[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly ...
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Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
There was a question a couple days ago about hourly rate, and a lot
of the discussion revolved around raising compensation by
specializing. Of course, generalists can still specialize, but it's
a bit different. So, I'm curious what the answers will be like if
we hear from only generalist developers.
Author : codingclaws
Score : 285 points
Date : 2022-09-03 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
| cutler wrote:
| Which back-end programming languages do you find are most
| commonly required by clients who pay good rates? I'm particularly
| interested in the relative popularity of statically typed
| frameworks such as Spring Boot and ASP.Net vs Rails, Django and
| Laravel where serious money is at stake.
| gmanis wrote:
| jessecurry wrote:
| Between $175 and $400/hr depending on the type of work, length of
| engagement, and interest in the project.
| i_dont_know_ wrote:
| I generally bill around $175/hr to make whatever technology
| problems you have work out :) (Note I'm based out of Europe,
| though, reading some of the stuff here I should probably charge
| more anyways)
|
| That's my generalized rate when the person paying me is non-
| technical and the actual work involved isn't clear or known to
| them ahead of time. I spend part of the time coming up with a
| plan so they know what's going to happen, of course, and coming
| up with estimates.
|
| If it's a technical person or the problem is better-defined, then
| I charge different 'specialist' rates that vary based on the task
| and the rough 'market rate' for such a task.
|
| Sometimes, also, it's just an unusually fun task or a task for a
| nonprofit or something, in which case I work with their budget
| and my intrinsic motivation and try to come up with something
| fair.
| leetrout wrote:
| $150/hr for small (<= 10 hour) projects but I did lower my upwork
| to $90 before the pandemic to try and see if it got me any
| inbound leads (it did not).
|
| $4000/week with no Fridays for bigger contracts.
|
| It usually gets negotiated down for startups and non-profits.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| I build web apps from start to finish by myself (architecture,
| design, development, database, servers, marketing page etc.).
|
| I bill $500/day, but do project based billing, with 50% payment
| up-front, 25% on first preview, and 25% on delivery. For
| improvements and new features on existing projects, I estimate
| the avg. monthly work and we do monthly retainer agreements.
|
| I usually work with seed stage startups (usually referred to me
| by the angel investors) or bootstrapped B2B tech companies acting
| as their dev. team.
|
| My rate is lower than others mentioned in this thread, but I live
| in Turkey, which compared to EU/USA, has very low cost of living,
| and this rates allow me to live comfortably.
|
| That said, after doing this for 10+ years, I'm finally pivoting
| to creating my own SaaS products, and stopped accepting new
| clients and slowing down the works with existing clients.
| joshmn wrote:
| When you come back around to missing client work, remember that
| some guy on HN begged you to raise your rate. Doesn't matter
| where you are located. value == value; value != location.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Every time I've said "value == value; value != location" on
| HN I strangely get downvoted to oblivion. If I am getting
| $1,000 a day in Los Angeles, just because I decided I wanted
| to go live in a midden in the Outer Hebrides, it doesn't
| alter the value I provide, but immediately people trot out
| the "low cost of living" argument as though they are eager to
| throw themselves on any business' sword of justification for
| paying less money for the same thing. If I buy a Macbook Pro
| in SF or in Upper Tobago (we don't do Lower Tobago, the
| internet is lousy and there aren't any good restaurants),
| Apple ain't giving me a discount based on whether I am in a
| HCOL vs a LCOL (local taxes and minor exchange rate
| fluctuations not withstanding). I don't understand why so
| many contractors, especially in this remote era, are so eager
| to do the same and also tell everyone else why they should be
| paid less too. I'll keep banging this drum about "value ==
| value" even if it means taking some lumps with it.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| I totally agree that value != location, but clients' budgets
| absolutely depends on the location. I only work with local
| clients, and my rates are on the expensive sides of the
| scale.
|
| For comparison, my rates are about 25 times of minimum wage.
|
| I know that I could make more working internationally, but I
| was happy in my comfort zone. If my indie maker/single
| founder adventure doesn't work out (happened in the past),
| I'll keep your advice in mind.
| nevi-me wrote:
| Sometimes you're limited to local work. I contracted for a
| while, a few times when I got US based gigs, they'd raise my
| rate to what's acceptable for them, which was often way more
| than my local rate.
|
| If I tried to use that rate locally, I'd likely not get much
| work.
|
| A good analogy was from a real estate agent recently. She had
| 2 apartments of same size in a complex, one had been vacant
| for 2 months, and one had just become available.
|
| She said that the owner of the vacant one wasn't willing to
| lower their rent, and every month that the apartment remains
| vacant is an 8% loss to their short-term annual rental.
|
| The one that had become recently avaiable got a tenant in
| days, because even though it's better, its owner offered the
| same as the first vacant one.
|
| So I'd often consider time to next gig and take shorter term
| jobs at low rates so I'm not idle.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Project management, execution or consultation, $40/day.
| leto_ii wrote:
| In Amsterdam NL a backend engineer could expect 80-100 euros/hr.
| > 100 is also possible, but you may get into specialization
| territory.
| wofo wrote:
| Also based in NL, "Amsterdam" area (Utrecht). As people have
| mentioned elsewhere, it depends. My current long-term (6+
| months) contract is at EUR95/hr, working as part of a great
| team of developers on an Elixir backend, and being able to
| learn Elixir (which I didn't know beforehand) on the job. I
| have also done smaller projects (2 months), a bit more
| specialized, on the side for EUR125/hr.
|
| By the way, I am not totally convinced about weekly vs hourly
| billing. In my case, hourly billing has worked well. I just
| make sure I bill for _everything_ I do for the client, also the
| time I spend learning stuff, and communicate clearly about it.
| People hire me because I can figure out stuff quickly, not
| because I know all there is to know about programming (though I
| do think I have a strong background).
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, hourly billing gets knocks, but I think it's the right
| approach for a lot of circumstances. If I can control the
| shape of the engagement and it's the kind of thing I've done
| enough that I can reliably predict the work needed, sure,
| project pricing is great. But if you're just putting in work
| on a project somebody else is leading, hourly's the way to
| go, because that insulates you from all sorts of risks.
| b0m wrote:
| Where would one go and look for those kind of vacancies?
| leto_ii wrote:
| I think in the beginning recruiters on LinkedIn. Note however
| that like all parasites they will try to skim a lot off the
| top. Worse than that, some will try to lock you in and write
| in clauses saying that they should get a share of any other
| future contracts you might have - make sure to never sign
| smth like that.
|
| Once you have a few 6 month contracts under your belt and you
| can get good references you can probably find things without
| relying on intermediaries.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| You either connect to a freelance broker or you network your
| way into such things.
|
| In my experience no advertises on job boards that they are
| looking for contractors.
| handzhiev wrote:
| And where do you find freelance brokers?
| francis-io wrote:
| in the uk, everyone wants to work on daily rates. 600pd-650pd as
| a devops engineer.
|
| So, PS75, or $86 an hour. This is 5 days a week, 40 hours a week.
| I bill around PS14k a month and after taxes i walk away with
| about PS7k a month.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I'd recommend stashing the money inside a ltd and investing
| them from there paying only corporate tax. Then in 20 years
| move to Dubai for a year, withdraw as dividends at 0% and close
| off the company.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > I bill around PS14k a month and after taxes i walk away with
| about PS7k a month.
|
| You should employ some sort of a tax-reduction strategy. Paying
| 50% of your gross in direct taxes is absolutely batshit crazy.
|
| I used to contract for PS350-450 per day as a PHP backend dev
| and paid an effective 30% tax rate. Which is still crazy insane
| high, but it's not 50%.
|
| Does your 50% figure includes VAT? Because if that's not VAT
| inclusive, you're doing something horribly wrong. Inside IR35?
| eatYourFood wrote:
| tekkk wrote:
| If that's net after pension and everything it's not really
| that surprising. In Finland for example the employee pension
| rate is 25% of gross. Then tax and employer insurance on top
| of that and you're left with about half of the total paid
| sum. Of course, as independent contractor you can set your
| own pension rate as low as you want but that's a different
| debate.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Virtually all contractors in the UK are operating through a
| LLC and paying themselves in dividends, so there's no
| pension at all, and legally they are not even employees of
| their businesses (because board members can provide the
| business with whatever services without being employees).
|
| If you go through PAYE, you make yourself an employee, and
| you must pay yourself a pension. But going through PAYE is
| a net loss, because then you also have to pay national
| insurance not only on your side, but also on the employers'
| side. Paying NI if you can perfectly legally avoid paying
| it is stupid.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Virtually all contractors in the UK are operating
| through a LLC and paying themselves in dividends_
|
| This hasn't been entirely true for a long time and it's
| almost the opposite of true today. The _vast_ majority of
| contract work in the UK today is now forced under
| umbrellas where you 'd be an employee of your umbrella
| firm and not working through your own Ltd. There is still
| outside IR35 work around but close to 100% of larger (and
| typically better-paying) clients don't want to get near
| it because of the risks since the recent changes in the
| rules.
|
| _If you go through PAYE, you make yourself an employee,
| and you must pay yourself a pension. But going through
| PAYE is a net loss, because then you also have to pay
| national insurance not only on your side, but also on the
| employers ' side. Paying NI if you can perfectly legally
| avoid paying it is stupid._
|
| I urge anyone considering working as a freelancer or
| contractor in the UK to take the time to talk to a real
| accountant before trusting this advice. The above
| paragraph is all kinds of wrong.
| tekkk wrote:
| The difference between taxation schemes between countries
| seems to be a wildly heterogenous bunch - thanks for the
| explanation!
| mjfisher wrote:
| That's not universally true. Most of the contractors I
| know are a mixture of PAYE and dividend (pension
| requirements don't apply to directors and paying nominal
| NI secures a state pension on retirement). It's usually
| the setup a good accountant will suggest.
| ents wrote:
| 95/hr, doing "web stuff" for small businesses
| helloguillecl wrote:
| I charge 75 EUR per hour but my main client is very loyal (15
| years working together), pays on time (24 hours) and I might soon
| become a business partner.
