Subj : Re: How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract? To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp From : michael Date : Mon Jul 11 2005 05:16 pm Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote: > In recent years I've been unable to find anyone willing to pay me an > hourly rate for my fine work writing computer software. Apparently no > company is willing to hire anyone who has been out of work, for fear of > paying even minimum wage and getting somebody nobody else wanted and > now they know it's because they can't get any software working within a > reasonble time (hence for a reasonable amount of wages given hourly > pay). Robert, I think you should pretend that everything you think you know about work and what companies are willing to do is incorrect. Flush it all out. Empty your mind. Then do some reading. You have so many *huge* misconceptions, and you filter all your experiences to match your map of the economic world as a brutally hard place where no-one ever hires anyone for a living wage, and nothing you can do will ever result in getting back the kind of career you had 15 years ago. Programmers can't ask for minimum wage, because professional programmers *don't* *get* *paid* *minimum* *wage*. If you walk into my company and claim you are a software developer and expect me to pay $7 an hour for your labor, and I don't know you, and I can't watch you do real programming work in front of me -- I'm going to assume you are a *crank*, and not a developer. Competent developers in *any* language, even baby scripters make at *least* $30K a year just about anywhere in the US or other rich countries. Probably much more in the bay area. Competent *secretaries* make at least $30K a year, as do competent graphic artists and any number of other office workers. Do you think software development is easier than that? Is what you are doing less valuable to your potential customer than those jobs would be to an appropriate enterprise? Do you think the pool of competent programmers is bigger relative to the demand? If you think your skills are worthless, why would anyone else think they are worth anything? > So why am I posting this? Please anybody who has ever billed software > via fixed-price contracts, if you produced Java classes or Lisp modules > of approximately that size range I cited above, how much did you charge > for each such appx.-fixed-size class/module? Are you kidding me? The price per byte of source code is exactly zero. Nobody cares how much source you write. They care about what your program *does*. They care about how much money or time it saves them, or how much profit they will make on new business it allows them to get. If you can't come up with a way to estimate those numbers and it is not self-evident to the potential customer, then they will not pay you a dime for any amount of code. Secondly, if you are not charging an amount that will equate to at *least* $30 per billable hour, nobody will take you seriously. There is almost no profession or trade that doesn't bill at that rate or more. Car mechanics, house painters, and small job handymen bill at least that much. If you aren't asking for that much on a contract basis (especially short term contracts), it will be assumed that you don't have that much skill. Michael .