[quote=SK in CV][quote=AN]I wasn’t referring to the “come and set up my router” type. I’m talking about come and setup big ERP system. I’ve setup a small scale ERP system before (Microsoft Great Plains). It’s not rocket science. It’s much easier than writing those ERP software. I did that while I was fresh out of college too.
At $400/hr, that equivalent to hiring someone full time and pay them ~$800k/yr. I’m not in IT consulting, so I don’t know, but I’m skeptical about the $400/hr rate since I was in the S/W consulting business. Even at the best of time, a S/W architect can’t fetch anywhere near $400/hr.
I didn’t know IT consulting is more lucrative than S/W consulting. Typical rate today for S/W consulting range for 1.5-2x hourly rate (Wipro type to more high end Teleca type). I’d impress to know that there are people who would pay that much more for IT consultant. Even at the high end of your range, 3.5x hourly pay, your typical Sr. IT is probably making around $40-50/hr., so 3.5x that would be $140-175/hr. That’s a far cry from $400/hr.[/quote]
The guys that are doing the installs for the big ERP systems (not GP, which is now MS Dynamics), like Oracle and SAP systems pretty typically bill in the $175-$225 range. The EPM guys that do Hyperion and SAP’s EPM solution tend to be a bit higher. The tech guys related to those installations are $250 at the very low end, up to $400. The $400/hr for the non-tech work is typically for the very esoteric stuff. (like SSM and PCM work) I may have exaggerated a bit, in that for one, there aren’t too many of those guys out there, and second, there isn’t that much work for them. (Literally, there may not be more than a dozen guys in the US that know SAP’s SSM module inside and out.) But that is the standard rate for some firms.
These guys get paid more than $50/hr. Some of them a lot more. I’ve got a contractor I pay $165/hr because he has skills that very few had, and he won’t become an employee. His 1099 was over $300K. he’s being cut loose because of that, but the employees that have acquired his skills have W-2’s >$200K, and they bill at $250+. On the lower side of margin %, but still a high margin $ for the industry.[/quote]
The nice thing about when I use to work for a major EAI integration company was that I had a lot of exposure to a lot of the CRM and ERP systems, because my job was building automation to workflows between these systems. I can tell you although I worked for a competing technology, having experience in these ERP systems + having integration experience with things like Tibco/MQSeries, you could bill out at around $250-300/hr, because not many people at the time knew it. The most lucrative positions were big companies that and a mess of an infrastructure. This rate has fallen somewhat, but the trend has and always been that folks who were “solutions architects” with good knowledge of pre-packaged ERP/CRM and other major backoffice systems and could design the system architecture and walk the talk of non-techie’s often could bill out more so than someone that can “write IT programs, particularly J2EE”…The way most things are going, it’s all about pre-packaged solutions.
There’s a common misconception imho.. Working in I.T. is NOT working in technology. Most likely, you are not working at the bleeding edge, but rather trying to fix sh1t that everyone else created. I.T. is NOT engineering and for the most part not software engineering these days.
Pay can be good if you realize your value is better knowing how to do solutions rather than coding. I.E. you’re better off being a solutions architect versus knowing J2EE/Java/php/name_your_flavor_programing_language in and out. You can find many many people to be the code monkey, but very few people can do a decent job about being a solutions architect. If you find yourself in the coding category, and you’re hired to be a coder, expect to compete with folks in Banglore or the likes who, given a perfectly worded specification and write a module or two for you. You’re probably in the wrong role and you’re probably going to be looking at yoy decline in pay as a result. If you’re in the role of telling people what the solution should be like and finding people to actually write the code to implement your solution, then you’ll do just fine.
If your heart really is about creating the most advanced, breaking technology/innovation hands on coding, work for a real technology company instead of being an I.T. consultant, or create your own products and push them.
It’s for the very reason why I left the I.T./integration business years back and haven’t looked back since. Was tired of spending so much time NOT focusing on technology and on internal bullshit of a companies. I mean, one company I spent years with had a cluster-f of an infrastructure and couldn’t even send out targeted emails on demand because they decided to home-grow an email solution that got so coupled with their ERP system that it couldn’t do anything else but send out email for that ERP system. Could don’t anything related to the web solution and couldn’t do anything for the SAAS offerings. The first thing I did was to help eliminate it and replace it with a SAAS third party system. Heck of a lot cheaper to run, and with guaranteed availability from the third party.. I don’t understand why the company took so long to do it. I mean come on, email has been around for ages.