|
| I de design, backend in PHP test and do server administration of
| a PMS for hotel.
| joshmn wrote:
| Ten-some years ago I started at $100/hour and I thought that was
| a good idea. "Great, I'll make $200k a year and pay 45% in taxes,
| that's fine, I can live on that." I thought that being attractive
| to more people was a better way to find clients.
|
| I didn't have a problem finding clients, but they were clients
| that I didn't see panning out -- they gave me vibes of being poor
| executors. I looked for a way to filter out these "app idea bros"
| as I called them.
|
| The first thing I did was change my rate to $150/hour.
|
| Again, I didn't have a problem finding clients; they were still
| the clients that I didn't see panning out, though.
|
| I kept increasing it until I got three prospects in a row that
| had huge concerns paying what I was asking: granted, it as a lot
| more than anyone should ever pay for any skillset that wasn't
| life or death, but it helped me find a balance.
|
| Eventually I settled on $375/hour, prepaid, and prepaid weekly. I
| still have no problem finding clients, but the quality of client
| has significantly increased. I also now am much more happy to
| filter clients out -- I let them know that, too.
|
| I rarely negotiate on it. I'll negotiate on scope (time), or
| really narrow focus so that my value can be had in a much more
| focused manner.
|
| Before, my marketable skill was "developer, with business chops".
| My acumen has evolved, sure, so my marketable skills have too.
| But how I approach it has changed greatly.
|
| My value prop is quite extensive: I am a one-stop shop for all
| things idea, from both a business and product standpoint. I
| contribute at the executive level, I build the product, I share
| fifty ways that a product could fail and find new ways that it
| could succeed.
|
| Most importantly, though, I tell clients what they don't need,
| and I don't spare any time to do so. "Well, my friend said that
| they use AWS and Kubernetes, don't we need that to scale?", to
| which I reply, "Cool, I'm happy for them, but you don't need it,
| no; $PaaS is fine until you reach their limits and it starts
| becoming a problem -- you have three paying customers who are
| operating off your hacked-together MVP; thus, it's not a problem.
| Please, do yourself a favor and stop talking to friends about
| what they use and go talk to customers and potential customers
| while I'm building this."
|
| This builds trust, and is the most important tool in my bag of
| tricks: not my background in Ruby development, not how productive
| I am, not my experience in having already solved seemingly 99.9%
| of the problems people face in building and scaling web apps.
| Those are all superficial and nice-to-haves.
|
| Trust is the most important thing I sell, followed by my ability
| to say "no". The practical and tangible experience in design,
| development, systems, content, email campaigns, copy, branding...
| my clients could hire anyone to do those things better than I
| could -- people can specialize in it. I specialize in saying no,
| and, while the jury is still out on this, I haven't quite been
| proven completely wrong yet -- and one of my biggest kinks is
| being wrong.
|
| I miss client work. It was stressful at times, and at times kind
| of lonely. I've pivoted to other things to build skillsets that
| were practical, but I still find myself picking up the odd job
| here and there.
| holler wrote:
| > It was stressful at times, and at times kind of lonely.
|
| This resonates having done contracting for the past 5+ years
| and at times, lately, feeling lonely.
| xcambar wrote:
| I'm a full-time employee but I can see myself in your comment.
| Too many people do not realize the power of "no" on one hand
| and the power of being able to build a valid opinion on many
| topics quickly, opposed to having the perfect, expert opinion
| on one single topic, on the other hand.
|
| It took me a lot of experience to learn that and now I'm more
| listened to by my reports, peers and superiors alike, while
| feeling much quieter and more efficient at the same time.
|
| Kind of a zen state of sort. :)
| hansvm wrote:
| When I was early in my career I spitballed $180/hr as something
| they'd surely try to negotiate. The client jumped at the
| opportunity. I've been employed normally since then, but I
| imagine the market rate is substantially higher.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| I recommend Weekly Rate Consulting[0]
|
| About four years ago a friend of mine, who specializes in
| personal brand consultation, suggested whatever my hourly was
| that I double it. I didn't believe her. I doubled it and landed
| the first proposal.
|
| You're probably worth more than you think.
|
| Specialization can increase your rate, but business sense,
| communication, and ability to articulate and contribute value at
| the executive level is a 10x difference.
|
| [0]
| https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > About four years ago a friend of mine, who specializes in
| personal brand consultation, suggested whatever my hourly was
| that I double it. I didn't believe her. I doubled it and landed
| the first proposal.
|
| Doubling your rate is really only an option when you're already
| charging too little or if you're dealing with clients who have
| no idea what market rate actually is.
|
| I encourage everyone to explore incrementally higher rates
| until they are losing deals over pricing. That's the only way
| to really know the ceiling.
|
| The other important thing to keep in mind is that higher rates
| bring higher expectations. I've had contractors who charges in
| the $100/hr range and delivered okay-but-not-great work with
| mediocre communication. We kept them on because they could
| deliver eventually and we felt like we got what we paid for. If
| they doubled their rates to $200 the first thing I'd do is wind
| down the contract and switch to any number of more diligent and
| qualified contractors I know who charge in that range.
|
| As soon as you violate the client's sense of "you get what you
| pay for", the relationship is in trouble. If someone doubles
| their rates, they need to be prepared to deliver work and
| communication deserving of that rate. There are a number of
| contractors in my area who have reputations of charging
| expensive rates but delivering budget quality work. They're
| mostly limited to new clients at smaller companies who don't
| have enough of a network to check their reputation.
|
| However, if you can increase rates _and_ deliver quality work
| that matches the price, you could work yourself into a premium
| market segment. And that's a good place to be!
| Kamq wrote:
| At the same time, the old saying that if you double your rate
| and lose half your clients, you came out ahead seems
| applicable here.
| lumost wrote:
| You just highlighted why doubling the rates might work for
| many people. If you charge $100/hr, the client may simply
| assume you can't handle the higher level/harder work. If you
| potentially can.. then doubling the rate will make the client
| feel comfortable giving it to you.
|
| The same pattern happens in salaried work, A manager needs to
| show that the expensive new senior hire was worth the money.
| So they give the new hire all the good projects and leave the
| (cheaper) current employees high and dry. Further, management
| is incentivized to show the new hire's work in a positive
| light during performance review as they would be admitting
| that _the manager_ made a mistake otherwise.
|
| Understanding this dynamic will make you happier at work.
| Sometimes you need to leave so that you can be the great new
| hire, sometimes you need to demand more money/promotion so
| that management sees your worth. People inherently assume
| that you are worth something approximating your salary.
| jordanf wrote:
| 12,500 / week for general work (design, prototyping, sometimes
| building). Startups won't pay this, but large firms will.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| Are you paid primarily for product design, graphic design or
| engineering? That's a killer trifecta of skills. It reminds me
| of some advice from Scott Adams: "Become very good (top 25%) at
| two or more things."
| abofh wrote:
| It varies widely based on how much I think I gain from your
| project (experience, learning, networking etc). I'm an AWS
| specialist DevOps ish person, and bill around 1k/day on retainer
| and a bit more for "live" work. In general, if your aws bill is
| smaller than my invoice, we do something short term and results
| focused and I bill at a higher rate, if your aws bill is higher,
| you get a lower rate, but keep me around on call because when
| someone really fucks up, it balances in the wash when you're back
| online in hours instead of days.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| 1700 dollars per day, minimum 5 days
| k__ wrote:
| Depends on how fast I work.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| vilius wrote:
| I'm also curious what's a good way finding projects for
| generalists. My contracting experience was that I ended up doing
| specialized work even though I would able to complete the project
| from start to finish.
| davedx wrote:
| Startups! They love generalists.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| The downside of a startup is that they don't have as much
| money to pay you, and as a contractor you don't get equity.
|
| (On the upside, you don't get equity, and for _most_ startups
| the money they pay you will be worth more than any equity
| ever will be.)
| Silhouette wrote:
| They don't have money at first. The ones who hit product-
| market fit and then want to scale quickly used to be a gold
| mine for good generalists though.
|
| A few startups are run by veterans of several previous
| adventures who can spot when the real game is about to kick
| off and it's time to ramp up hiring. But almost no-one
| without that prior experience can hire a bigger permanent
| team as fast as they want to during that period of rapid
| growth.
|
| Also these companies often have relatively inexperienced
| teams as they start to scale just because of the earlier
| budget limitations. They benefit from having some more
| experienced hands on deck for a while to stop them making
| dumb mistakes and help them train up their early hires who
| stick around and suddenly find themselves operating a level
| or two up the ladder as the head count grows.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Most recently my floor was USD$300/hour but billed in weeks, and
| sometimes I didn't do full weeks (like four day weeks during good
| weather). Usually minimum engagement of four weeks, 25-50%
| upfront (longer engagements get the lower end).
|
| I increase the rate with respect to beurocracy and scope. If I'm
| working with a small, single digits shop then the lower rate
| usually holds. If it's a larger shop and I'm going to be in a ton
| of meetings all the time, I usually start doubling the rate. For
| a F500-type company I'd never drop below $500/hour, and minimum
| engagement would probably grow to eight weeks.
|
| I'm a generalist. I've actually signed a number of contracts on
| "I will fix ~all your hard to fix bugs".
| pyuser583 wrote:
| How much does that come out at per year? Do taxes eat up a
| large amount? Are you continuously employed or are there dry
| spells?
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I'm at a full time gig right now for various reasons but it
| depends on how many clients I want to have at once. I tried
| to limit to a handful per year, and the last year in which I
| did contracting I was working less than half of the year --
| but by choice.
|
| Dry spells are planned, as otherwise it's difficult to line
| work up as often times scope changes during an engagement.
| galfarragem wrote:
| ..What's your main stack?
