[HN Gopher] My First Year as a Freelance AI Engineer
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My First Year as a Freelance AI Engineer
Author : polm23
Score : 194 points
Date : 2020-05-02 06:24 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (masatohagiwara.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (masatohagiwara.net)
| JoeMayoBot wrote:
| Really nice article. I've been an independent consultant
| (freelancer) for several years and there are so many parts of
| this that match my experience too: whether freelancing is right
| for you, being prepared for uneven work cycles, and what is fair
| game for billable hours. To me breadth of experience, time
| flexibility, and just being independent are the strongest perks.
| polm23 wrote:
| Hey, quick clarification - I posted this because I thought it was
| interesting, but I am not the author and can't answer questions
| about it.
| mhagiwara wrote:
| Wow, it's nice to see my post on the top page of Hacker News.
|
| Note that I wrote this post back in February 2020 and there are a
| couple of things that I would like to add:
|
| - Due to high demand, I increased my rate to $250/hour + some
| fixed monthly fee in April. I didn't drop any single client :)
|
| - I'm seeing very little impact from the coronavirus. I have a
| client base spanning between Japan and the US in a little-
| impacted industry (education). Don't put all your eggs in one
| basket.
|
| - I would strongly encourage everyone who's considering making a
| leap to read "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto"
| https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/the-manifesto/
|
| - Due to a sheer volume of my incoming emails I can't answer all
| of them, but do let me know if you are interested in working with
| me!
| trott wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experiences!
|
| I did well in Kaggle's highest-prize competition[1], so I
| wonder if I should explore this kind of consulting myself.
|
| The competition I was in was effectively limited to US
| residents though, but as a freelancer you compete world-wide,
| potentially with people willing to work for far less. Are there
| reasons your clients prefer US-based freelancers enough to
| justify the gap in pay?
|
| [1] Top 1% (5th/518), #1 result in California:
| https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2018/07/09/n...
| ganstyles wrote:
| Super cool, I've been thinking a little about this for CV rather
| than NLP. One thing that gave me the idea is I (the company I
| worked for, at the direction of me) engaged an outside expert on
| a particular ML domain. It wasn't a freelancer, but just someone
| at a major company who did some cool stuff. I approached them,
| told them about what issue we were having, and engaged them for a
| 50 hour contract @ $500/hr. Completely worth it, but looking at
| your rates maybe we super overpaid. Not that it matters, but just
| an interesting data point and got me thinking about freelancing
| purposely if those are the rates. Thanks for sharing your
| experience.
| gk1 wrote:
| You didn't overpay; OP is severely undercharging. $150-200/hr
| is freelance marketer manager territory.
|
| As an aside, this is one of several reasons I think charging an
| hourly rate is bad for business: You _immediately_ get compared
| to other freelancers based on this arbitrary number rather than
| your abilities.
| ganstyles wrote:
| I was just reflecting on the rate before you posted and
| realized OPs rates are around what I made in base salary,
| plus I get the benefit of things like health insurance,
| equity, etc. I think I would consider freelance for $500/hr,
| but $150-200/hr seems low for all the risk, for me
| personally. But I could see doing it depending on whether I
| really just enjoyed the freelance lifestyle and didn't have
| to live in an expensive locale.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| As a general rule to consider freelance you should make at
| least twice as much per hour as you do full-time employee
| to make up for the instability of the job. This calculation
| of course changes in times of instability such as now, I
| don't think there is any freelance job I could be offered
| right now that would tempt me to quit my current job - of
| course it is also unlikely I would get offered twice hourly
| given my current salary is pretty high up for my region.
| 1024core wrote:
| A FTE costs (to the company) way more than their salary;
| an easy rule of thumb is to double it. The salary cost
| does not include things like the cost of providing an
| office, retirement matching, health insurance, etc. etc.
|
| If a typical ML engineer makes $250K/year, she costs the
| company about $500K/year; that means the hourly rate
| should be at least $250/hr.
