Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate
Poll version of [0]
> I charge $115-130 an hour. All work is 100% remote. I customize Salesforce.
> I think my rate is pretty good, but am wondering if I should charge more or if there is other tech I should specialize in that could get me a higher rate.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32606348
270 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] thread(Apologies for the HN meta comment)
I’ll leave it here so people can read it if they’re trying to avoid doing something else.
Original comment below
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As long as we’re doing HN meta comments, I’ll bring up that your “me too” reply is a pet peeve of mine.
It would’ve been better to just upvote the parent comment and not reply with “me too”. A comment like that adds nothing to the conversation.
Truly no offense is intended but the only time it’s additive is when the person saying it is notable to the conversation. Like OP, the article author, a moderator, etc.
In those cases it’s only helpful if they clearly state who they are. Otherwise, it comes off as just another person asking for attention without contributing something.
So, I downvoted your comment but wanted you to know why.
Now, that I’ve said my peace, I must find something else to procrastinate with.
Maybe I’ll continually refresh this page with the hope that I’ll get a reply and could procrastinate further by writing another long winded comment.
Bonus points if they say something I think is blatantly wrong.
Fingers crossed.
Edit: Anytime I see a “me too” comment, I sing the line from Weird Al’s “all about the pentiums”. I won’t repeat the line because it’s offensive and that’s not how I feel but I sing it every time.
I wonder if anyone else does this too.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I will change my downvote to an upvote.
Though I did mention that it’s acceptable for someone like OP but only when they explicitly say they’re OP. However, it would be silly for OP to keep mentioning they’re OP in every comment.
Reddit is nice in the way they give OPs comment a slight treatment to make it clear they are OP.
Simply stating that someone deserves dignity and respect (which is something everyone deserves and I hope I didn’t take that away from OP) because they are important to you is empty without additional context.
Remember the Slashdot equivalent of blockchaining everything? "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!"
a) using the GPU to accelerate the poll item sorting (EDIT: I was wrong! Someone did!)
b) rewriting not just the backend in Rust, but the whole front-end in Rust, compiling to WebAssembly. (Drawing the whole thing into the canvas instead of using the icky DOM, too!)
c) Machine learning wasn't mentioned once
[0] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
Who volunteers to write the data analytics in Julia?
I'm sure that number is inflated, but there's still some truth to it
It is possible people mistook "professional experience" for "experience", but that still takes the data into question.
For more explanation: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io/editions/012
(Blind is a site where devs mainly discuss salaries)
How can you honestly be “best of the best” but be dumb enough to ignore remote work. Something you almost actively have to be doing these days and which, for this hypothetical person, has an insane payoff.
This person is supposedly both super smart but at the same time can’t even see the fruit that’s so low-hanging that it’s literally smacking him in the face.
But yeah, probably safe to assume USD, just playing devils advocate I guess.
Even so, on US-based platforms, like reddit or HN, USD is usually used as a "convertion unit" rather than a implication of location, I've found.
Rather than do things by hand like many MBA’s, I wrote some scripts to make it easy to create lots of Excel files (can’t remember if I used a DB, I don’t think so).
Client wanted to keep me on during the year, and my employer never had that come up and didn’t know what to do. So client offered me $100/hr and said I could use a different one-guy firm as my employer to avoid new vendor set up.
They offered me $100/hr. Being an MBA student I figured I was being undervalued (even at 2.5X, as I was doing both engineering and MBA BS). My manager very firmly but nicely said $100 was an excellent rate. I agreed and did 10-15 hours a week, mostly training 2 employees at the consultancy how to do what I did and move away from my non-standard scripts.
Sometimes you’re offered the right rate upfront!
The lawyer looks at it and says, "Wow, I don't even charge that much per hour and I'm a lawyer"
The electrician says, "Tell me about it. I didn't charge that much when I was a lawyer either"
I found thumbtack to be pretty good for small jobs.
They're probably also being ghosted by their prospects and don't want to waste the drive time.
Small ones like leaky pipe or drywall, when the owner (or sole proprietor) is the laborer, they just come out and do on first visit.
1. billed hours in the trades don't include travel to or from the worksite; if the plumber is 30 minutes from you and the job takes an hour, they're already down to $75/hr.
2. software contracting can be done from anywhere. You can live in rural Kentucky and charge a high rate. But plumbers and electricians in rural Kentucky probably aren't charging $150/hr for house calls.
Where in Europe do tile guys make more than that? (I’m assuming that Java rates have some global or at least EU stickiness)
If it’s well built, they’ll be less odourful than a standard toilet/bathroom by drawing air away from where it’s the worst.
Some years I was 105% billable but those are brutal years and I'm sure my life will be shorter for it.
I was once told that it's unwise to expect to bill more than 50% of the time I spend, so I've been sticking close to $target_income / 1000 for the last few years. The actual ratio of billable to unbillable hours probably depends a lot on what kind of contracts you get and what type of work you do.
1) Contracting for the same company all the time (common with people outside the US contracting 40 hrs/week with a US company). These hourly rates will be much lower
2) Contracting for many different companies. These hourly rates are much higher because you need to budget for idle time, searching for your next contract, etc.
Until very recently Amazon's cash comp was capped at $160k. Startups lean very heavily on perks and paper stock that is worth nothing 95% of the time. Wider industry (banks, mom/pop shops, design firms, etc) will top out at high 100k/low 200k and usually don't have bonuses more than 3-5% of salary and almost never offer stock.
Is there any kind of "outlier" there with like... it's good for a senior developer but not a principal/architect level developer?
I'm just curious why the poll on this post has people saying they are making $150-$300/hr... Are they "lying" and it isn't steady 40 hour a week pay?
I don't think anybody is lying but if your first reaction is to compare consulting/contracting engagements with W2 FTE salaries you're just in for a bad time. They're just too different. $300/hr does not immediately correlate to $600k/yr (in fact it almost never does).
You’ll need to worry about finding new clients at most twice a year, and can easily find gigs through recruiters or agencies if you don’t wanna do your own marketing
Granted it doesn’t pay as well - low risk low reward
I subcontracted for about 6mos with a late stage startup at closer to the 100/hr rate, then negotiated up to closer to 150 for the next 6
I wasn’t doing anything special, literally just another dev on a given team just without benefits and without having to attend company events or having a boss
And this was my first ever contracting engagement too (was all fulltime before that)
e.g. if you charge exactly $100, rather pick $100-$150 and NOT $70-$100.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcsaHx997nt...
Then they are surprised when they find themselves desperately needing the skill set once the business has decided to do a big salesforce thing and not having anyone on hand who a) can do apex / knows salesforce or b) is willing to do it.
So they often turn to salesforce speciality agencies and pay through the nose.
To answer your question - I’ve seen salesforce agencies bill their developers and designers at a blended rate of $170-$200 for $1M+ projects for onshore (US) talent. I suspect if you are a decent software engineer who knows salesforce well you can probably find clients willing to pay higher rates.
In my experience on the client side of a contracting relationship, that doesn't seem to give the agencies pause at all...
(As a sometimes consultant, though, I'd never bid on a project I couldn't confidently do.)
Client wants us to do what? Oh, I found some tutorials online and there's a lot of StackOverflow posts on the topic. Also, Jim says he did something kinda like that about 5 years ago and thinks he still remembers some of it. Let's SWAG it at $200k estimate for T&M and see if they bite.
In the 5 years I worked at an engineering services (embedded systems) company, I remember exactly ONE project we didn't bid on and that's because I kept saying over and over that we'd lose our shirt on it if we even tried.
If independent, go to Trailhead.com setup an account and start getting some badges (there's a lot for Apex)/ developer certifications (Platform Dev I is a good one). They're kind of a pain, but relatively straightforward and are a good, in ecosystem, way to show prospects you know what Salesforce is.
If you want to work for a firm and have development experience, find a Salesforce consulting firm you like, and see if they'll hire developers who don't know Salesforce. Many will since Salesforce devs can be hard to find.