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| If I'm developing services, I just write Go. I have a lot of
| Linux experience as well. I'm comfortable reading and
| patching pretty much any language.
| 01100011 wrote:
| You need to define your question better. What is a generalist? I
| would have considered myself a generalist but thats with a focus
| on embedded/systems programming and an ability to make a shitty
| website/database backend. Other folks may consider themselves
| generalists because they handle front & backend web design or
| because they write applications from start to finish. What sort
| of information are you looking for?
| hnthrow29475792 wrote:
| I'd actually go at a different argument than generalist versus
| specialist, some fairly commonly heard wisdom in UK was if you
| were risk-tolerant you could "always make more contracting". What
| you also hear is "charge more". I would instead say to both of
| those things that one should seek to understand where they want
| to be in 5-10 years, earning what and doing what?
|
| A lot of these threads do boil down to the few making $350 per
| hour, the many making $100 per hour, and both cohorts seeking to
| make more. I can't actually tell you how to do that while
| contracting, I can tell you my story and perhaps it will help
| someone :-)
|
| I pursued contract roles for a few years typically resulting in
| me making PS100-250k gross per annum range, typically billing at
| PS1000/day or PS15-20k/month and optimizing UK tax using all the
| usual and perfectly legal means. That's a good income and my
| family had an okay standard of living.
|
| These roles were anything from software development to systems
| engineering, mostly a "make problems go away" situation - clear
| connection for the client to business value. I worked for
| everything from US startups through to UK financial services.
|
| Before that I'd done some full-time roles with big and small
| companies typically in the PS80-150k range. Striking out as a
| contractor was partly the desire to try something new and partly
| a particularly interesting opportunity arose.
|
| Eventually, I ended up going back to what I'd still consider
| generalist roles with larger FAANG or FAANG-adjacent employers,
| that's something of a "loss of freedom" versus contracting, the
| nature of growing a "career" with them (not the same employer
| necessarily, just the same set of companies).
|
| For me, long term goals were twofold:
|
| 1. To have interesting work and problems to solve, ideally to
| engage with smart people;
|
| 2. To make money, lots of money, I'd like to retire at some
| point, and I'd like my standard of living to be high, I'd like to
| never really worry about money.
|
| In outcome terms, making that jump back to FTE and "getting in
| the door" of FAANG, which took effort both to get in and then to
| excel in the new roles, it has paid off in ways where generalist
| consulting could never take me, I relocated, now take roles that
| are FAANG or FAANG-adjacent executive-level roles in
| "Engineering", these involving a multi-disciplinary mix of duties
| -- Product, Software and Program Management, the full spectrum of
| working out what the customer needs and what that means for the
| business, building that technology often with a large team,
| enabling the field to sell it, feedback loops to improve it.
|
| I've had several years of W-2 employment in the $2-4M USD range,
| that's >10x from contracting rates, achieved in <10 years and I'm
| on track to punch my retirement ticket around 43 years old and
| then only work for interest, not for money.
|
| In my humble opinion, it is much harder to sell yourself as a
| contractor when applying to FTE roles (particularly those at
| bigger companies) and to tell the story in ways a Hiring Manager
| will appreciate and see your value. Therefore you really need to
| consider whether the "hustle life" of contracting is something
| you want to do through retirement, what's it mean for you when
| 35+ or even 45+ and is it setting you up for the endgame you want
| in life?
| eatYourFood wrote:
| Best comment yet but zero replies. Would love to hear about how
| you jumped into 2m$ roles after working at FAANG. Is that still
| consulting?
| hnthrow29475792 wrote:
| I haven't done any significant consulting since moving to
| FAANG. Occasional due diligence on M&A. Occasionally a Board
| Advisor. Nothing that creates conflict with the day job.
|
| So, I'm a W-2 employee now in an executive-level role, have
| been for several years, and this is my second such role
| (meaning two companies now have hired me in from outside as a
| senior leader). Right now I'd say FAANG-adjacent, it's not a
| company in the acronym, it's still a huge employer. They're
| paying highly competitively and matched the deal offerer by a
| FAANG when I moved jobs in 2020. I would expect this is
| probably what I'll be doing until I "retire".
|
| Retirement to me doesn't actually mean entirely ceasing doing
| work but I'm only going to be pursuing interesting problems
| with interesting people in a few years.
|
| Overall my point though was you're doing something today not
| just to make a paycheck this month, but hopefully to lead up
| to something next year or the year after, and you should have
| an endgame. Evaluate whether generalist
| consulting/contracting really supports that endgame for you,
| and don't just focus on how do I get from $50/hr to $200/hr
| and then have a "Oh, crap, this skillset and my resume now
| makes it even harder to get to the endgame that I'm seeking".
| ewuhic wrote:
| Does everyone of you charging quite a significant sum have a
| LinkedIn?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I don't, why? Found the current job off craigslist. :-D
| jwmoz wrote:
| PS500pd this was 4 years ago though. Decent rate at the time.
| adenozine wrote:
| I bill anywhere from 85/hr to 350/hr depending on what's going to
| be done, who and what I'll need, location/commute, etc. In the DC
| area.
|
| I imagine a not quite bell curve with the center around ~150/hr
| for "accomplish X task and leave" contracts that I'm willing to
| entertain. Sometimes you bump into some juicy ones, sometimes
| not. That's life.
|
| I've always told clients that above all else, they're paying for
| my ability to provide them certainty, quality, and a hard
| deadline. I charge what I charge because I'm worth it.
|
| Depending on your reputation, if applicable, it can however be
| smart to work below your worth for a contract if it means a
| greater chance at better contracts later. You gotta build your
| network somehow.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I have a 'rack rate' which is for anything short. That comes down
| for larger projects - say 10% for 500 hours, 15% for 1000 hours
| and so on.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I specialize in the ability to competently and fully build from
| the ground up your whole business from design, development,
| system administration, deployments, testing, seo and other stuff
| as a single person.
|
| My rate is $10,000/week pre-paid monthly.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How did you get your first client
| joshmanders wrote:
| I offered to build someone a website for $100 in 2001.
| fb03 wrote:
| Josh!!! It's Cadu :) Nice to see you on HN <3 Where's my hugs?
| joshmanders wrote:
| I LOVE YOU BUDDY <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
| SavageBeast wrote:
| Id think your ability to re-use piece parts from one project to
| another would help save a lot of time too. There are really
| only say 10 things to build and once you do, simply re-
| arranging them for different systems probably levels out the
| workload significantly.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| FYI, first load of your personal website (redirected from
| Twitter) was surprisingly slow. Subsequent reloads were fine
| however. Could have been something on my end though or likely
| just Twitter redirection(s?) process taking its sweet time..
| joshmanders wrote:
| Probably that, it's just a ghost blog deployed to a k8s
| cluster on aws.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| I'm assuming you do Frontend? What else? What frameworks would
| you suggest?
|
| I feel I could definitely build a project myself, but I find FE
| to be very time consuming.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I do it all. Have for 25 years. Frontend is actually my
| weakest skillset (but I'm still awesome at it)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I do these as well, wonder if you happen to know competent
| people from the sales/marketing/product-design areas to team up
| with? I can build 'em but don't have time to help folks show up
| and take notice.
| rco8786 wrote:
| What's your strategy for finding clients, if you don't mind me
| asking?
|
| And how do you handle ongoing maintenance/sysadmin?
| joshmanders wrote:
| > What's your strategy for finding clients, if you don't mind
| me asking?
|
| Referrals from existing clients, HN monthly threads.
|
| > And how do you handle ongoing maintenance/sysadmin?
|
| $10k/week, pre-paid monthly. I don't do hourly because I
| don't work hourly. You're paying for my skills and expertise
| not the geo coordinates of the chair I am sitting in for
| however long I am working. I charge accordingly.
|
| The price is for your slot in my workload and that is it.
| Need maintenance then you pay me weekly for any maintenance
| work.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Amazing. Any oncall type of work? What if things go down at
| 3am?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Nothing I do is on-call worthy. I may build the product
| but I don't run the product after it's built.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| A client who's paying one person effectively a half
| million dollar a year rate to be a 'slot' in their
| workload, which presumably implies they take on multiple
| such clients at once, would also presumably not blink at
| pouring another 5,000 or 10,000 a month off onto a robust
| cloud platform to make sure things don't go down at 3:00
| a.m. for trivial reasons.
| kishinmanglani wrote:
| How do you usually find clients?
| joshmanders wrote:
| 100% word of mouth and when I was looking, the "Freelancers
| to be hired" monthly threads here have brought in a ton of
| money for me too.
| [deleted]
| rtlfe wrote:
| Have you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at
| everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash
| plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to
| be much higher.
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| meh. I make a little bit more than that at a FAANG and my job
| is vastly different than a one man show contractor. My work
| (and any Staff-level job really) is a lot more talking to
| other engineers and help them being productive, steer the
| product in the right direction and some high impact coding.
|
| For the OP it's probably a lot more dealing with clients and
| building stuff from the ground up which you don't tend to do
| at FAANG at all. I'm not saying it's not as important, it's
| just very different skill wise.
| [deleted]
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| $500k + benefits? Are you sure? Especially since you don't
| really know anything about the parent commenter (for example:
| their location)
| joshmanders wrote:
| I'm located in Midwest USA. My states median family income
| for a year is $10k more than my monthly.
| rco8786 wrote:
| At a FAANG? Yes that is fairly normal senior engineer comp
| joshmanders wrote:
| I also charge a non-refundable down payment of $100k to sign
| non-compete or NDA and that doesn't guarantee I'll accept the
| job.
|
| Both my rates and this keeps people who aren't serious about
| working with me away. Anyone else is most likely worth my
| time and the cost is acceptable because I don't work a full
| 40/hr week for the client. I plan the work to be done for a
| week and let them know. If it takes me 40hrs ok but most
| don't.
|
| They're not paying me for hours logged. They're paying me for
| my experience and skills.
| scifibestfi wrote:
| Has anyone paid the $100k? Or do they all drop the non-
| compete and NDA?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Dropped. The rate is mostly a "no I'm not signing your
| stupid contracts that will harm me accepting future work
| just because you think your facebook killer is a special
| snowflake that can be stolen" rate.
| [deleted]
| osigurdson wrote:
| OP didn't say they were good at competitive programming.
