Comment by IkmoIkmo
7 years ago
I've got similar experiences working for corporate clients, but it was legal work, not tech stuff. It was a bit more complex than the equivalent of a static HTML, but something that anyone with an IQ of > 90 could learn in less than half a year.
There were days when I'd charge clients $15k... for a day's work. This wouldn't have been possible if I worked on-site. But I was essentially completing $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in total.
Corporations get kind of crazy, there's extreme focus on some areas (mainly, those with KPIs and KPI owners attached), and extreme nonchalance on others. They're so big that there's just lots of insane things like this that slip through.
There was a time during the golden dotcom era when my manager scheduled a monthly management meeting across the Atlantic, which required me and 2 colleagues flying all the way over for a meeting that lasted about 4 hours.
Business class plane tickets, 2 nights in a nice hotel, rental car, dinner at very fancy restaurant.
Meanwhile, that same 100k+ employee company wasn't able to set up email fast enough for new employees, so some new hires had to use hotmail(!) for weeks before they were in the system.
I'm sure they also were very touchy about giving out raises too
> $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in total.
This sounds like a SaaS waiting to happen.
I'd mostly disagree.
If you have an extremely high-margin service, e.g. perform bill $10k of work for $100 of salary, there's absolutely no incentive to automate things on the seller's side. It essentially means hiring someone to build out a (software) solution to squeeze the $100 into a dollar of payments on a cloud provider. All you're doing is raising your margin from 99% to 99.99%, it's meaningless, your profits increases by 1%, assuming the Capex for development was zero. And given this is typically a low-volume kind of transaction, with considerable development costs to build a Saas solution, this assumption is way too generous.
It's exactly these kinds of services which are completely fine to have humans perform.
It's the type of legal work where you bill $200 for a simple contract review and have to pay a paralegal say $100 for the work, which would be great to automate to a $1 of AWS payments. Here you're increasing margins from 50% to 99%, doubling profits. Any development costs can be averaged out to approach zero, as document review is a high-volume task in any organisation.
https://atrium.co
These types of gigs are more about who you know rather than the work that gets done. I'm guessing that you didn't just cold interview for this work, right?
$15k per day billable for legal work sounds exactly like biglaw, and you don't cold interview for that.
Indeed. My story isn't entirely comparable as I didn't do it as an independent. This was indeed billed as an employee of a fin/legal company with offices in ~100 countries.
For some background info for the person you're replying to... I can easily name a whole range of colleagues with whom I could easily complete $1m per person / annum of work (about $4k a day) in billable time.
The problem is you don't get the work without the company name.
Even having worked in this business, with clients trusting me on a personal level who'd love to grant me the work even if I worked as an independent contractor... my clients are other fortune 500 companies, sales goes through a process, which has all kinds of checks and balances in place. For example, if you have no certification for data security (i.e., audited on e.g. ISO2700-1/2), you don't stand a chance to say receive sensitive due diligence docs in order to perform legal work. Performing such an audit can easily cost hundreds of thousands a year, just to pay the auditor. Building an internal framework to comply with standards, regulations etc, costs way more. This makes it impossible for small firms or contractors to compete as they can't average out a $100k audit over $50m in revenues.
Not all work has these requirements of course. But in some fields, and some clients do. Building an internal software tool for a national seller of paint products, fine as an independent contractor. Trying to win a government tender for a tool that handles personal data, extremely likely you won't be considered without working for an organisation that has 10 certifications in place that cost >$1m a year to renew. In my line of work, it'd be very tricky to sell my work to clients as an independent.
I'd like to ask a couple of questions about this. My email is in my profile if you'd like to answer them.