| ledauphin wrote:
| I've heard this rule of thumb and can't make it make any
| sense. My company's contribution to my health insurance
| and retirement doesn't come anywhere near 25% of my
| salary, and there's simply no way my office space costs
| more than $500/mo for my share of it.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| If anyone is reading this and considers $150 per hour
| "low", do reach out to the email in my profile. Here in the
| Netherlands the going rate for a AI engineer is more around
| $90, so I'd be happy to pick up the work.
| j_autumn wrote:
| I know right? 40$/h FTE here. Not an AI engineer though.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| I have almost never seen such a thing. The $500/hr
| freelancer are probably the same category as the $500k
| programmers. They exist but are quite rare.
| zerr wrote:
| Most senior devs at FNG reach 500k and beyond (US and
| London).
| nnoitra wrote:
| For U.S. I understand, but do you have any official info
| that seniors make 500K of total comp in London?
| qu4ku wrote:
| Working for a rate that you would get full-time is non-
| sustainable as a contractor.
| ScottFree wrote:
| What's $50/hr then? College student frontend web developer?
| :)
| nnoitra wrote:
| They are BSing.
| [deleted]
| ma2rten wrote:
| What did they do for you exactly? Did they continue working at
| the major company while they were working on your project?
| wdb wrote:
| As contractor as I was charging PS650/day and I thought that
| was a nice daily rate but $500/hr that's nice. Guess, the ML
| domain pays well
| Avalaxy wrote:
| It doesn't. Outside of this HN bubble I have literally never
| ever met anyone that made such rates with ML.
| ganstyles wrote:
| In my experience it very much does, depending on what
| you're doing I guess. Levels.fyi under the Data Scientist
| tab seems to verify that this isn't some bubble thing.
| Well, bubble maybe, but not HN bubble.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| Sorry but I have never heard of "levels.fyi". TBH the
| domain already looks like a typical silicon valley HN-
| bubble website. Don't you think there is a massive
| selection bias to the people who fill in their salaries
| on a website like that?
|
| A more reputable site (that's known outside of the HN-
| bubble) would be the stackoverflow salary calculator. If
| I fill in "Data Scientists with a master's degree and 5
| years of experience in the Amsterdam area" I get a median
| income of EUR 51K. In silicon valley it's higher of
| course, but the same profile in San Francisco still
| 'only' gets you a median income of USD 157K.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Larger companies will pay that much salary for ML talent
| especially with experience and a PhD. I've seen $400+k
| salaries for people with a few years experience and no PhD.
| Contractors will generally charge twice the amount per hour
| as an employee so you're looking at $500-1000/hr.
|
| As for why. If a large company makes money from advertising
| and you improve their $10billion/year click model by 0.01%
| CTR then you've just made them a million dollars. Do that
| few times throughout a year and a million dollar payout
| seems low.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| > Contractors will generally charge twice the amount per
| hour as an employee so you're looking at $500-1000/hr.
|
| Yea, no. Not outside of the HN bubble. I run a data
| science company myself (in Europe). Rates here are really
| not higher than 80~100 euros per hour. That's for someone
| with a master's degree in data science and years of
| experience. On top of that, we have to very actively look
| for clients and advertise a lot. It's not like people are
| en-masse knocking on our doors to throw their money at
| us. So I claim BS on 500/1000 per hour. That just
| absolutely does not happen except for maybe the 1% who is
| a celebrity in ML world.
| 147 wrote:
| How did you find that person at a major company that did cool
| stuff? Was it through your network or their blog or ?
| ganstyles wrote:
| Surprisingly, they created a piece of OSS we considered
| using, but was directly related to our problem.
| nvilcins wrote:
| New to freelancing, and while I get the hustle and pricing
| according to the value for the client, it's still hard to wrap
| my head around people charging 500$/h+. Like, what is the value
| an AI contractor can deliver in ~50h that easily justifies
| spending 25k (and without much prior knowledge about the
| product, systems in place, etc.). Honest question, trying to
| understand the game.
| cambalache wrote:
| That is about 1 month cost of an average Engineer at a big
| company. So as longs as the freelancer provide as much as
| value as your average employee in 1 monh the company is doing
| a good decision. It is even better because the expertise of
| the freelancer tends to be high.