| joshmanders wrote:
| Less that and more that I don't play the FANG game of being
| under pressure to whiteboard the process of unlinking a
| doubly linked list or show bubblesort algorithm stuff for a
| position where all I am doing is stringing some divs
| together in a React codebase.
|
| I mean if you enjoy that stuff by all means do it, but I
| prefer to build real stuff that make impact not practice
| showmanship.
| wpietri wrote:
| Why's that? Large companies generally don't need single
| generalists; what they mostly have is teams of specialists,
| people who can get much deeper into a subject than a
| generalist can. Is there some role at a FAANG where
| generalists would thrive?
| joshmanders wrote:
| > Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would
| thrive?
|
| No, generalists typically get pigeonholed into being
| specialists, and typically not the field they were the
| strongest.
|
| For example I'm stronger in backend/devops than frontend,
| but because I do most of my work in Node.js, more
| specifically Next.js I'm always billed as a frontend dev,
| so typical companies just want me to do one thing.
|
| Contracts like generalization because I cover more surface
| area with relatively smaller costs than paying $150k+ for
| each role I can do.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would
| thrive?
|
| In my personal experience everything except infrastructure
| and mobile UI favors generalists. The people I worked with
| were constantly jumping around between backends, protocols,
| business logic, web UI, test suites, architecture, data
| analysis, small-scale UI design. This was on public-facing
| products. I'd expect internal tool teams have even greater
| need for generalists.
| cromd wrote:
| Also, the two types of generalists aren't quite the same.
| Being a generalist in a 10k person company feels different
| from having to do everything alone at a 5 person company.
|
| I think some heuristic like "earn double a FAANG income"
| isn't going to go over well with companies that are getting
| off the ground. Are the companies stupid for not paying
| that? Maybe sometimes. But there are definitely way more
| companies willing to hire someone at $200/hr than at
| $500/hr.
|
| The calculations are just different for the companies. An
| operation spending $1B gains a lot by shaving off 1% (and
| small improvements are not strictly in the domain of
| specialists). But a new venture with $0 in revenue may have
| a very real risk of running out of cash one day, even if
| their product idea is great and well-built. "Hire the best
| people in the world" seems more prudent for a company who
| is certain it will pay off.
|
| But to be fair, I guess one should occasionally try asking
| for high amounts anyways. I think jaquesm had recommended
| aiming to have 50% of your clients turn you down on the
| basis of price, to find the sweet spot for a rate.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| For those drooling at this: you probably don't want this work.
| The clients who pay this amount are typically soul crushingly
| bad to work with, and you're under the gun to deliver 10k worth
| of value both to secure future work with the client and ensure
| your reputation stays clean. One bad experience can sink you
| with other clients, folks talk.
|
| IMO, build something for you and sell it vs building something
| for other people.
| rco8786 wrote:
| That's a lot to extrapolate based on no data
| joshmanders wrote:
| This is not accurate at all. I've found people who pay these
| rates are better to work with and demand less.
|
| You know that trope all startup people say "raise your prices
| and get rid of the low value high cost customers"
|
| Same thing.
| amelius wrote:
| Now I'm very curious how you find clients and what software
| stacks you work with.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I've replied below on various other comments asking
| similar, but for easier use, I'll repeat here:
|
| > how you find clients
|
| Word of mouth & referrals from existing clients
|
| > what software stacks you work with
|
| Next.js
|
| React-Query
|
| Prisma
|
| Tailwind CSS
|
| Kubernetes
|
| PostgreSQL
|
| Caddy
| shoulderfake wrote:
| rossnordby wrote:
| Having done a little work across the spectrum, this is
| definitely correct. Years ago, I targeted the cheaper end,
| and the amount of work expected was absurd. The nonmonetary
| terms of the deals were often even worse; think business
| destroying levels of exploitation. (I declined those!)
|
| In contrast, I've quoted hundreds of dollars an hour while
| explaining that I didn't think I would offer enough value
| to actually justify that price in context and encouraged
| alternatives- and got the job immediately. And the project
| went very smoothly. In another recent case, I requested
| tens of thousands of dollars for some project-relevant
| expenditures, and received a deposit without a single
| question.
|
| Organizations that are willing to spend money tend to be
| the ones that understand what they're buying and how to
| value it.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I gave up on the cheaper end long ago - too many trials
| by fire. Raising my rates was the best thing I did for my
| own sanity. I still run into an odd client here and there
| that makes my life Hell on Earth for a while. I also
| stopped giving discounts. And on the advice of good
| friend who runs a sizable creative agency in Los Angeles,
| came up with a "fuck off" rate for when I really don't
| want the work. Right now, I don't charge a sky-high rate,
| but I've started applying "9am to 6pm, no on-call, no
| toxicity, no arseholes, no high pressure to deliver at
| all costs." I am so over client-induced PTSD & anxiety
| disorders.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That wasn't at all my experience when I was doing contract
| work at higher rates. The more I made the better I got
| treated and the more forgiving things were. The worst
| contracts were with penny pinchers. As soon as something cost
| $500 more they were gone.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| This is a great rate. I'd love to know how you find clients
| willing to pay this amount. Most people I've come across that
| need a new site/app built have extremely low budgets. Like
| $10,000...total for an app. Certainly not $10,000 for a week.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Simply put: Talk to people who have more money and higher
| expectations, and highly value efficiency (OP's selling point
| of being a "single person" means not dealing with a whole
| team, back&forth comms, etc). Don't talk to your local barber
| who wants a website to show up on google maps.
|
| I have a similar weekly rate but $200 hourly; How I bill
| depends on the client (though yes, gravitating more and more
| towards weekly over time).
| mxuribe wrote:
| Would you kindly share some examples of the types of
| people/orgs to seek out, then? For example, if not the
| barber shop, then the owner of a barber shop franchise, or
| owner of a chain of barber shops? Genuinely interwested in
| learning the archetypes of people to seek out here.
| Anything that you could share would be greatly appreciated!
| scrollaway wrote:
| Networking is critical. My clients are mostly in fintech,
| so I network in fintech, but you should seek out in
| whatever field you're most comfortable in and have loads
| of expertise with. If you're good at what you do and
| produce excellent results, you only need to hunt for the
| first few clients, and then you'll get a lot of
| referrals.
| orzig wrote:
| With the caveat that I charge a bit less, and have only
| had two clients (but kept them each >1y, and have gotten
| other client interest I did not have bandwidth for): Keep
| up with the talented people you worked and want to school
| with. If you are in your 30s, some significant fraction
| are managers with budgets. At any given time, a few will
| have a need which is too time-sensitive for the whole
| hiring cycle (which can take >>$10k and still return a
| dud).
|
| If they remember you as dependable and all-around
| competent, they would be thrilled to be able to deploy
| their budget against the problem nearly instantly.
| mwint wrote:
| Could you give some examples of those people?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| This doesn't answer my question. How do you find people
| "who have more money and higher expectations, and highly
| value efficiency"?
|
| > "Don't talk to your local barber who wants a website to
| show up on google maps."
|
| The specific case I was referring to was a series seed
| funded startup that needed to build an MVP. Even for them
| $10,000 was too much. They ended up finding someone for
| half that to build their entire V1. This was maybe 5 years
| ago. They've since rebuilt everything in house and are
| doing very well now.
| wcarss wrote:
| Your last point there is the stinger: they rebuilt
| everything themselves after going cheaper to start. So:
| they had the money, and they had cause to spend it, but
| they chose not pay you for your service, and as a result
| they likely paid more in the long run. It is a
| (admittedly pretty tough!) sales task, but it is _the_
| task: you had to convince them that $10k was worth it for
| _you_.
|
| Once they have 3+ programmers working full time, they'll
| be spending _at least_ $15k _every single week_ on their
| site /app -- likely way more. Save them even a single
| near-future month of crap-rewriting, "switching
| frameworks", infrastructure headaches, "one-click
| signup", getting their shaky foundations sorted out,
| etc., and it's a very clear win.
|
| I've seen founder and first contractor tech debt that was
| really hurting the business take _a year_ to clear out,
| because once the business is running at all, you can't
| just swap out the engine. Heck, I've seen it take 5
| years! Making the right choice today can really change
| their whole outcome, from struggling or closing to
| thriving -- and a bad contractor is not the right choice.
| (etc...)
|
| You have to show them: your rate is just a demonstration
| of your value. If they pick you, they're gonna be
| laughing all the way to the bank.
| cronix wrote:
| > So: they had the money, and they had cause to spend it,
| but they chose not pay you for your service, and as a
| result they likely paid more in the long run.
|
| That's one possibility. Another, and one that I think is
| more common with startups (majority are people using
| their own savings and family/friends, not raising
| millions from seed rounds) is that they really didn't
| have that much money up front, but paying a cheaper way
| allowed them to minimally get a product out the door
| until they had enough revenue to "do it right."
| lumost wrote:
| A tech seed round can easily be 7 figures these days. A
| new initiative at a non-tech fortune 50 could start in 8
| figures. Hiring someone at 10k per week who can kickstart
| the project to working production system isn't a bad deal
| at these budgets.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Wait wait, is it really possible to get that big of a
| seed round WITHOUT an MVP??
| rco8786 wrote:
| Not now. It probably was from 2018-2021. Probably will be
| again at some point.
|
| But don't take that to mean you can just walk in and ask
| for money. People still want to know who they're
| investing in. Prior track record is key.
| lumost wrote:
| In B2B it may be quite sufficient that someone has a
| track record in the industry + good customer
| contacts/buyers. Why wait for an MVP if the MVP doesn't
| seem like the risky part?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Yes now. Series A is harder to raise but 2M seed rounds
| are still happening. 1M seems pretty standard now.
| OhNoNotAgain_99 wrote:
| you seem to be on the low side, i do 4000p/day not less
| jononomo wrote:
| I recommend that you double your rates -- you're worth more
| than you think.
| oefnak wrote:
| I believe they're worth even more! Double it again!
| FBISurveillance wrote:
| Like Dr Evil said: "One! Million! Dollars!"
| mypalmike wrote:
| One million per day? Or per hour?
