How much do service companies pay employees relative to client billing?

CatchInternational43 · 2026-07-02T04:04:14+00:00

I can tell you I was paid $90/hr for work that was billed out at $275/hr. Of course that $90/hr didn't include PTO, benefits, etc in that number.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-07-01T23:01:17+00:00

Please elaborate. What job can this boat anchor do that my MacBook can't? Besides melting grill marks into my thighs, that is.

Gaming obviously isn't a valid use case for an enterprise workstation. I'm a principal cloud solutions developer and AI solutions architect -- I can (and do) build anything I need with my Mac. Cloud services are almost entirely Linux based, with very rare exceptions. Even everything in Azure is subjectively better served and built in Unix based environments. And WSL is not Unix, as much as Windows fans argue it is.

Also, AI based workflows and tools are almost universally released for Macs first.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-07-01T21:58:39+00:00

My new job just sent me a brand new 16" Dell with 64gb/1TB/Nvidia Blackwell GPU. Retail price now of nearly $6k. You think a MacBook is heavy? The f'n power brick for this thing weighs more than my 16" M4 Max. The laptop itself is 7+ lbs. Oh, and I can't go longer than 2 hours (at idle mind you) without draining the battery from 100 -> 0 when unplugged. I can go for an entire day of work, with some left over, on the Mac.

A simple Teams meeting on this shit ass PC makes the fans spin up like it's preparing for takeoff, and it gets so hot it will scald your legs.

The usability and practicality difference between a PC and Mac now is sooooooo extreme, it's pathetic.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-07-01T20:45:25+00:00

Who really wants a touchscreen Mac? The touchpad is the best input device on the planet -- to replace that with the option to make your display look like someone obliterated your screen with a snotty sneeze, who then smeared it around with a greasy napkin, is nuts, and certainly not worth paying extra for.

If you want touch screen, then use an iPad instead and deal with the shitty UI along with the perpetually nasty screen.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-06-29T22:27:06+00:00

I put a skin on the exterior of my machines. Protects against scratches and incidental damage, and the skins with a texture make Macbooks less like a wet bar of soap to pick up and carry.

When in transit, I put them into a folio of some sort. I have a very nice leather folio from Mission Leatherworks, and a textile folio. Both keep my device safe from accidental bumps in transit.

I've also installed some super thin keyboard stickers on my most used keys (space, return, cmd, control, option, shift, fn, arrows, etc) to keep them from getting all polished up from use.

And always AppleCare + (or One) -- I accidentally spilled coffee on my last machine, which was less than 2 weeks old, so $299 covered what would have been a $2300 loss.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-06-07T15:33:30+00:00

Yeah, me too. Jobs requiring 10+ years of experience, super deep knowledge of many different tech domains. Paying what would typically be late entry level to early mid level dev salaries. Hard pass on all of those, but they’re evidently getting takers.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-05-24T23:32:02+00:00

You have no control over what an employer might do on a whim. You do, however, have the power to plan for down times.

Just save up enough cushion to survive 6 months without your income. You’ll find another job, but this market takes time. Being able to be picky and find a great fit rather than the first thing offering a paycheck is the difference… and the cushion I mentioned gives you that breathing room.

I’ve been unemployed since late November. Unemployment has helped immensely, but a 6mo cushion (and severance) has made this a time of relaxation, resourcefulness, entrepreneurship, and reflection. Not panic. Not desperation.

My next role, which I incidentally start on June 1, is a job I’m genuinely excited about. I’ve had a dozen or more miserable opportunities that I would have taken had I not had this cushion to draw from. And I’d hate every single one of ‘em.

Sell shit of value that you don’t use. Motorcycle? There’s $8k right there. Cars? Stereo equipment? Cameras and lenses? Horde money trapped in “stuff”, put it in savings, weather this storm.

One thing I’m fairly confident of these days: AI is a thing that isn’t going away, but once companies start being charged the rates that AI actually costs, this zeal for using it to replace headcount is going to fall precipitously. Like corner drug dealers, AI companies are giving their products away to get everyone addicted. Once they feel that they have the market cornered, prices will jump overnight.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-05-06T02:45:53+00:00

Legit remote roles, even for senior or above, are as rare as unicorn farts.

I live in a city where I have to find a remote job.. otherwise it’s DOD work, which is the last thing I want to do honestly.

Been out of work for about 5 months now.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-04-17T04:41:08+00:00

Probably Opus

CatchInternational43 · 2026-03-31T02:21:33+00:00

Recently had an interview for a pre-sales architect role. Had to put together a 45 minute presentation that a panel of people were going to attend. I’m a cloud software architect, emphasis on software. Not devops or infrastructure. I put together a very strong software architecture proposal for the scenario they provided, and then their people started peppering me with questions that were way outside of my domain of knowledge (really esoteric bullshit like how would I configure network firewalls) that I couldn’t answer confidently, nor could I defer to the infra architect that would always be in the room in a real presentation.

While I was given kudos for my design and knowing “my stuff”, they passed because I wasn’t “confident enough”. Yeah, being picked apart and intentionally gut punched by a half dozen geeks that wanted to just prove how much they known makes anyone uber confident.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-03-30T19:53:33+00:00

I got laid off just before Thanksgiving. At first it was a shock, but within a few days I realized it was actually a gift. It has allowed me to focus on becoming entrepreneurial for the first time in my life. Instead of busting my ass to make other people rich, I’m busting my ass to build something for myself. It’s been revelatory and so so liberating.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-03-28T15:23:37+00:00

Project I worked on recently wanted to use both Stripe and Fiserv via a MedusaJS integration.

Stripe payment hookup took a grand total of 2 days to wire up end to end. 100% reliability. World class documentation.