| jorvi wrote:
| $500 per hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week gives $20k a
| week, $80k a month or (let's be charitable and say you earn
| a $40k bonus) $1 million a year. I don't know what the
| split between benefits and pure salary is in America, but
| let's put it at 2/3. Does the average engineer at a big
| corp _really_ pull in $666.000 a year..?
| TomMarius wrote:
| Yes, if you include stock options
| why_only_15 wrote:
| The average engineer doesn't pull this much. Maybe
| ~300-400k/yr but not 600k/yr, even with RSUs.
| ska wrote:
| For what it's worth the average engineer doesn't get
| anywhere near 300k/yr. SV rates in some sectors have
| really distorted peoples view of what is actually being
| paid across the industry.
| exdsq wrote:
| The average engineer doesn't pull in 300-400k either
| blackrock wrote:
| What is $666.000 a year?
|
| Is this $666 per year? I think you're missing a comma
| somewhere.
|
| ;-)
| littleweep wrote:
| In parts of the world other than the US they use '.'
| instead of ',' to punctuate numbers. The poster above
| meant "$666,000".
| blackrock wrote:
| Obviously..
| jonas21 wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the parent. Their
| comparison is between:
|
| (1) a 50 hour contract at $500/hr = $25K
|
| (2) 1 month of paying a full-time engineer = $25K (i.e.
| $300K/yr including payroll taxes and benefits)
|
| If a freelancer comes in with specialized knowledge for
| solving a particular problem, it can be quite easy for
| them to add more value in 50 hours than an average
| engineer would in a month, and therefore it's worth it.
| cambalache wrote:
| Exactly, I suspect that depending on the problem and the
| expert the value multiplier could be in the double
| digits.Something freelancers should think about when
| proposing and charging their work.
| woah wrote:
| Having a PhD likely helps. Whatever the value delivered, it
| will be easy to justify to higher-ups
| ganstyles wrote:
| This seems to be less and less the case. The ML industry
| changes so much and so quickly that a PhD in some specific
| subject is obsolete quickly. Of course there are ancillary
| benefits to having a PhD, and certainly the more stogey
| "higher ups" of certain mentalities might be convinced, but
| largely it doesn't move the needle. In fact, most of the
| really respected people in the industry have told me that
| one shouldn't get a PhD for ML anymore unless they have
| very specific goals and it is a tip top program.
| analyst74 wrote:
| The last projects I worked on with about 10 other people
| doing some not-cutting-edge tech to make things more
| efficient increased the company's yearly revenue by over
| 500mil. I imagine a consulting team can probably negotiate a
| fee exceeding $500/hr delivering that kind of returns.
|
| The company is not that special, I don't even know if we make
| it to Fortune 500. The point being, technology is a force
| multiplier, and when applied at the right lever for companies
| above certain size, the returns can be enormous.
| twomoretime wrote:
| Cutting edge applied ML can do things that previously could
| only be done by humans. You're generating potentially
| unprecedented insights into your data because neural networks
| pick up on what I call "nonlinear" correlations - stuff that
| is missed with typical first order statistics like averages
| and skews and such.
|
| So basically ML when done right is enormously valuable
| because it horizontally extends the reach of computation into
| previously humanlike domains.
|
| But the caveat is that it's hard to do ML right. You need
| very much to be a generalist, an autodidact (to quickly learn
| the nature of the domain you're operating in) and I think a
| background in math and/or physics, or at least some other
| quantitative field is indispensable. You can do a hell of a
| lot more with neural networks than sort cat pictures or
| target ads.
| bitL wrote:
| Automating away 100 people in some repetitive cognitive task
| for example.
| ska wrote:
| This has nothing to do with AI specifically. Basically if you
| are hiring a contractor/consultant you are doing one of two
| things - bringing on capacity, or bringing on capability.
| Sometime a mix of both.
|
| The former category buys you a little bit of flexibility in
| hiring, etc., so you should be willing to pay a little more
| than you would fully loaded (e.g. 1.25.x - 2x salary,
| depending on a bunch of factors) with no complaint, but
| that's about it. The great thing about capability freelancers
| is you can turn them on and off easily as your needs change.
