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For a consultant who offers professionalism, experience and a truly in-demand or rare set of skills, 2k / day isn't anything out of the ordinary.

by ra 15y ago

arethuza 15y ago
Indeed, I bet RBS don't get many lawyers charging them as little as £2000 a day.
Silhouette 15y ago
For software contractors, in the UK, 2k/day would not only be out of the ordinary, it would be about twice what I've previously heard of anyone getting, and that includes a few people who work for the kinds of project that traditionally pay serious money: banking in the City, defence with clearances/specialist skills, etc. etc. The article doesn't say who is getting those rates, but if it's the software guys then I'm guessing we're talking about a very small number of isolated cases, where probably either someone had them over a barrel with knowledge of a critical project that was otherwise going to be lost or someone knew where the skeletons were buried. Either way, management made the expensive screw up a long time ago...
- corin_ 15y ago
  I've heard of higher daily rates in a couple of industries here in the UK, but not commonly.
- arethuza 15y ago
  Hyperion HFM rules are both fairly logically complex (manipulation of 12 dimensional data), usually associated with fairly arcane financial requirements that only apply to large companies and, as a final wonderful touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-conditional VBScript. This is not a pleasant combination.
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    > as a final wonderful touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-conditional VBScript. Sounds like the people implementing them don't deserve £200/day, never mind £2,000! :-) Seriously, though, nothing you wrote there sounds particularly impressive when you look at what plenty of very smart, very skilled, very well trained contractors do for daily rates in three figures. I'd guess that in the UK today, the middle of the bell curve for software contracting rates is probably in the £30-£50/hour or £250-400/day region. With specialist skills/relevant experience you can get higher, and in London you generally shift everything upwards a bit as well, so for something like banking in the City you might be looking at £600-800/day. Even in London, in a generally high-paid industry, with specialist skills and experience, you're still an outlier if you're approach £1,000/day though. I know absolutely nothing about Hyperion HFM rules, but I find it hard to believe anything could be so difficult to learn and work with that you couldn't get someone capable of doing those other jobs to learn it and do it for half the rate we're talking about. Is there some sort of artificial barrier that stops otherwise capable software contractors from moving into the field? [Edit: The PCG's benchmark report from June this year had the middle of the curve around £300-500/day or £60k-100k turnover, with the middle of the respondents curve around ages 35-55 and IT making up the majority of responses and fitting the turnover curve pretty well when isolated. That's based on self-selected respondents who are members of a professional organisation, and certainly tending to the more experienced age ranges, so I think it's fairly consistent with my guess above. They did indicate a small number of responses with turnover above £200k, and even some with turnover in the £300k-500k range. There is no way to tell whether those correspond to the respondents whose businesses had more than one fee earner (10% of the total).]
    - arethuza 15y ago
      You have to use VBScript - that's what Hyperion expects. I think the main barrier is that you need to be a competent developer (mod working in VBScript) and know a hell of a lot about financial consolidation and know about how Hyperion is typically implemented in organisations. It's those combination of skills that I suspect is pretty rare and if you don't have the domain and application knowledge then no amount of technical skills is likely to compensate. Believe me - my respect for accountants has gone way up since I've been involved in integrating with HFM. I wouldn't dream of working on the guts of it - although we did build a reporting engine on top of the beast that is orders of magnitude better than what it comes with!

For a consultant who offers professionalism, experience and a truly in-demand or rare set of skills, 2k / day isn't anything out of the ordinary.

by ra 15y ago

For a consultant who offers professionalism, experience and a truly in-demand or rare set of skills, 2k / day isn't anything out of the ordinary.

arethuza 15y ago

Indeed, I bet RBS don't get many lawyers charging them as little as £2000 a day.

Silhouette 15y ago

For software contractors, in the UK, 2k/day would not only be out of the ordinary, it would be about twice what I've previously heard of anyone getting, and that includes a few people who work for the kinds of project that traditionally pay serious money: banking in the City, defence with clearances/specialist skills, etc. etc. The article doesn't say who is getting those rates, but if it's the software guys then I'm guessing we're talking about a very small number of isolated cases, where probably either someone had them over a barrel with knowledge of a critical project that was otherwise going to be lost or someone knew where the skeletons were buried. Either way, management made the expensive screw up a long time ago...

corin_ 15y ago
I've heard of higher daily rates in a couple of industries here in the UK, but not commonly.
arethuza 15y ago
Hyperion HFM rules are both fairly logically complex (manipulation of 12 dimensional data), usually associated with fairly arcane financial requirements that only apply to large companies and, as a final wonderful touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-conditional VBScript. This is not a pleasant combination.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  > as a final wonderful touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-conditional VBScript. Sounds like the people implementing them don't deserve £200/day, never mind £2,000! :-) Seriously, though, nothing you wrote there sounds particularly impressive when you look at what plenty of very smart, very skilled, very well trained contractors do for daily rates in three figures. I'd guess that in the UK today, the middle of the bell curve for software contracting rates is probably in the £30-£50/hour or £250-400/day region. With specialist skills/relevant experience you can get higher, and in London you generally shift everything upwards a bit as well, so for something like banking in the City you might be looking at £600-800/day. Even in London, in a generally high-paid industry, with specialist skills and experience, you're still an outlier if you're approach £1,000/day though. I know absolutely nothing about Hyperion HFM rules, but I find it hard to believe anything could be so difficult to learn and work with that you couldn't get someone capable of doing those other jobs to learn it and do it for half the rate we're talking about. Is there some sort of artificial barrier that stops otherwise capable software contractors from moving into the field? [Edit: The PCG's benchmark report from June this year had the middle of the curve around £300-500/day or £60k-100k turnover, with the middle of the respondents curve around ages 35-55 and IT making up the majority of responses and fitting the turnover curve pretty well when isolated. That's based on self-selected respondents who are members of a professional organisation, and certainly tending to the more experienced age ranges, so I think it's fairly consistent with my guess above. They did indicate a small number of responses with turnover above £200k, and even some with turnover in the £300k-500k range. There is no way to tell whether those correspond to the respondents whose businesses had more than one fee earner (10% of the total).]
  - arethuza 15y ago
    You have to use VBScript - that's what Hyperion expects. I think the main barrier is that you need to be a competent developer (mod working in VBScript) and know a hell of a lot about financial consolidation and know about how Hyperion is typically implemented in organisations. It's those combination of skills that I suspect is pretty rare and if you don't have the domain and application knowledge then no amount of technical skills is likely to compensate. Believe me - my respect for accountants has gone way up since I've been involved in integrating with HFM. I wouldn't dream of working on the guts of it - although we did build a reporting engine on top of the beast that is orders of magnitude better than what it comes with!