| joshmanders wrote:
| One million to open the email.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I chuckled. For you, if you want any work done, my rates are
| $20k/week pre-paid monthly.
| holler wrote:
| What's your go-to tech stack? Do you find a lot of your work is
| crud apps?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Next.js
|
| React-Query
|
| Prisma
|
| Tailwind CSS
|
| Kubernetes
|
| PostgreSQL
|
| Caddy
| klapaucjusz wrote:
| I charge $150/hr. for new work and do pretty much exclusively
| hourly-based work. I have many clients that I grandfather on
| lower rates.
|
| The second half of this equation is how many billable hours you
| can get as freelancer in a week. Plenty of the things I do are
| not billable, and the more different small contracts I'm working
| on the less billable hours I'm able to fit in. I would say I
| average 20-25 hours billable on a regular work week of 40-ish
| hours.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Do you guys charge the same rate no matter the task ? if a
| customer wants a quickfix or some trivial change do you adapt ?
|
| On the other side of the spectrum, if you spend way longer than
| thought on a feature, do you stop charging or do you consider
| your work is still worth for them ?
| hakanderyal wrote:
| I only work on the products I've built myself. Bug fixes are
| always free, even if the project has been delivered years ago.
| Trivial changes are sometimes free if I have a good
| relationship with the client. Mostly I group the work for a day
| and charge my daily rate.
|
| For the 2nd question, if it's a fixed budget project, I bear
| the cost myself and take it as a lesson for the future to do
| estimates better. If it's not, I always inform the client that
| it might take a longer than the estimates if it's not something
| I've done before.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Thanks a lot for your input :)
| dmje wrote:
| Everyone here is so incredibly focused on money as the primary
| motivator, which I guess given the thread question makes some
| sense. But I'd like to just put in a little word for money not
| being everything, and client type / work type actually being a
| really important part of the equation.
|
| HN is a forum where increasingly I see posts every single day
| about the high level of misery in tech / how can I get out of
| this rat race / high levels of stress / undervalued / etc etc.
|
| I charge PS500 a day. It's not much compared to some of the rates
| on here, but I work with lovely, interesting clients in the non-
| profit sector. My clients love what they do and I do good work
| for them so they love what I do. I have long term, low stress,
| friendship-like relationships with my clients, not shouty / nasty
| / high stress ones. I've done this work for 12 years, and had to
| work with maybe a handful of assholes during that time.
|
| FWIW I think there is a "lower budget bar" under which demands
| are insane for the money being offered, and we should all avoid
| this work unless we actively want to take a race to the bottom.
| But - I think there is undoubtedly a "higher budget bar" over
| which the stress level and expectation is made exceedingly high.
| This (I would imagine; I don't know, I've worked in non profits
| my whole life) is probably also equated with sector - if you're
| in a FinTech environment I would imagine you're looking at high
| budgets but also an insane number of highly pressured assholes
| shouting at you all the time.
|
| What am I basically saying? I guess - yes, charge enough (and
| this is probably more than you think it should be) - but also,
| look at the bigger picture of your work / sector. Think about
| happiness, work-life balance, client motivations, etc - and use
| this to inform what you charge and how you charge for it. That'd
| be my advice.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Money is everything to me because I'm not getting younger and I
| don't want to toil forever. I stopped caring about almost
| everything except my growing family.
| dmje wrote:
| I'm 50 and care about nothing apart from my family. That's
| why I want to be around for them by having a good work / life
| balance which for me means working as I've described. I can
| worry about the money when they've left home :-)
| trhoad wrote:
| I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it's easy to say
| money isn't everything when you're already earning PS120k/$140k
| pa.
| omginternets wrote:
| I think you and the parent poster are in agreement, insofar
| as much of HN is simultaneously displeased with their
| professional life whilst trying to go fro PS140k to PS240k
| _per annum_.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I seriously doubt parent is earning that much. I expect they
| probably bill avg 10-15 days per month at that rate. Most
| contractors like them in the UK that I know operate this way
| most of the time.
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| Seems perfectly reasonable to me, maybe 1 month off a year.
| All my UK contractor friends make over PS550pd and have
| work whenever they want
| elliekelly wrote:
| And there are lots of expenses.
| trhoad wrote:
| Contracted for a few years. Almost zero expenses (a new
| laptop, an accountant, some PL insurance).
| trhoad wrote:
| Most (all) the contractors I know can bill PS500 per day
| outside IR35 pretty much indefinitely.
| phphphphp wrote:
| PS500/day is the rate for software engineering contractors
| in the UK that guarantees a continuous stream of work: it
| would be trivial for someone to bill 100% of billable days
| in a year at that rate. I don't know anybody who only bills
| 10 - 15 days per month, I personally bill ~21 on average
| per month and I am always fully booked (I turn down work).
| All you need is a profile on LinkedIn and you'll get a
| constant stream of offers at PS500/day -- no reputation or
| relationships required. Anybody billing 10 - 15 days per
| month is doing so out of choice.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'm not suggesting they are unable to bill 20 days per
| month if they want to, I would say they probably choose
| not to on average across the whole year. I certainly
| don't like working absolutely every weekday, and I take
| time off periodically. Working a bit less is one of the
| huge perks of being a contractor.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _PS500 /day is the rate for software engineering
| contractors in the UK that guarantees a continuous stream
| of work_
|
| That might have been true pre-COVID but is even that rate
| a guarantee of much in a post-COVID world with the
| economic uncertainty we have now and so much pressure to
| do everything inside IR35? So many of the offers being
| made in the UK contract market now fall through and so
| many of the gigs are relatively short that even if you
| take a rate where you can work "continuously" you could
| actually be losing 1-2 months out of the year just from
| things like delayed starts, having several rounds of
| looking for the next gig in the same year, having "safe"
| contracts fall through unexpectedly, aborting a "done
| deal" that was advertised as outside IR35 but it turned
| out the client or recruiter had no idea how IR35 actually
| worked, etc.
|
| We've been talking about this a lot in my network this
| year as it seems to be a recurring source of irritation
| for those who are still trying to work genuine freelance
| and outside IR35 contract gigs. A reasonable estimate for
| this year might be that 80% of gigs people have been
| approached about on LinkedIn or seen posted by agency
| recruiters never actually hired anyone and the time taken
| for a freelancer or contractor to find their next real
| gig is up maybe 50-100% compared to a couple of years
| ago.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Yeah I exhaled slightly when reading they're in the >97th
| percentile for UK salaries.
|
| Modest earnings
| karamanolev wrote:
| This is apples to oranges and therefore false. Contracting
| has much much more deductions from the base rate than
| salaries. At the very least, with 20 days (1 month) off,
| you start off with a 11/12 coefficient. Then there's buying
| your own benefits, dealing with your own accounting, i.e.
| maybe paying an accountant or otherwise investing the time
| to do it yourself, which in turn reduces the number of
| hours you have to actually, you know, contract. They aren't
| in the 97th percentile.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Fair.
|
| Let's be realistic, or even conservative.
|
| 90th percentile? (PS58k)
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| I think any contract developer will be on the 95%+
| percentile. When I started contracting in my mid-20s I
| was in the UKs 1% for a 40 hour gig done from my bedroom
| desk. It's pretty mental.
| Retric wrote:
| That's assuming they can work 240 days a year, contracting
| normally has significant unpaid downtime and of course zero
| benefits.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Not really, the rule of thumb most contractors talk about
| is plan around 220 days per year (44 weeks).
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Even the 10% pay cut you suggest vs the numbers mentioned
| seems like a significant difference to me.
| bawolff wrote:
| All they said was money isn't everything. They didn't say
| money is nothing.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| One way of thinking about this is that you're charging less for
| doing less work. Maybe that's what you want (eg less stressful
| days). Another way to see it is that if you could work for some
| places you like less for PSX per day, you could live off PS500
| per day and donate PS(X-500) to charity (this is basically the
| argument that was popular 10 years or so ago that ambitious
| young people wanting to 'do good' should go and work in
| tech/finance to make a lot of money to give to charity instead
| of working for charities directly). So in some sense you're
| choosing to instead donate PS(X-500) per day to the nonprofits
| you work for. I guess if you like what they do then maybe it's
| a reasonable choice for you.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I charge PS500 a day. It's not much compared to some of the
| rates on here_
|
| 500GBP/day is still very good by European dev wage standards.
| You can't compare to American wages/rates.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| It is pretty average for a contractor in Europe.
| Contractors/Freelancers have always been paid above normal
| wages, because the contracts offer more flexibility to the
| employers.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Depends on which market in Europe. Rates can vary wildly.
| joshmanders wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but I work to live, not live to work.
| My end game is to spend my time doing what I love with those I
| love and unfortunately, writing code for someone elses business
| is not what I love. It's traveling the world, hiking mountains,
| swimming with whales and dolphins, sitting on a swing set with
| my kid, taking my dog for walks.
|
| Money is my only motivation because I want to quit everything
| that makes money and only do stuff that doesn't make money but
| makes me happy.
| j45 wrote:
| 5 years ago I'd say - Working to live is great. It makes one
| more well rounded and you discover you have other interests
| to pursue with time.
|
| As time goes on the cost of freedom is higher and higher. You
| might meet someone special and want to experience life
| together. That might lead to realizing the world might be
| better with little versions of her in it.
|
| In The last 2 years - My kids will be the only people who
| remember me when the day I no longer breathe, if I'm around
| for them now. I don't want them to have to relearn the stuff
| I had to unnecessarily on my own and be in a position to lean
| into whatever their potential calls them to.
|
| Wealth moves from not just money, but to time and creating
| memories. If all my time is spent to get money it's not worth
| it.
|
| Wealth as time is all there is. Since I've embraced this
| oddly the professional and product side of life has taken off
| even more.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| From my experience in management consulting, it's more industry
| related than rate related.
|
| Clients in finance tend to be assholes even when you are cheap.
| The field just tolerates it.
|
| Similarly, industrial customers are used to be put under a lot
| of pressure regarding costs and delays and will treat you as
| they are used to be treated.
