She was the female Batman! secretly helping people at night ...

"Magnanti... has spoken of the time six years ago she worked as a £300 an hour prostitute working through a London escort agency."

The sad thing is, an IT contractor could easily expect to earn £300 an hour, especially in London.

An experienced, well-connected IT contractor, yeah no doubt. Someone fresh out of school, new to London ? No way.

And sad thing ? Nice little judgement you have going there.

She was hardly 'fresh out of school', she was in the middle of doing a PhD. And yes, I do think it's sad that anyone has to make a living working as a prostitute, if that makes me some sort of Victorian prude then so be it.

But she also says she enjoyed it more than working in computing :) so in this case "has to" probably didn't apply!

"I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable."

It was by choice. Now what, if anything, does this say about what we do? Contrary to common arguments surrounding the topic of women in computing, this woman is definitely not averse to science / technology. She's got as much geek in her than any of the people on this site, and yet she preferred being a callgirl to a programmer.

Not easily, not at all. I know a few people in that range, they are seriously good, it took them many years to get there, and they're not paid for their C++ skills (which are taken for granted at this level) but for their domain knowledge (usually very exotic financial instruments). What they do is translate what the quants want into code.

The average IT contractor in London probably makes 30-40 GBP/hr.

The other group that has insane billing rates are (top) photo retouchers. GBP 500/hr is possible in that field.

There are very few IT contractors in london making 500k+/year.

> There are very few IT contractors in london making 500k+/year.

Let's not forget that "X per hour" does not simply translate into "Y per year", especially if you're a contractor.

500k was based on a 80% utilization rate which is reasonable given most IT contracts in London are for 6 months typically.

No, but look on Jobserve and you'll see that £300 per hour is a fairly realistic rate.

It isn't. Where are you looking ?

300 per day, perhaps. 300 per hour, no.