"Why are we trying to turn programmers into product managers?" Nobody is doing that AFAICT, it's just why being a consultant is different from having a job. "

"Why are we trying to turn programmers into product managers?" Nobody is doing that AFAICT, it's just why being a consultant is different from having a job. "Aren't you going to see a lot of the same requirements from projects as a consultant? <snip> That's just paying for experience." Well sure. It's the experience and the domain knowledge that makes that somebody can do something at a higher speed than someone else, and that somebody knows what a customer is looking for without them having to spell it all out. I'm nobody special, and I'm certainly not claiming that I'm a '10x consultant' in the sense that I'm 10x better than the average or whatever. I was just reflecting on the underlying mis-assumptions in the GP's question. Also, it's not because somebody bills 200/hour that they make 2004050 per year. Jobs are not like doing consulting. I'm doing OK, but (after discounting for everything) I'm making roughly what a senior employee would. Some do better, again I'm not claiming I'm anything special (and I guess I shouldn't have made this about me by mentioning an example from my own work) but some of the 'calculations' I've seen in this thread are nonsense. It's like people saying 'Mohammed Ali made x million per second in his fights'. Uh, sure.