So many jobs that pay that sort of cash. They're just not easy to get. It's that old 10,000 hours of practice thing again. If you're willing to build up a lot of experience in an arcane technical field that is in continuous demand, you can easily get that sort of cash, particularly in short-term fly-in-and-fix-the-thing gigs.
I know of COBOL programmers in a bank that make $150/hr because they are irreplaceable now.
Another way to look at things is that a lot of speaking roles pay in the 000's for a 1 hour talk. Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour.
I've seen job postings here in Uruguay that pay 4x the average local programming wage for anyone that knows COBOL decently (about U$ 3000 monthly)
He might even be willing to relocate here for that money (you can live princely here with that much). It was for state telecom company ANTEL, last year (I learned some COBOL at university, but not enough) .
It might not be hard for him to relocate to Uruguay; he lives here in Buenos Aires. But he might have other problems that are at the root of being a COBOL programmer (e.g. lack of interest in new things, lack of aptitude for programming, I have no idea) and he was about a month away from retiring anyway.
Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour.
Your assumption is way off. I have read from professional public speakers that for every minute of a speech, they will prepare on average about 1 hour. A 60 minute speech would have about 60 hours of preparation behind it.
I am practising public speaking and while I haven't done longer speeches, my experience shows about the same ratio.
Whilst I'm sure that's true on technical areas of great detail, a lot of celebrity speakers turn up and do the same talk over and over again. This is particularly true in the case of someone with a story to tell, ie, war hero, ex politician, ex founder with a big IPO, etc.
Your point stands - I was just throwing figures around.
I'm doing my first conference presentations in two months time, and I expect to take probably 40-60 hours to present two 60 minute sessions. And I don't get paid for it at all!
I know of COBOL programmers in a bank that make $150/hr because they are irreplaceable now.
Another way to look at things is that a lot of speaking roles pay in the 000's for a 1 hour talk. Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour.