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> "He will know exactly what I charge the client and what I give to him out of that." In my experience this is exactly how traditional engineering firms work.
by polemic 13y ago
> "He will know exactly what I charge the client and what I give to him out of that."
In my experience this is exactly how traditional engineering firms work. It seems to work for them, I'm not sure why a software consultancy would work differently. Do they?
Regardless, if you give people the power to manage their work, to bill their clients appropriately, to take ownership for the work, then the right people will thrive and the rest will find it far too transparent to hide behind.
- ams6110 13y agoI've worked as an employee of a consultancy a few different times, and I've never been informed about the rates at which I was billed to clients.
- moron4hire 13y agoYes, neither have I. On a few occasions, I accidentally stumbled on the numbers and was quite shocked to see that it was whole-number multiples over what I earned. Large, whole-numbers. Especially on government contracts.
- busterarm 13y agoPretty much always this. I don't think I've ever seen that multiplier been less than 4x.
- polemic 13y agoAFAIK 2.5% - 4% is about normal. A lot of that goes into marketing, bidding on projects, etc. It's not actually that shocking when you look at where the cost goes: it's not just "your time * multiplier", more like "how many hours of other work are required to support one hour of actual work".
- moron4hire 13y agoNo, I get the need, as you described it, but one place was charging 1000%.
- sokoloff 13y agoI'm assuming you mean 2.5 times, not a 2.5% margin. Even odesk takes more than 2.5%.
- busterarm 13y agoBoth my brother and I have done a fair bit of IT consulting and have always either been told or found out along the way. Anytime I've been employed to provide services, it has always helped me do my job to know exactly what value we were providing to both our customers and our business. It has always been my experience that the more business-minded employees are significantly better at doing their jobs and that the ones who tend to waste company time/money also have the poorest business-sense. The companies that don't want you to know this don't want you to have enough information to ask for what you're really worth. It also tends to negatively affect the client as well. I don't want to work for any company that behaves like this.
- zura 13y agoI was getting a significant share of what each client was paying, along with a regular salary. So yes, I was informed.