|
| That capability category is a vastly different space though.
| Imagine I'm a specialized skill/experience sort of consultant
| or freelancer. If you hire me to show you how to do something
| you don't know how to do, how much is that worth? Or what if
| bringing me on for 3 months can pull your time-to-market
| ahead by a year? Maybe you would love to hire me full time
| but can't afford it (or I just don't want full time with you)
| - or maybe you just don't have enough of this sort of work to
| justify an expensive hire.
|
| It all comes down to value. If 50k worth of my time will save
| you 3 million dollars, why do you care how much time that is?
|
| Sometimes a 2 hour conversation can save you from a 300k
| mistake. Should I be charging you for the time, or the
| impact?
| ganstyles wrote:
| Just responded to the person you were responding to, but
| well put. In my case it was very much the latter, and we
| don't know the true results yet, but will potentially allow
| us to get operational significantly faster, with fewer
| mistakes, with a better product. Win win win.
| ganstyles wrote:
| Imagine developing a core competency for your company where
| it's complicated enough that you're not sure what route to
| take. Also assume you have a team of maybe 8-10 ML engineers
| who all make what ML engineers make. It makes so much more
| sense to pay $25k to get direct knowledge of systems and
| techniques versus your team spending a bunch of time
| exploring different products/methods/algos to find something
| that might work in the end, or might fail in a few months.
| $25k is like 5 MacBooks, hardly worth thinking about versus
| being able to get experienced direction from someone who has
| done what you're trying to do and saving your team literally
| hundreds of hours of exploratory work. It's not really a
| game, it's good sense. Yeah given the covo here I probably
| could have negotiated them down, but that's my time doing
| that and then things have to be vetted with outside counsel
| and the CFO, also time wasted, versus just telling them this
| is what the person charges, we need them for 50 hours,
| "authorize the charges please." And at what cost, saving a
| few thousand dollars?
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| How do you develop a business connection and market your
| service as being more valuable that the wide abundance of
| free materials, engineering blogs, research papers, etc.,
| in this space?
|
| Just for example, I run a team of 10 machine learning
| engineers at a large ecommerce company. We mostly do NLP
| and computer vision, some time series forecasting.
|
| I cannot imagine ever paying anything close to $25k for
| consulting advice, that's just bananas to me. We recently
| purchased licenses to use the data annotation tool prodigy
| from the spaCy creators at explosion.ai. That was ~$4000
| and the decision whether to build our own data annotation
| system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of
| business documentation, RFCs, approvals, NDA processes,
| etc. It was deeply non-trivial to procure that, and
| building our own was a very serious option we pursued with
| tech specs and prototypes and everything.
|
| Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which
| practically grows on trees today, is just totally
| unrealistic.
|
| It makes me suspect the real target customer for you is not
| companies with actual ML engineering teams or ambitious
| data-driven projects, but more like someone looking for
| McKinsey-lite. Some place that has no serious ML use case
| beyond drop-in pretrained models and sees $25k as the
| cheaper path to rubber stamp certification that dissolves
| internal political feuds. Most likely just selling super
| cookie cutter NLP models as if they are advanced and
| represent some sexy leap forward for a company with a
| couple junior data scientists. Algolia or just some drop-in
| Elastic tfidf search is more than enough for these
| companies. Spend the $25k on an intern who can tell you
| anything you need to know about neural network frameworks.
|
| In reality, the 4-5 ML engineers you already hired are very
| likely _more knowledgeable_ than the freelance consultant
| you might hire. They can tell you much more about state of
| the art and simultaneously know the specific integration
| path in _your_ company's web service and data ecosystem.
| Those folks won't be wasting time prototyping - they would
| be pursuing a _more efficient_ way to get the answers you
| need than advice from a freelancer, even if that freelancer
| was Bengio for pete's sake.
|
| I just cannot see the value prop here except for the usual
| story of paying for consulting as a virtue signal /
| credential / politics kind of thing.
