I don’t have a good comparison of what rates are like for independent consultants. I have only worked full time salaried for consulting departments - at AWS directly (Professional Services - full time blue badge RSU earning employee) and now for a third party AWS partner.
But let’s say I make more as a staff consultant considering my actual billed hours, benefits (401K, health insurance, paid time off etc) than I would make working independently and I always know how much I’m going to get paid.
But I will say in today’s cloud consulting environment, it is a race to the bottom unless you can lead projects and even then there are relatively few high paying (over $200K with benefits and 80% utilization not including PTO) outside of being a full time employee working in the consulting divisions of AWS, Google (they had an RTO mandate so I ignored recruiters) or maybe Oracle.
The only reason they can justify American rates for someone like me who knows cloud but who is mostly a developer is because I can lead projects and churn out code quickly - thanks to AI.
I've been feeling it pretty strongly too. The way I see it there are very strong incentives to make this work out. Whether they actually manage to automate a big enough portion of knowledge work is still an open question. A few years ago I would easily say it's 0%. Now, I'm not so sure it feels like a non-zero probability to me.
Either way, planning for it to happen would be better than be taken by surprise if it does.
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