|
| Here is my trick: if you want to work in a nice environment,
| choose a job in an environment known to be nice.
| j45 wrote:
| Pricing according to the ability to pay and the value it
| generates is something that seems to make sense.
|
| There is no perfect universal formula. Everyone has different
| situations, backgrounds, variables to weight and scenarios to
| ensure. It's good to advocate for balance because keeping score
| with money quickly can get hollow when Al your time and best
| energy is tanked.
|
| Ones pursuit of profit and purpose doesn't have to be with min
| the same hour of activity at work. One can be optimized to feed
| the other.
|
| Surprisingly the world will pay atomically will for solving
| what appears to be a boring but very real problem.
|
| Solving these tries of problems can lead to interesting ones.
|
| If one some it might be more possible to work for larger rates
| based on their experience and give back to non profits at
| little to nothing, or over deliver value.
|
| It doesn't seem important but within 5-10 years it becomes
| apparent that ppl on the self or startup path have to create
| their own retirement fund and healthcare plan not just for
| them.
|
| The more you can save the more you can have a say in what you
| do and don't take on, and for how long.
| cogwheel wrote:
| Have an annual salary in mind for a similar role, chop off the
| last three zeros, and that's my hourly rate.
|
| It works out to approximately double which is just enough to
| account for things you would normally get from an employer:
|
| - payroll taxes (SS/Medicare) - PTO/sick days - equipment &
| supplies - training/conferences - health insurance - retirement
| savings
|
| Etc
| wpietri wrote:
| Yes! Long ago I read a book that mentioned that freelance
| professionals (accountants, lawyers, etc) tended to bill around
| 1000 hours per year. That the unbillable time went toward
| sales, client relations, marketing, learning, etc. I could
| usually do a little better than a 50% utilization rate for
| myself, but as you say that money goes to things most people
| don't have to pay. So the knock-three-zeros-off-salary rule
| served me well.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Common advice is to double your effective hourly rate when
| going from salary to contracting (which "divide annual salary
| by 1000" is equivalent to). That's not just because you'll
| have fewer hours or have to search for clients; some clients
| will pay you for all the hours you can give them. But also,
| you'll have to bring your own health insurance, pay the
| additional self-employment tax, maintain a business, do
| business taxes, and quite a bit of other overhead. The
| additional cost helps offset all of that.
| okaram wrote:
| Keep in mind it's not really 50%, more like 65? 2,000 hours
| means you work 40 hours/week, 50 weeks ... Basically no
| vacation, just a few holidays or sick days. We budget full
| time as 1,600 hours
| wpietri wrote:
| Depends on the people, I'm sure. For a long time 40-hour
| weeks with two weeks off was pretty standard in the US,
| which works out to a nice round 2000 hours. A lot of the
| people prone to going independent are the types to put in
| more time than that. I sure am. But yes, if you want fewer
| working hours, that changes the calculations.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| $2k per day.
|
| hourly always invites discussions, for example how are phone
| calls with mixed topics billed?
| typeofhuman wrote:
| I'm considering switching from hourly to a daily model.
|
| Tracking hours is becoming too granular for the work I'm doing.
| This includes research and development; each of which I find
| myself "guessing" the hours a lot of the time.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| In my case, it was the research.
|
| If you bill 2h of DuckDuck-ing for suitable libraries to use
| as dependencies, that sounds like you're slacking off. But
| it'll probably save money for the project as a whole.
| furyofantares wrote:
| i assume that invites a discussion about what a day is. is that
| an easier discussion? how does it go? or does it not invite
| discussion?
| Silhouette wrote:
| This is a bit like the clients with low rates or clients with
| high rates discussion. Clients who will pay high rates
| actually tend to be more respectful of your time and
| expertise.
|
| Similarly a chargeable day is a day when you provided the
| contracted services period. It doesn't come with fixed hours
| or even a fixed amount of hours. It doesn't come with a
| guarantee that you won't take a quick call with someone else
| in the middle of the day or a two-hour lunch date. It does
| include travel, phone calls, answering "quick questions" on
| Teams or Slack or whatever they use, and anything else you do
| to provide the contracted services.
|
| Anyone who doesn't like that can find someone else to work
| with who is willing to put up with all the other nickel and
| dime stuff that client will surely try. No-one I worked with
| on a day rate ever even questioned it. What you get done on
| the days you charge for will tell a client soon enough if
| you're providing the value they're paying for and if you are
| then they won't have any reason to worry about nit-picking
| the wording in your contract.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Never had that discussion.
|
| When I assign a day to a project, it basically means that I
| promise to not work on something else on that calendar day.
| But the actual hours don't matter that much if I get some
| stuff done.
|
| I mean regular employees also can have a bad day where they
| can't concentrate well and then you only get 4 hours of
| productive work out of the 8 hours they are physically
| present.
| plantain wrote:
| $120US for work I think will be interesting or rewarding, scaling
| to $300US for work that sounds like it's going to suck.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| Southeast USA. $100/hr for everything (meetings, development
| work, bug fixes, ...).
|
| Took me a while to be honest with myself and finally charge for
| all of my time. Maybe it's confidence?
|
| Never had an issue from a client with this arrangement.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| You should probably charge more. Automobile repairs techs in
| Alabama charge more than that.
|
| But I'd like to know where you find work because I haven't
| found many clients in the SE that wish to spend money.
| jononomo wrote:
| Repairing an automobile is a more difficult and valuable
| skill set, however.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| Absolutely and the tools required often cost far more than
| a developer will ever spend during the course of their
| career.
|
| But $100 per hour is too cheap. I charged more than that
| for carpentry repairs to homes and commercial buildings.
|
| The local PepBoys charges $122 per hour and they're aren't
| capable of much more than oil changes and tire repairs.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I'm not going to debate the difficulty but looking at the
| median and mean salary for both, it's certainly not more
| valuable in a monetary sense.
| lostboomerang wrote:
| > Automobile repairs techs
|
| Is that a different term for "mechanics"?
| motoboi wrote:
| Yeah. Mechanics charge 50, automobile repairs tech charge
| 100.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| In the repair industry, technician is reserved for folks
| that can properly diagnose and make any and all repairs.
|
| A mechanic is someone who can throw parts at a car but
| isn't likely to be able to perform in-depth diagnostics or
| advanced repairs especially on newer cars with complex
| electrical systems.
|
| A mechanic in Alabama should expect to earn $50k-$60k while
| a tech is closer to $110k or so.
|
| I know at least 9 guys in my county who never finished high
| school and couldn't compose a proper sentence if their
| lives depended on it yet they earn $150k+ per year
| repairing automobiles.
| lostboomerang wrote:
| Thank you for the explanation.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I tell clients that identifying the problem is at least 50% of
| the work, and that includes meetings. Well, I call them "work
| sessions", and I don't think it's an euphemism.
|
| And then they can pay 100 hours for a narrow scope of perfect,
| or they can pay 20 hours and iterate until it's good enough
| (bugfixes).
| rebuilder wrote:
| Is it controversial that meetings should count as billable
| time? I mean, it's not like you're there because you just
| really like meetings!
| nathancahill wrote:
| I bill double for meetings. Suddenly was invited to a lot
| less meetings that I never needed to be in as a contractor.
| Perfection.
| wpietri wrote:
| This is genius and I wish I had read this comment a long
| time ago.
| swader999 wrote:
| There's no way my wife will go for that.
| ncallaway wrote:
| We bill for project management and work related meetings,
| but not contract and business development related meetings.
| So if we're getting feedback for our performance, ways we
| can improve, or discussing a contract extension we don't
| bill for those. But if we're discussing the thing we're
| building, or doing project status updates we bill for that.
|
| We've never had a client push back on that.
| nivertech wrote:
| Meetings before signing a contract are usually free. Mean
| people call them "exploiting freelancers". They would
| invite consultants to their office and try to pickup their
| brains. They usually asking for free estimation, or some
| other free work, in the best (and very rare) case they will
| ask your rate and shake the hands right at the first
| meeting.
|
| There are very few people who would agree to pay even for
| the initial meeting.
|
| After signing the contract, you can bill for all the time
| you spent working, meeting, thinking, answering emails or
| phone calls, or even being on standby or warming up a seat
| at a client site.
|
| In case the client set up a meeting and then canceled it on
| the short notice, or worse, didn't show up at all - you can
| also charge for this if you've lost the opportunity to work
| on other things.
|
| Of course it's best to discuss this with the customer
| before signing the contract, and if possible made it clear
| in the contract itself.
| conderr99 wrote:
| I have 12 years of experience working as a backend engineer full
| time for medium-to-large sized software companies, and breaking
| into consulting has always seemed really difficult to me.
|
| I mostly excel at system architecture and writing technical
| documents to describe the trade offs of those systems. I really
| don't enjoy full stack/web programming or marketing - is it
| possible to consult in strictly this capacity? e.g. as a
| principal or higher level engineer?
| rtlfe wrote:
| I don't know about doing it on your own, but you could
| certainly join a consulting firm and do that role alongside a
| team of more junior people.
| fifafu wrote:
| Germany, mostly doing iOS, macOS native (Objc & Swift), Android
| (Kotlin), Hybrid (Ionic/Capacitor) & Web (Angular + React). ~ 10
| years of experience. Working with lots of low level communication
| protocols for controlling industrial field devices from native
| apps or web apps. However I never decline a project based on
| technology and have done all sort of other things as well.
|
| I usually charge 120EUR per hour (working mostly for big german
| companies). Currently mostly helping various international teams
| of my clients and not doing much dev work myself anymore. Usually
| my contracts are at least 500 hours.
|
| However I do this in addition to my own software projects that
| sell pretty well. This gives me the flexibility to decline any
| customer project I don't like. (Or if they want me to do scrum)
| [deleted]
| koevet wrote:
| My rate is 1000 Euro/day. There is flexibility on the rate, if
| the project is particularly interesting.
| swader999 wrote:
| Any thoughts or concerns on how to deal with inflationary
| environment and the falling Euro?
| koevet wrote:
| I'm based in Germany, so the tax pressure is quite high,
| thinking of moving back to Italy (where I'm originally from)
| to benefit of the massive tax break for "returning Italians"
| (or anti brain drain tax advantages).