| hogFeast wrote:
| It is funny that you think you overpaid. Small company
| mentality. The right person's time can be worth tens of
| thousands per hour. The question isn't what you paid but what
| you got in return (most companies function by vastly overpaying
| the 95% of average people they employ, and underpaying the
| competent 5% who don't know their value or will move onto
| better things soon).
| tensor wrote:
| There is almost no one that is worth tens of thousands per
| hour. Most "big companies" overpay for people with fancy
| titles that produce a lot of noise but not a lot of output.
| Small companies have no choice but to be highly efficient and
| that's why they have lower levels of pay inequality.
|
| Chances are that 95% of people is what is bringing in 95% of
| the value of your company.
| ska wrote:
| This is the wrong way of thinking about it. There is almost
| nobody who is worth even 1k/hour full time in most
| scenarios.
|
| If 20 hours of someones time saves you 2 million though,
| it's a no brainer to pay them 20k to do it.
|
| Some people absolutely do specialize in this sort of
| engagement, and do well at it. It's really important to
| remember that. $N/hour usually doesn't mean $N*2000/year
| salary. Often hourly rates go up because of the nature of
| the work means the ratio of billable hours to hours put in
| isn't great (see, e.g. many independent lawyers).
|
| Also worth noting that most people contracting at this
| level don't in fact charge hourly but that's a different
| aspect.
| littleweep wrote:
| This seems like such a narrow viewpoint. Consider a
| business problem -- like a misconfiguration of an Amazon S3
| bucket -- that is needlessly costing a company an extra
| $30k per month. Say you don't have the expertise on your
| team and hire an expert for 1 hour @ $20,000/hour to fix
| it. It would be well worth it to stop the bleeding.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| This example sounds a little like the examples to justify
| torture because they guy you have caught knows how to
| defuse the ticking bomb. Sounds good but never happens in
| reality.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| other than torture is immoral and paying someone for
| expertise is sensible this analogy is spot on.
|
| I agree that 20000 for one hour is pretty unlikely but
| 10,000 a day for 2 days seems like it might happen.
| tomp wrote:
| This is business, not saving human lives. Remember,
| whenever a company pays you something, you're leaving
| money on the table - they're _still_ making a profit
| overall, otherwise they wouldn 't be doing this! Same
| goes with buying, of course - any car discount you fail
| to negotiate, is profit for the dealership.
| svaha1728 wrote:
| "It's perfect!" she gushed. "You managed to capture my
| essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much
| do I owe you?"
|
| "Five thousand dollars," the artist replied.
|
| "But, what?" the woman sputtered. "How could you want so
| much money for this picture? It only took you a second to
| draw it!"
|
| To which Picasso responded, "Madame, it took me my entire
| life."
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Small companies have no choice but to be highly efficient
| and that's why they have lower levels of pay inequality.
|
| Only if you discount equity, small companies are very
| unequal because the owners/founders will make orders of
| magnitude more in the event of a sale.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| Agreed, if the top contributors fell in the 95% bucket :)
| Imo EVERY senior/principal engineer is underpayed if
| compared to juniors based on contribution value. And this
| is OK
| hogFeast wrote:
| It depends how you define almost no one. I agree almost no
| one is worth that much...but that was my point. There are
| people with hourlies in the hundreds of thousands. I
| wouldn't call tens of thousands particularly high.
|
| And no...that just isn't correct. It does vary by industry.
| Very generally, capital-intensive businesses have smaller
| productivity differences...but even then it is probably far
| less than you think (in some of those industries,
| experience curves are per employee). But, given the subject
| of the post, then yes...productivity can vary that much.
|
| What is perhaps confusing you, and many companies get this
| wrong, is that they treat every employee like a superstar
| when (by definition) they can't be. It is far more
| profitable to hire five below-average people and teach them
| to be average than hire one superstar.
|
| My point wasn't really about what companies should or
| should not do but how they should look at those decisions.
| Wages really don't matter. I will pay someone $1m tomorrow
| if they can generate $5m in sales. Simple.
|
| But companies should think carefully before they go down
| this route. It mostly isn't worth it because most companies
| aren't very good at hiring and will lose the employee if
| they can't continuously provide a high productivity
| environment. Some places can retain staff but, again, there
| is an 95/5 rule about workplaces just as there is
| employees.
