Comment by kfcm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kfcm | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who thinks $140/hr (or whatever per project rate is) is too high, consider the following.

My CPA in a Midwest/Great Plains rural town of 10K people charges $175/hour. Her firm has 5 other CPAs. The town has around 20 CPAs total.

My attorney charges $90/hour for advice only. Nothing else. $90/hour just to discuss a problem (pro rated per minute) or BS. If there's real work to be done (contract creation/review, legal issues, etc), it's more. He's in a town of 2K people.

Auto dealers in towns/cities ranging from 5K to 200K population are charging between $90-120/hour for mechanic's labor. Not including parts/supplies. Oil changes at many dealerships range from $45 to $70. (Oil changes at mom and pops run $25-30.)

Dentists? I just saw an ad for a newly opened dental office in a metro area. Special for cleaning, x-rays and such was like $75 from a regular rate of around $350.

Electricians? $80-100+/hr easily for a good journeyman or master. Not including service call charge. That was in 2011. ( A good electrician rate thread from 2009: http://www.electriciantalk.com/f15/when-did-you-last-raise-y... )

$40-75 to mow your lawn. $40-50 to clean snow from your driveway.

Technologists make things which can bring in (or save) hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but seem to consistently undervalue their worth.

none of those guys can be easily outsourced overseas though

That's not entirely correct. Accounting and non-trial legal positions can be outsourced overseas (cf, http://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/article/10741227/what-tax-... ), or H-1Bed. Most of the other positions can have the "cheap labor" come here (eg, legal or illegal aliens). Most of the billable rates don't go to the workers of companies which do this though.

But this digresses from my original point. There are independent business owners who do charge the same or more than IT workers on a per hour basis. They know the value of their work (customers either don't know how to do it, or don't want to), and charge accordingly.

I'm pretty sure your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm taking it at face value for the hell of it:

Horror stories of outsourcing cheaply overseas, where doing it ended up delaying the project and sending it way over budget, are so commonplace now that you really need to define 'easily'. I would reword your statement:

> none of those guys can be recklessly outsourced overseas though

...but it no longer supports your point :-)

countless companies have remote employees or contractors and it seems to work out great for them. there are horror stories about anything under the sun if you look hard enough

my point was that the end client will always have more choice regarding building their site than cleaning their pool. they can outsource to elance, get a highschool kid to build on wordpress, use shopify, etc

all of them being orders of magnitute cheaper than hiring the local agency with the fancy offices

The downside to getting the wrong Elancer, or the wrong high school kid, in terms of delays and wages paid, is potentially a lot higher than not having your pool cleaned properly.

In my view, you're right about "choice" in the same way you'd be right about the choice of apps on App Store or Google Play.

But, you are right that there is more choice, for sure.

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