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's not that great, you still have to pay social
| insurance. It's been a long time since I checked but you
| end up paying 30-35%.
|
| In Europe your best options are Malta (5% corp tax +
| progressive rates on what you spend and keep everything in
| the company until you leave and withdraw at 0% from eg.
| Dubai) or Cyprus (12 corp tax +2.5% dividends tax).
|
| I'd consider Montenegro as well if it makes sense for you
| or other eastern European countries.
| factorialboy wrote:
| What do you offer for that rate?
| koevet wrote:
| I'm quite a generalist, my strongest expertise is the JVM
| ecosystem, but these days I'm helping clients to migrate to
| cloud infra.
| de_freelance_1 wrote:
| In Germany - 100EUR/hour. Billing on average 150 hours each
| month.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 100EUR per hour.
|
| I'm a contractor on paper and work with my own company (so I can
| pay 15% in taxes) but it's a long term job, full-time and I don't
| take holidays. I live in a nice low cost of living European
| country, even if everything is slowly degrading and I give it
| 10-15 years before I'll need to move. Found the job (like all my
| jobs) via word of mouth / personal network. Recruiters offer you
| significantly less per hour in my experience.
|
| I tried working with the States but I couldn't charge more (they
| try to pay european prices) and the work was way more stressful.
| Living in the States is definitely not for me though, way too
| many homeless and mentally ill people, not to mention the culture
| gets "progress"ively worse and worse.
|
| If I were employed by a FANG (even ignoring the waste of time of
| preparing for the interview) I would have to pay way more taxes
| because I would be an employee. Also they pay way less in Europe.
|
| I guess over time I could make more money, once I progress inside
| a FANG but that sounds hard, shaky and absolutely not fun.
|
| I need money to build a house so my current plan is to keep
| contracting and run side businesses to make passive income
| (currently at around 1/2k per month passive) until I don't need
| money anymore.
| zackify wrote:
| 125/hr
| gwbrooks wrote:
| I do fixed project fees against tight scopes rather than hourly
| rates. When things go out of scope, it's expensive enough
| ($250-300/hr) to create a pain point.
|
| One thing I don't more of and it surprises me: There's no reason
| to charge all clients the same rate. If you're solving a five-
| figure problem for one client and a seven-figure problem for
| another using basically the same solution, why charge them the
| same?
| philsnow wrote:
| > If you're solving a five-figure problem for one client and a
| seven-figure problem for another using basically the same
| solution, why charge them the same?
|
| Do you have a script for sussing out the value of solving a
| problem for any given client?
|
| I guess savvy clients might pretend that it's not all that
| important/valuable to them, to prevent contractors from bidding
| it up.
| brankoB wrote:
| In Canada, $80/hr. Aiming for $90 for my next contract starting
| next month. Or to move to the US and make way more, apparently.
| swader999 wrote:
| In Canada too but long term multi year international contract
| leading small dev team. $150/hr 40 hours week.
| ykevinator2 wrote:
| There are 100 clients who expect to pay $15 / hour for every one
| who will pay $125. It's really really hard to find them but you
| will find them if you ask 101 potential clients.
| cgfloat wrote:
| OOC, do you have a link to the question from a couple of days
| ago?
| redbell wrote:
| Here it is.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32606348
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| I'm a cyber security specialist (in web application security)
| with a few certifications and 10+ years of experience.
|
| I charge usually $350 an hour unless it's something I estimate
| will require the help of an outsider to which I may go as high at
| $1k an hour.
|
| Answering everyone asking how we find clients - I love public
| speaking and so I try to do as much as I can. 80% of my clients
| saw me speak, the other 20% come from word to mouth. Highly
| recommend if you have the ability.
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| How long are your engagements?
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| They can go anywhere from one hour (e.g awareness training)
| to a full month (e.g complex web application pentest)
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| Ironically, I've found it's easier to charge higher rates
| for longer engagements.
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| Although I charge a flat fee, I've found that companies
| tend to be more accepting to my pricing when it's a
| longer engagement than a shorter one
| orzig wrote:
| Yeah, the fixed "cost" (in effort) of bringing someone in
| can totally dominate the financial cost for smaller
| engagements. Especially when a manager is spending their
| large company's dollars.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I've seen some companies charge very little ($2-$5k) for a
| pen test. How are you able to charge $350/hour for
| essentially the same work? Is there some pitch or playbook
| you're using to justify the price for doing the same work?
| cratermoon wrote:
| A $5K is pentest is just some guy running a couple of
| off-the-shelf, open source, or scriptkiddie tools and
| handing you the reports.
|
| For $350/hr you get
|
| - someone knowing which pentest tools to start with
|
| - someone knowing how to follow up with more focused
| attention on problem areas and run additional tests
|
| - someone analyzing the raw reports to understand the
| causes of the vulnerabilities
|
| - a multi-page written formal report with interpretations
| and recommendations for mitigation, including a
| cost/risk/benefit summaries.
|
| Edit to add: in my experience the companies offering
| cheap pentests and handing you the logs are the ones that
| then say, "If you want to understand these logs and know
| what to do about them, you can contract with us at
| $VERY_HIGH_RATE"
| folmar wrote:
| I've seen a couple of the cheap pen tests by a few German
| companies. The whole thing looked like a 1-2 days of work
| and the person doing it was doing the basic stuff _, but
| definitely conducted by a knowledgeable person and when
| problems were found reasonable suggestions were offered
| in the report. The apps were standard - frontend in
| Angular, backend in Spring Boot on Tomcat.
|
| _ basic DoS, XSS, SQLi, token abuse, open ports with not
| up to date services, generic vulnerability scanner, basic
| password brute forcing
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Man. I (CISSP, CISA), 20 years of experience, everything from
| development to dev management to sales and marketing to finance
| to fundraising, the whole shebang, do ISO27001 ISMS's and coach
| through certifications... for $70/hr. But then, my clients are
| based in the U.K., where technology is still generally seen as
| worthless.
| jll29 wrote:
| That's what a (Master-level) plumber charges per hour in
| Germany. By offering such discounted rates, people consider
| you 'less valuable' a priori.
|
| I have indeed heard anti-"IT" sentiments in the UK, where
| managers often come from outside disciplines (e.g. "politics,
| philosophy and economics" type of oxbridge degrees). Some of
| these people adjust quickly and pick up technical skills
| naturally, whereas others couldn't insert a 9 V block battery
| into a toy without a YouTube video after a decade of "IT"
| exposure. But they also do not know what something is worth
| without a clear explanation, so your value is bound by your
| ability to articulate it.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Fair. Thank you. You've just inspired me to fire off a
| round of emails announcing a 500% rate increase, listing
| the pretty significant accomplishments I have achieved for
| each client, and underlining the point that their
| businesses would likely not exist were it not for my
| support over the many years I have worked with them. I
| don't exaggerate - many of them would never have got off
| the ground without me dragging them through the startup
| thorns and driving their first few years of technical
| sales.
|
| Either they'll like it, or I'll just quit technology, as
| the resentment just keeps growing.
| dsr_ wrote:
| If you scare off 80% of your recurring clients, you've
| drastically lowered your workload without penalty.
|
| If you scare off just 50% of your recurring clients,
| you've halved your workload and are making more money.
|
| The downside is if you scare off more than 80% of your
| recurring clients.
| orzig wrote:
| Unless there is a massive recession, I would consider
| scaring off more than 80% an opportunity to spend time
| prospecting for better clients. I can't speak for the UK,
| but I really suspect you can find them.
|
| Also don't forget that some fraction of the clients who
| balk at the increase from their anchor-bias price will
| come back to you after they see the low quality they get
| from other vendors at that price. Just be gracious when
| they leave.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I work in the UK and it's a fair estimate that a good
| percentage of senior managers haven't got a clue when it
| comes to IT and technology in general. Having said that,
| people aren't necessarily stupid: if the pitch is right,
| they would adopt the solution and pay decent consulting
| rates. The biggest problem is that both groups do struggle
| to meet each other.
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| Sounds like it is less technical correct? I find that there
| are a lot of auditing firms out there willing to do
| compliance work for cheap therefor bringing down the prices
| (still not super low).
|
| Technical auditing and training in cyber security was always
| a kind of niche that allows you to charge more.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| No, I typically end up filling the roles of CTO, CISO - I
| can advise, implement, whatever, on virtually any stack.
|
| It's just that in the U.K., technology skills have little
| to no value.
| eertami wrote:
| There are definitely companies in the UK that will pay
| competitive rates for tech. $70/hr is lower than the
| median contracting rates for the UK, and I'd be
| suspicious if someone with 20 years experience was that
| cheap. I'd expect at minimum to be paying 1000 GBP/day.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I had 15 years of experience when I last updated my rates
| - and I chronically undervalue myself. I'm responsible
| for the better part of a billion pounds of revenue,
| without exaggeration, across my clients, over the
| decades.
|
| Part of the issue I've faced is that I usually start
| working with folks when they're 2-3 people, and I grow
| them - but my rates end up stuck at the 2-3 people
| company level, not at the 1000+ person company level that
| they've mostly become.
|
| I also consistently manage to get gipped out of equity,
| as I'm always "just madaxe", who humbly grinds away and
| doesn't feel right taking a slice of someone else's pie.
| orzig wrote:
| Have you considered finding somebody to act as your
| "talent agent"? I don't know exactly how this would work,
| but with so much money being left on the table I think it
| makes a ton of sense to be creative. I totally understand
| how awkward it can be to ask for more, but if part of the
| block is your own personality, there must be someone out
| there who would have less of a problem asking for what
| you deserve. The ROI would almost certainly be huge
| regardless of their cut.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| "and doesn't feel right taking a slice of someone else's
| pie"
|
| I hate to say it, but you need to get over that. This
| very mindset has screwed me over more times than I care
| to think about. I'm in the $2B+ generated revenue part of
| my career. I've got a lot of scars, bruises and broken
| dreams that brought me here. Built an entire start-up,
| that sold for $256M, got screwed out of $2M. That was on
| the low-end of what I've lost in various endeavours. And
| I have stupidly made that mistake several times. Over the
| years I've learned some hard lessons.