| exolymph wrote:
| > There is almost no one that is worth tens of thousands
| per hour.
|
| Sure, but there are plenty of business problems worth
| solving even if it takes millions. You're not paying for
| the person, you're paying for someone to solve your
| problem.
| hogFeast wrote:
| This reminds me of a story a friend told me: he locked
| himself out of his house, he calls up the emergency
| locksmith, locksmith takes a look, and says it will be
| PS150.
|
| My friend (annoyed) asks what is he going to do.
| Locksmith pulls out a bent coathanger. My friend gets
| angry. Says he could do it himself, he has a coathanger
| upstairs, he doesn't need the locksmith, PS150 is a total
| rip off, calls him every name under the sun.
|
| Locksmith: "Okay mate, you have a coathanger now?".
| Friend says no, agrees to pay him. Door opened. PS150
| well spent.
|
| I think too many people here perceive tech as something
| that meets their needs when it should be about providing
| a service to others.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| A couple years ago I was approached for a consulting job
| for a company using DSSSL with some arbortext extensions
| for generating their user manuals, I was unfortunately
| already committed on a project, darn the luck.
|
| I don't know who they found to take the task, but I have
| to assume they charged them quite a lot because you're
| just not going to find very many people to solve that
| particular problem.
|
| Certainly not 10000 per hour, but a significant amount
| given the Danish market.
| Advaith wrote:
| This is super cool. I'm curious if OP engages in cold emails to
| scout for leads.
| kazuki wrote:
| Great post. I felt like $150/hour is way too cheap for his resume
| (10+ years of experience, PhD, author of book, based in Seattle).
| I am pretty sure some companies will be happy paying twice as
| much.
| hoerzu wrote:
| What are your clients?
| damon_c wrote:
| One interesting thing about being freelance during times of
| economic instability is that the "steadiness" metric is inverted
| when you have multiple sources of income compared to relying on
| one company.
| justingreet wrote:
| Just wanted to say that even though you said you're not a native
| English speaker, I never would have known if you hadn't mentioned
| it. Very well-written and clearly organized post.
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| what are most people asking for - pytorch? or are they leaving
| those decisions up to you?
| m0zg wrote:
| As a practitioner in the field and in similar circumstances,
| the answer will probably be: it doesn't really matter.
| Personally I prefer PyTorch, but I can work with whatever the
| client already uses, if anything. For one of my clients I
| worked in both because there was no viable deployment option
| out of PyTorch to one of their platforms. There still isn't, so
| both models are still maintained and trained.
|
| If they aren't 100% set in their ways, I do make them aware
| that things will move at about half the speed with TF, so
| they'll effectively be paying twice as much. If they are set in
| their ways, I do not mention it, since I'm not going to change
| their mind anyway.
|
| That said PyTorch 1.5.0 is just broken pretty much - tensor
| permute (which in computer vision you end up doing for every
| input tensor) is 10x slower than it used to be. There's an
| issue in GitHub already.
|
| I'm beginning to worry about PyTorch.
| angel_j wrote:
| This person, like many, makes the error of commodity pricing for
| labor. They charges less, the more the client buys. That's how
| corn is bought. Don't sell your time like corn.
|
| This kind of thinking/pricing has been inculcated by so much
| free-market idealism, and of course on some level human labor can
| be thought of as a commodity, but that's neo-evil.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| Would you mind sharing what you think are the practical
| downsides of this pricing approach?
| FpUser wrote:
| "As a freelance AI engineer, you are expected to, for example,
| start with a client, familiarize yourself with the product and
| the codebase, submit the first PR within a couple of days"
|
| Although I have my doubts maybe this is true specifically for AI
| area. In general contracting, getting familiar with the large
| project and "submitting the first PR within a couple of days" is
| a wet dream. I will exclude cases when one is hired to find and
| fix bug in some simple, short piece of code.
| bigmanwalter wrote:
| Congrats on making the leap! Do you find that your pipeline is
| busy enough are are you still looking to grow it?
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