[FredPret]

Consider a company that needs a programming job done. It’s maybe a one-off, perhaps a 3 month to 3 year project. The company is not in tech and has no programmers.

Now, in this scenario they could hire a programmer at say, 100-200k, for the sake of argument. But this person might want to stay on for years, want benefits, and would need a manager. The company has no management experience in programming, so they know they’ll either do a shoddy job managing or have to hire a manager. This thing is already spiralling!

So now a consultant comes along. This person is an expert and has a track record. They are self-starting and self-managing. They can be brought on to get the job done and then they go away.

You can see that hiring such a consultant is not only far easier, faster, and likely to result in high quality, but very likely cheaper.

[tptacek]

Which makes it crazy to me that anybody thinks about delivering work metered in hours, as if they were a furniture mover. A contract developer is selling a (quite valuable) enterprise product. You don't need an MBA to know not to do cost-based pricing.