4 ms·

There exist many, many things one could do with a computer worth piles of money. Knight just blew $400 million in 45 minutes. What rate could you have charged

by patio11 14y ago

There exist many, many things one could do with a computer worth piles of money. Knight just blew $400 million in 45 minutes. What rate could you have charged them in the middle of that for credibly offering a fix? That's worth a few orders of magnitude more than a lot of work, but there are plenty of companies with revenues in the millions or tens of millions with very specialized IT needs. They might be unable to hire for them or unwilling to spend 6 months interviewing and training when they could hire an expert to parachute in now. That expert might well charge a project rate that works out to a bit of money, but crucially, anchor it to business value rather than things which have a cheap, non-expansive dynamic range like "price per hour."

johnnyg 14y ago
Sometimes the dam just breaks. If you are so good as to be able to predict such an instance, you can see the future and should BE trading stocks, not working on the systems that facilitate trades. If you are very good at building the systems that facilitiate trades, you should be paid well, but you will be paid for building stable, reliable systems and not for predicting one off gotchas. That is impossible to do consistently. No amount of money can prevent the one off events. You can only hedge. As a result, is $1000/hr worth a hedge? Likely not. Now, is a guy worth $1000/hr if there's a crisis, he can come it and make it better and we are talking millions of dollars. Likely so. All of these things to say: no, he's not worth $1000 on any given hour, but might be on a very particular hour.
genwin 14y ago
> What rate could you have charged them in the middle of that for credibly offering a fix? Plenty of course. But the odds that such person exists outside their organization is nil. The world's top programming expert would take more than 45 minutes to assess the issue. (I'm assuming that cutting off power wasn't an option.)
goblin89 14y ago
However, I believe you have to be comfortable and convincingly experienced in that particular area in order to get such a contract. Which is not always an option since the area is ‘very specialized’. Or you may be able to deal with wide range of IT problems that includes that area, but then there's a question of credibility—whether that particular area would seem like something you can deal with to company management, considering that you've never done exactly that thing before. In this case it seems that you either need strong reputation for dealing with different problems successfully, or some leads inside the company. (Either way is possible, of course, but apparently not as easy as it may seem on the first sight.)

by patio11 14y ago

johnnyg 14y ago

Sometimes the dam just breaks. If you are so good as to be able to predict such an instance, you can see the future and should BE trading stocks, not working on the systems that facilitate trades. If you are very good at building the systems that facilitiate trades, you should be paid well, but you will be paid for building stable, reliable systems and not for predicting one off gotchas. That is impossible to do consistently. No amount of money can prevent the one off events. You can only hedge. As a result, is $1000/hr worth a hedge? Likely not. Now, is a guy worth $1000/hr if there's a crisis, he can come it and make it better and we are talking millions of dollars. Likely so. All of these things to say: no, he's not worth $1000 on any given hour, but might be on a very particular hour.

genwin 14y ago

> What rate could you have charged them in the middle of that for credibly offering a fix? Plenty of course. But the odds that such person exists outside their organization is nil. The world's top programming expert would take more than 45 minutes to assess the issue. (I'm assuming that cutting off power wasn't an option.)

goblin89 14y ago

However, I believe you have to be comfortable and convincingly experienced in that particular area in order to get such a contract. Which is not always an option since the area is ‘very specialized’. Or you may be able to deal with wide range of IT problems that includes that area, but then there's a question of credibility—whether that particular area would seem like something you can deal with to company management, considering that you've never done exactly that thing before. In this case it seems that you either need strong reputation for dealing with different problems successfully, or some leads inside the company. (Either way is possible, of course, but apparently not as easy as it may seem on the first sight.)