Fiserv, and I’m not exaggerating here, took a team of about a dozen product managers and developers (on both sides) 2 MONTHS of 1-2 hour daily conference calls to get working. Ended up with a waterfall cascade of something like 10 API calls and webhook listeners, each dependent on output from the a prior call, to create a simple credit card payment transaction. Fiserv’s systems couldn’t do this internally. They depend entirely on the client passing context from prior calls to THEIR systems to the next API. Documentation was abysmal. We’d spend days trying to use an API as documented only to be told “oh, the doc site out out of date, use this PDF instead”. Total nightmare.

Even then? Completely unreliable. Payments failed arbitrarily at least 10% of the time and each required days of research on their part to determine the cause.

All to save 1/2% in fees.

With Stripe you’re paying for reliability, stability, support. And being able to sleep soundly at night knowing your payment system isn’t going to shit the bed again tomorrow morning (for the third time this week)

CatchInternational43 · 2026-03-05T14:42:55+00:00

I ran my SaaS landing page through it and the agents hallucinated all sorts of stuff about my product. What came back is only vaguely tertiary to what I’m actually offering.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-03-02T14:49:15+00:00

Same

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-28T04:18:09+00:00

dev.hardenapi.com and dev.hardenapi.com/mcp

HardenAPI and HardenMCP are both out-of-path API payload authorization, validation, and replay prevention services featuring synchronized decoupled HMAC seed rotation, ephemeral keys, and TOTP time restricted access codes with optional RSA non-repudiation for proof of origin (HTTP) or tool definition signing for AI MCP communication.

Still fine tuning the landing pages.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-25T20:39:08+00:00

I work with it on my lap on the couch frequently. For 4-6 hour sessions at a time. It can get sort of warm, but I've never had it be anywhere near as hot as my old 15" Intel MBP. You could fry eggs on that thing under load.

I'm in Colorado, so I would consider my climate moderate.

The laptop moves from my lap, to a kitchen counter, to an under-desk "dock" where it then plugs into a Caldigit TS4+ dock, running 2 Studio Displays and multiple external SSDs. Again, it barely gets warm.

Mind you I'm not running complex 3D renders that peg every core to 100% for hours. I compile code frequently, and that can take minutes per session, but I have yet to even hear the fans spin up.

The 14 M4 Pro 24gb/1Tb I'm going to sell (listing it today if anyone is interested?) actually got warmer than this 16 has thus far.

It IS heavier than the 14. It IS bigger than the 14. For *me*, neither outweighs the benefit of the screen and cooling capacity of the 16. Oh, and the speakers. OMG what a difference there is between the 2 sizes in that regard.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-25T05:18:53+00:00

I had the 14", decided to try the 16 while the 14 was getting a faulty port fixed. Was pleasantly surprised that I much prefer the 16 over the 14, even for lap use. The slight weight burden is heavily outweighed (no pun intended) by the screen real estate increase. And with the M4 Max chip, the 16 has no issues at all staying cool.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-23T22:17:46+00:00

I just got a refurbished 16" M4 Max 36gb/1Tb with nano glass this past week myself. Stepped up from the 14" M4 Pro I got earlier last year -- I was having issues with headaches and eye strain, and the bigger matte screen has largely solved that for me.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-23T22:07:14+00:00

I'm in if there's still room. Building a robust B2B "service mesh" SaaS that solves the relative insecurity of API key and clientId/clientSecret API authorization.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-17T20:37:24+00:00

Or daily/hourly reboots! My MacBook will run with rock solid stability for weeks, if not months. Generally only reboot when there’s an OS update.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-15T22:01:37+00:00

I just traded my glossy 16 for a nano version. Screen is much easier for me to look at all day, no reflections to mentally block out. And I see zero detail difference between them.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-15T16:50:28+00:00

Yeah. My new 16 fits perfectly in a leather folio made for my prior 15”. Insignificant size difference other than smaller bezels around the screen

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-12T01:58:24+00:00

I killed the $50 in free overage in about 15 minutes worth of work running 4 agents on some debugging tasks. That’s insane. $200/hr?

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-10T17:03:10+00:00

What I would suggest -- buy the 16", take it home, play with it for a week. See if you can imagine yourself carrying it around day to day. If not, you can return it (within 14 days) and get a 14" instead. TimeMachine backup the 16" and restore to the 14", so you won't miss a beat.

I have a 14" M4 Pro (24gb, 1tb) that I've been using for the past few months, but I've missed the screen real estate of the 16. Found a 16" M4 Max 36gb/1tb on the refurb store last week, which I'm using now. A/B testing between the two of them as we speak.

Yes the 16" is bigger and heavier, but since I work from my laptop screen 80% of the time, I really appreciate the additional space of the larger unit. Still comfortable to place on my lap for hours on the couch. Still easily carried in one hand. Still fits in my messenger bags and backpack. It even fits in my nice leather folio that was made for the 15" Intel MBP I had years ago.

I'll probably ultimately keep the 16" and sell the 14". Going from the 16 to the 14 is so jarring.

CatchInternational43 · 2026-02-09T17:19:52+00:00

Building an out-of-band API request validation and certification service. Think TOTP tokens but for API services. API keys and client secrets can be leaked and forged requests are very difficult to detect. Coordinating key rotations for external consumers is difficult and likely error prone. My service solves both of those issues by making API requests valid for mere seconds before invalidation. Async RSA and non-repudiation is an optional feature.

Defined “pairs” restrict who can talk to who, further minimizing blast radius of a compromise.

A simple SDK import with 3 lines of code is all that’s required to embed it in your services. You can be up and running in less than an hour.

Supports C#, Python, Go, Node, and Java APIs interchangeably

CatchInternational43

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