|
| I now take the approach that "I charge this much per
| day/week for my time, if you cannot afford that and wish
| to give me equity in lieu of (some of) my pay, these are
| my terms." And I don't do 4 year vesting with 1 year
| cliff. If I am taking a significant pay cut, e.g. 60% to
| 70% from my usual day rate, the cliff is 90 days on an
| accelerated vesting schedule. And it is a grant, not
| options, I'm not giving back money to get what I earned.
|
| You also need to start negotiating your contracts to have
| a quaterly or bi-annual rate increase from "I'm doing you
| a solid here with a big discount" so that three years
| later, after built all the tech for the start-up, you
| aren't earning less than the Junior who struggles to
| remember the difference between margins and offsets. On
| client discounts (I've stopped giving them except where
| large chunks of equity are concerned), you can backload
| them too, so that should the client cut you loose because
| you bumped your rate by 10% last year, as stated in your
| contract, they pay a termination fee. Some clients will
| balk and nope out, those clients you don't want. It took
| me decades to figure out I was allowed to say "no" to
| potential work.
|
| Right now I am charging less than what I have in the
| past, $1,000/day as opposed to $1,600 to $2,000/day,
| because I need some stress free time, and at 6pm, I turn
| off my computer and forget about my work.
| raesene9 wrote:
| If you're doing $70/hr in the UK at CISO level you're way
| under some of your competitors.
|
| Heck Pentesters charge more than that and they're 50%+
| cheaper in the UK than the US.
|
| My hourly rate in the UK as an Big-4 Infosec consultant
| 15+ years ago was way more than that and I wasn't doing
| CISO work. Partners (who were the kind of people doing
| that kind of work) were 10x your rate back then.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| It's actually a similar price in Germany. There are
| higher paying jobs in Berlin, but in general it's not
| unusual to have this price in Europe. France and Spain is
| even lower.
| swader999 wrote:
| I've looked at UK rates and salaries over the years and could
| never understand why they are so low.
| aantix wrote:
| You have to get out of Europe.
|
| For whatever reason, Europeans just don't seem to value
| software engineering and it shows.
|
| Great engineers. Zero money to show for it.
| ehnto wrote:
| Venture Capital and FANG pay obscene money because their
| business models can afford to, they just happen to be
| powered by software. The actual work of software
| development isn't somehow worth more to society than your
| average white collar job, at least in my opinion. It's just
| another job, and it would be better for the world if the
| pay came down rather than everywhere get inflated, so that
| software could thrive in other markets, not just the tech
| bubbles. Perhaps not the right forum to be preaching for
| that, and it's certainly not in my best interest either,
| but that's how I see it.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| In order for pay to come down it must be inflated first
| so that people are motivated to saturate the open
| positions.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >It's just another job
|
| If this was true, then then purchasers would not be
| having to pay so much for the labor. No one is forcing
| them to.
|
| Pricing is just a function of supply and demand. The high
| prices indicate more supply is needed to market
| participants. Maybe the participants can respond and
| provide sufficient supply to bring prices down. Maybe the
| participants are not able to respond with enough supply
| and prices stay elevated.
| acjacobson wrote:
| Their business models can afford to pay a lot because
| these companies generate that much cash. They drive that
| much cash because software can be highly leveraged
| (whereas plumbing cannot). Having salaries come down to
| means shifting where the profits are distributed and
| allowing the company owners and investors to capture more
| in comparison to the employees. I don't see how this is
| better?
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Forgive me if this is obvious but how do you get speaking
| opportunities? Are you applying to calls for presentations at
| conferences?
| bubblehack3r wrote:
| I take part in local meetups who are always looking for
| speakers and apply to CFP.
| orzig wrote:
| Every technical meetup group I have been involved with his
| perennially desperate for speakers. If you make the effort to
| be present both physically and virtually for about three meet
| up groups over the course of about three months, I think it's
| very likely you could get slotted in to speak by month 6.
| It's possible they would add you on as a moderator for the
| group, guaranteeing persistent visibility if you are willing
| to put in the work (assuming you are a honest and decent
| person, this is a win-win because these communities have a
| huge positive externalities)
| Exuma wrote:
| 300/hr
| Arubis wrote:
| I'm not sure if I qualify as generalist, but this should still be
| relevant:
|
| It depends. Did I go through an agency, or find the client
| myself? Do they need _me_ or a butt in a seat? Will the work be
| fun, or awful, or is there any on-call expectation (which is
| worse than awful and probably a hard no)? Discounts for bulk and
| prepayment.
|
| Also, hourly rates are the worst. Value pricing is a hard leap; a
| much easier thing you can do today is at least bump to a flat day
| rate, or a weekly one of the shape of your clients makes it
| seamless. Just do it; it'll make you a happier, saner person and
| immediately mitigate a terrible incentive misalignment.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think incentives are misaligned either way. You have to match
| the structure to the situation.
|
| I have a friend, a great sydadmin/devops/infrastructure person.
| He never takes full-time jobs; his deal is always for 32
| hours/week. His reasoning? 32 hours is 32 hours, but full time
| is all the time. He leads a much happier life than most ops-ish
| people I know.
|
| Maybe you have the sort of clients where day/weekly rates work.
| But for the sort of client that has crunch mode or deadline
| rushes, there is no way in the world I'd give them a weekly
| rate. If I'm going to do an 80-hour week to get something out
| in time, I'm going to get paid for every bit of it, and I want
| them to feel the pain when they see the bills.
| ehnto wrote:
| > If I'm going to do an 80-hour week to get something out in
| time, I'm going to get paid for every bit of it, and I want
| them to feel the pain when they see the bills.
|
| That's a great point, maybe a way to mitigate that is a
| combination in your contract of a weekly rate + hours cap,
| and then just really good communication on time you're
| spending. But I must admit, that ruins one of the incentives
| for weekly billing for me, and that is not having to
| atomically track time and nickle and dime every little task.
| bhu1st wrote:
| I'm from South Asia. I offer end to end web development, SEO and
| digital marketing. I charge $50/hr.
| corobo wrote:
| PS75/hr was my last freelance rate for some PHP dev work I did.
|
| Got a few too many plates spinning at the moment though so only
| doing oldschool Linux sysadmin stuff (pets vs cattle) outside the
| day job. I'd probably bill cheaper for that as it's less of a
| time sink and the tasks are either easy fixes or interesting.
| davedx wrote:
| About 100 dollars/hour, depending on the client
|
| I'm "full stack", also experienced with C++ and various other
| stuff
| revskill wrote:
| Mine is 40$/hourly as a Fullstack JS developer (React + Node)
| tyurok wrote:
| Generalist can be a specialization in itself. Imagine someone
| that can do a bit of front-end, backend, infra, design, would be
| a specialist in bootstrapping a startup.
|
| Don't get too attached to market/industry defined roles.
|
| Another way to raise rates is to take risks (like deadlines,
| promises) but every person had their own risk profile.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or change the language. Instead of 'generalist', sell yourself
| as a senior developer, architect, lead developer, etc. Nobody
| asks "what programming language are you an architect in",
| because the job is supposed to be much broader than that.
| tyurok wrote:
| Yeah, poliglots are difficult to find as well, maybe not as
| in actual difficulty to be but more of a preference for a
| subset of techs.
| leetrout wrote:
| Excluding design this is me and what I enjoy doing.
|
| I named my operation "engine ignite" because I like helping
| startups start.
|
| I LOVE getting folks leveled up on team process and procedure
| to support SOC2 and such.
| tyurok wrote:
| It's a fairly rare set of skills. People in these positive
| usually are bad in most of them and it becomes harder to ramp
| up the team later (mentoring, quality).
| throwaway74829 wrote:
| Have you gone down this route?
|
| I think the biggest issue deep generalists fall into is that
| they can be above average in the entire stack, but not
| exceptional enough to make the cut for a specialized role in
| any single thing (i.e the vast majority of publicly advertised
| roles).
|
| Going down "specialized in boot-strapping startups" route is an
| interesting remedy. I would imagine the only way to find these
| opportunities is word of mouth.
| tyurok wrote:
| I didn't go through, but have seen quite a few. It's indeed a
| less advertised position since it might be more common in
| smaller companies (less money/reach) and it might be a
| founding opportunity (less pay, higher risk), so it goes
| under the radar compared to very specialized positions.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Generalist can be a specialization in itself.
|
| This is absolutely true. Someone who is comfortable chasing
| down a problem no matter where it leads, and learning what's
| necessary to handle it if they don't already know, can provide
| a great deal of value.
|
| Many clients don't need a specialist in X, they need someone
| who can do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, and oh we didn't realize we needed
| D and E but we're glad you're up for that too.
| nathias wrote:
| 25-35$ per hour, im in EU so this is the maximum I can get away
| with
| kache_ wrote:
| time to quit my fang job l m a o
| prismatix wrote:
| Keep in mind that contractors don't receive benefits (health
| care, dental, etc) and have to pay about 30% in taxes. So in
| reality, the pay is about equal once you factor in that.
| kache_ wrote:
| I live in Canada & I've done the spreadsheet math. I can
| probably ~triple my salary if I go balls to the walls.
| Insurance is a drop in the bucket (I can just outright buy my
| drugs). I'm just kinda comfy where I'm at, and I'm having fun
| at my job.
| swader999 wrote:
| Agree, I've never seen a benefit package that gets me
| excited. With our health care system here, the FTE jobs are
| a lot less compelling vs the contractor route. About 1/20
| that go the FTE equity route seem to hit the jackpot.
| xcambar wrote:
| Freelancing is as stressful as it can get. No matter
| where you are an FTE, freelance will get you much further
| in terms of stress.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Fang is for comfortable and reliable cash, not for the highest
| possible salary at the highest possible stress level.
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