It's easy to become seduced over the articles on HN, Double Your Freelancing, Patrick McKenzie earning $30k/week and guys commenting they charge $180. The real

It's easy to become seduced over the articles on HN, Double Your Freelancing, Patrick McKenzie earning $30k/week and guys commenting they charge $180. The reality is very different. Most consultants are much older than 23. They usually know a few technologies inside-out. For example we had to hire someone recently - he was a guy in his mid-40s who knew this particular thing we needed doing, this is a real email: ---------- My rate would be £1350/day + expenses. If the customer wishes to go ahead, I would suggest spending a day on site when all the relevant [company name] staff will be available, and possibly [third party company] who I presume is a supplier or partner associated with the X.25 links or the function which runs over them? This would be split into a meeting where I can discover more about their requirements and constraints, and then some time investigating the systems to see what they're running on the systems, what can be found of any development/build/testing environment, etc. I can then return home and write this up for them, so they can decide what they want to go. This is a minimum of 2 days work for the visit and initial write-up, but it would be wise to allow for more because it's going to depend on what I find when I get there which is a big unknown at the moment, as they know so little about the system themselves -- it might take longer than a day on site to work out what their current setup is.” ---------- Note £1350/day is about $250/hour, however, he was worth every penny because nobody in our company knows how to do this. He was on site roughly 2 days though to gather requirements and around 2 weeks to do the work. 12 days at that rate is $24,000.