consider doing that that he'll kindly provide it to interested parties.) BTW, his $1k/hr rate blog post was originally about his plans to travel worldwide and to use limited consulting hours at that rate to help fund it. I don't think he's the one you're looking for to send your first email to if you need a talented developer to work longer term. If you are looking for long term work, @schwa, the guy that wrote that tweet that Mike screenshotted and included at the top of this blog post, maintains a list of experienced developers looking for work (http://toxicsoftware.com/i-wouldnt-hire-an-iphone-developer-who-charges-less-than-999-95hour/ http://toxicsoftware.com/i-wouldnt-hire-an-iphone-developer-...). Big Nerd Ranch, the company founded by Aaron Hillegass, the person that wrote the book on Cocoa Programming, also does consulting (http://www.bignerdranch.com/consulting http://www.bignerdranch.com/consulting). Iconfactory does UI/design work (http://iconfactory.com/design http://iconfactory.com/design). The list goes on and on.

inmygarage 16y ago

simple supply and demand issue that he's taking advantage of. the iphone is a fairly new platform and i'd say the number of true "platform experts" is very small so anything you can point to that differentiates is a reason to charge a crapton. haven't you seen all those crappy corporate apps? some companies will pay for a track record, and good for them/him.

petercooper 16y ago

Even if he doesn't get $1000/hr in the end, his statement is likely to be already doing some work in the form of anchoring. That is, $1000/hr seems ridiculous but you might now, as a client, feel like $250/hr isn't ridiculous.. yet if he'd said $250/hr at the start, that would have also seemed as crazy as $1000. This effect of price anchoring has been demonstrated a lot and it works, sadly.

pmcginn 16y ago
That's a great point, and makes even more sense when you consider the examples he provides for why someone should contact him for an hour of his time. If he can really do everything he listed in one hour per task, he deserves the $1,000. On the other hand, if he spends 2-4 hours on it but "only" bills the client for 1, he seems like both a rockstar and a value.

food 16y ago

what a douche

koeselitz 16y ago

I'm pretty sure the real drawback of coding for $1000 an hour is you're never actually allowed to shut up it.

sharpn 16y ago

There are no testimonials on his website. Just saying.

danudey 16y ago
He worked for Delicious Monster and Tapulous, well-known names in the Mac/iPhone dev community. Also, Apple hired him to build their Mobile Store app, which is pretty significant because I'm sure they have a lot of talented developers already.
- sharpn 16y ago
  Fair enough then. I only came across the post through this site & couldn't see anything to substantiate his claims, but I guess they're a given.
- silencio 16y ago
  He was already working for Apple before moving teams internally, probably because his DTS job wasn't working out or the perks of switching were too great, i.e. he started at DTS a year ago, and before that year was up he switched teams and then presumably quit altogether. He wasn't hired by Apple expressly to come impart his wisdom onto the team working on the app.

sbierwagen 16y ago

I like how I have to allow his domain in NoScript just to see the page text. Not that the site actually does anything in javascript, as far as I can tell, besides pointlessly slow down page rendering.

filosofo 16y ago

Slightly O/T, but can someone explain why with JavaScript disabled this blog post is completely invisible? I can't see any technical reason or understand why one would penalize NoScript users (like me).

pwim 16y ago

He isn't talking about charging $1,000/hr for coding. Rather, he is doing technical consulting. This means he should be able to deliver high value in a short time, and he'll only ever bill clients a couple hours at a time.

khangtoh 16y ago

It's not about how much you can or will charge, it's about how much you've actually sold.

aymeric 16y ago

I think this guy can have a positive impact on our industry if he reports back in a month or two and tell the world that he actually worked at that rate. The value of IT consultants could be perceive differently.

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nir 16y ago

Seems to me the promise here isn't just "I'll build you a great app" but "I'll get your app in the Apple Store" (hence mentions of the author's positive record and connections with Apple) - in essence, it's a combination of a lobbyist/developer, and lobbyists do charge $1000/hr. Apple has an approval process reminiscent of a third world beaurocracy, decisions are unpredictable, timelines unknown and the entire process is completely opaque to the outsider. Around such systems you often find people with good connections offering their services in ensuring proper treatment, for a handsome fee.

10ren 16y ago

Of course he can charge $1,000/hr. So can I, or so can any man; but will clients come when he advertises it?

cool-RR 16y ago

Can someone please explain why when I zoom in with Chrome on this page the text size remains the same? I've never seen anything like it.

ahoyhere 16y ago

Well, aren't we a feisty bucket of crabs. (patio11 brought up this metaphor - and it's perfect.) People, if you're here on HN, you spend a lot of time devoted to reading about the importance of confidence. That it's the entrepreneur's stock in trade. Hell, maybe you even write your own blog posts about the importance of confidence & post them here, hoping for attention. But what do you do when the chips are down and you come across somebody who truly embodies them? Clatter your claws and try to pull them back in: "HA HA" "Oh so he's like Brad Pitt now?" "Wow, 2 app store hits, whatever" "Hope he likes having no clients!" "I would never hire him" "DOUCHE!" "What a jerk" "I'm gonna judge him just by this essay and assume that he has none of the actual qualifications or experience he mentions" The power of belief-action congruity at work. Or not. If you want to be successful, and you believe having confidence is part of that, then you better figure out of your words and your deeds line up. Because if they don't, you are never going to get what _you_ want. Now, I've never charged $1k/hr... but almost. And if you return true business value, that is totally a reasonable number. Remember - it's all about the value returned. That's another HN belief, isn't it? When I returned to consulting after two years in traditional employment, after many years of lackluster freelancing, I raised my rates from $80 to $200 to $250 to $300 to $400 and beyond. My last project came damn close to $1k/hr after all said & done. And you know what? My clients loved it. They kept coming back for more. They loved my work and thought the prices were reasonable, because there's nobody out there doing what I do in that price point. (My only true competition in that space was Stamen - a mid-sized agency compared to little old me and my husband, an intimate 2-person team. Who competes with Mike Lee on what he offers in that blog post?) I would keep raising my rates and I would have started talking about it, too, except that I don't want to consult any more. The more you charge, the more people need you, the harder it is to say no to projects that promise to put a quick $40k in your pocket. The moral of the story is: most freelancers are lazy, unprofessional, with their interests completely divided, and have little to no real-life experience to back up their years spent coding in the basement. They undercharge, take on too much, and then produce merely mediocre work. They have no true value proposition other than a body that types the special arcane symbols, and asks the client the occasional question. They have no connections. Believe it or not, there are many companies out there who will gladly pay for an experience that is entirely the opposite of that.