I had an electrician come out to give me a bid to run 12 Ethernet lines (6 distributed locations to 1 central location), a single electrical outlet, and some media cables pulled through from where we were mounting our flat screen TV on the wall while he was at it (since Ethernet lines were going there anyway). The quote was close to $4k.
I ended up doing the runs all myself, have a couple hundred feet of leftover Cat6 cable rated for in-wall installation, a bunch of new tools and a much more familiar understanding of how my new house is setup. It cost me WAY less to do it. If he'd quoted me around $75 a drop, I'd probably have just had him do it for convenience sake. But I would've been pretty unhappy to have RJ-45s crimped onto the end of the solid-core cable rather than a patch panel and keystone jacks.
Yup, just really depends on where you are and what electrician you talk to.
$4k is roughly the cost to wire up an entire house (if a small one) with romex, let alone doing six pulls of ethernet and an electrical outlet. I mean, crap, unless a mansion, that is maybe one good solid 12 hour day for most electricians in a medium sized house, maybe with a bit of clean up work the next day or something. Short of them being very, very complicated pulls.
I wish my hourly rate was ~$300+.
It is part of the reason I typically do a lot of my own work. I understand these guys are trying to make a living, but I've had to many times I've gotten quotes on work just thinking it would be easier to pay a bit in labor to have someone else do the work for me and had to restrain from laughing at the person on the quote.
"Oh, yes, I agree, $800 to relocate a sink with the walls already open, perfectly reasonble. Let me not call you back."
And 6hrs later, dust hands off and put away torch, left over pipes and get out the dust pan and brush. "Honey, I just save 780 dollars!"
That said, I do occasionally contract out work, its just rare that I find someone who is charging what I would consider fairly reasonable prices. Example, I hired a guy to redo some brickwork on the front of my house where I closed up a door and moved a window. Probably did a better job than I could have with the brickwork and he charged $300 for 3/4 of a day of work. It probably would have taken me closer to a day and a half...and also probably just wouldn't have looked quite as nice. Worth it.
Quotes I've gotten on electrical, plumbing and a lot of other stuff, rarely worth it.
I'd pay most people to do dry wall work (at least on a large scale) in a heart beat. I hate to do it and they can generally do it in a third the time, looking slightly nicer (I am pretty good at it, but not amazing) and they often charge reasonable prices.