As a manager, who are you going to pay that kind of rate to?
Why would someone hire a contractor at that rate, when they could hire the top tier Google Engineers?
$200-300/hr rates are usually for 'expertise' style inputs - it's where you have industry leading or arcane knowledge in your field, and you bill for your insight, which might just be a few hours.
A lawyer who specializes in IP, and is intimately familiar with the Texas IP legal circuit and all the judges, would bill some 'very high rate' per hour, but probably only for limited number of hours.
If you have a full time job, and want to do some 'evening consulting' - you could bill $300/hr if you prepare a training package and are training a team on how to do something, i.e. a 4-hour course for $1200. That kind of thing.
Or if you really have some super DevOps knowledge, you're 'The K8 Man' and they call you because they are stuck on a problem, and you always have a solution - you can bill them $300/hr.
But being a bit more senior than their regular devs and helping them out doing regular work, then it's going to be tough to get a huge billing rate.
That's what I indicated: At 'a few hours or a day' there are many problems which need solving, for which rates may be substantial especially given highly specialized knowledge.
But 'leadership' over some project, over any period of time, is not one of them.
A 'consultant to solve our DB limitations', sure.
But in terms of leadership, part time, non-business hours, no 'on site' (aka the OP has a 'real job'.). I don't think so.
$300/hr is a $600K/year run rate - is the relative cost of having for someone for extended periods.
A contractor can log much more than 1K hours per year - or less - it entirely depends on the nature of their work.
Also, some 'hours billed' are de-facto to the firm, not the individual. If you're hiring 'a lawyer' - you're really hiring 'their team' not really the individual, as often you would when hiring a contractor.
$300/hr is more like $300K/year, if you follow the "overhead to a company is basically equivalent to salary" common wisdom. That assumes that the contracting is for fairly large numbers of hours on a fairly long term, otherwise "benchtime" can make that effectively much, much lower.
It's the equivalent from the 'buyers' perspective - that's the benchmark burn rate if they were to hire the person for a 'man year'.
Contractors come in all shapes and forms some may book more, some less, though yes, from the contractors perspective, $150/hour is more like $150K/year.
My day job company pays upwards of $1000/hr to short-term contract leadership people. I guess it's really more consulting than contracting but the lines seem pretty blurry based on what I've seen. Based on what I've seen for senior/principal engineering contracting, I'd say $500/hr is completely realistic, so my goal of $300 feels realistic. Perhaps I'm in a weird sector of the industry or something, but I don't think so.
The 'key word' in your language that is a bit off is 'leadership'.
Yes, usually in a hierarchy, 'leaders' get paid more.
But consultants and contractors are not hired for 'leadership' roles, so I'm a bit confused by that.
I started a new project and our DB guy was young, we were unsure of ourselves, so we hired some Oracle expert to help with that and they were expensive. So 1 or 2 days consulting on our project.
It could have been $1K an hour for all I know, it doesn't matter.
For short bits of key insight, high rates are not uncommon.
Corporate Lawyers will charge $1K/hour - but even then that's going to go to their interns, associates, overhead as well - it's a 'business' not just a person.
Also note that those rates tend to grow exponentially pas a certain point: someone who specializes in international law for mining and gas, who is needed 'right now' because of a flare up between SNC Lavalin and the Peruvian government, can bill $10K/hour etc..
There actually isn't that much of a difference between 'consulting' and 'contracting' but the later usually implies 'work' as opposed to 'expertise'.
If you are providing very specific knowledge that the company really needs to move forward, and the terms are fairly clear that they need it, then you can start billing much higher than contract rates. The bigger the influence (i.e. if it's affecting a giant, $100M contract), then the bigger the rate.
But for 'general leadership' ... that's a much harder thing to put into dollars.
I think some are using leadership to mean the led/lead a project in a tactical sense. My understanding of the term leadership (or leaders as most others are using) is thought/strategic leaders.
Holy jeezus, I was worried I was flexing by mentioning my $200/hr rate. Dude or dudette, if you feel that’s realistic, the half Jew side of me is rooting for you. Godspeed.
$1,000/hr, what the fuck. I don’t think I’ve dropped a legit WTF on HN before. That’s a 40hr a week rate for at least a month, right? Otherwise you’re probably using the wrong comparison to what you want. But still… sure wouldn’t take many hours at that level. What do they do?
As a manager, who are you going to pay that kind of rate to?
Why would someone hire a contractor at that rate, when they could hire the top tier Google Engineers?
$200-300/hr rates are usually for 'expertise' style inputs - it's where you have industry leading or arcane knowledge in your field, and you bill for your insight, which might just be a few hours.
A lawyer who specializes in IP, and is intimately familiar with the Texas IP legal circuit and all the judges, would bill some 'very high rate' per hour, but probably only for limited number of hours.
If you have a full time job, and want to do some 'evening consulting' - you could bill $300/hr if you prepare a training package and are training a team on how to do something, i.e. a 4-hour course for $1200. That kind of thing.
Or if you really have some super DevOps knowledge, you're 'The K8 Man' and they call you because they are stuck on a problem, and you always have a solution - you can bill them $300/hr.
But being a bit more senior than their regular devs and helping them out doing regular work, then it's going to be tough to get a huge billing rate.