Working on Salesforce can get a bit wonky at times (like any platform), but the primary back language (Apex) is a Java derivative and will be vary familiar to anyone with Java or C# experience. Front end dev work uses web components which are similar to react. Overall I like it since the platform takes care of a lot of boilerplate and lets me focus on solving the actual business problems. My email is in my profile if anyone wants to reach out and talk about it more.
It's not hard, but it requires an incredible amount of overhead to first understand various different salesforce specific concepts and then understand the various different broken workflows your company has adopted using those concepts.
I was interviewing for a position several years ago. They had zero software people at the time (the last guy quit) and one of the hardware engineers in frustration told me they were contracting some company (2 guys in barn) for like $50k a month. Since I would be replacing them I aimed high, but still well below them. Company didn't even question my salary. If I'm not mistaken they gave me "manager" title simply to put my pay in the right bracket, but that also meant my bonus was higher than most the other engineers.
Know what a company is willing to pay for work, contract or not.
We have had a couple contractors bill us on the higher side like you but in their case, I knew they were worth it. Even though it was a lot of money for us, we saw it as a "will they bring that much value and more?" I knew that they wouldn't just code, they would meaningfully move the company's foundational technology forward, mentor the team, etc.
And they did exactly that. If we did have revenue pressure, they'd be the first ones whose hours we'd cut down (but they're so talented they'd find more work in a few hours). But it wasn't hard to justify getting them on board.
I had one devops firm quote me $250/hr but quite honestly, I haven't worked with them yet. So it was a very easy no (it was more likely they would've put a random person worth 1/3 of that on our project). But for the right person (someone who performs at a very high level), for the right period of time (these folks get a lot done quickly), even that rate is palatable to companies.
I took that into account. I made between 100k and 200k per year vs the other guys 600k for the same work, which I arguably did better since it was my specialty. The company really was being taken for a ride by the contractors (if what I was told was true).
One contracting company had the audacity to fly in two carloads of “experts” before the system was even set up. They lingered and deflected even the most basic questions about the product.
They just come in and get shit done
It does mean that now the majority of my work is the work for those exhausting clients that pay very well. Not great for my work/life balance, great for my bank account.
One thing I recommend to folks: have a high base rate and then discount for things you really want to work on. People really like discounts, and the high nominal rate establishes you as important/worthy. It's also a good way to work toward increasing existing clients. If you tell them, "My base rate is now X, but as established clients I'll give you the old rate for one more project," that lets them feel special and gives them time to adjust.
What I've done in the past however for projects I believed in is to give a steep discount in exchange for revenue share. That works a lot better for early stage startups and has been hit and miss but I did get one good success out of this.
A full week of stuff you don't want to be doing is exhausting, but a couple of days of it in return for a four or five day weekend can feel very different.
I'm not going to actually retire but I've always wanted to do a phd and there's not much money there to be made so with a kid, I'd rather have enough to no longer worry :)
If you make $100K, charge $100/hr - which if fully booked is like $200K if you did it full time. That accounts for your overhead, your pipeline not always being full, etc.
Separately, the value of a contractor is different than the value of an employee, so why should the prices be equivalent (even taking overhead into account). As a contractor, you're not only help the client with a project but you're also saving them the time, effort, and risk of bringing someone in full-time... Why not charge for that?
That's a separate question, and personally I prefer double as a rule of thumb (I've read some studies to support that number) - but 20% is outright wrong. You'd pay 20% for office space rent alone. Employer portion of payroll taxes are 7.65% and health insurance in the group markets is $600/mth. Then add in legal, hardware, software, servers, HR tools, accountants - it adds up fast.
However my point was that it accounts not just for your overhead (remember you have significantly worse economy of scale at 1) but also, and this is critical, your pipeline not always being full. As a contractor you won't always have a job, and you should account for that in your estimation.
> As a contractor, you're not only help the client with a project but you're also saving them the time, effort, and risk of bringing someone in full-time... Why not charge for that?
You are, about double.
Like I said, $100K/yr -> $100/hr is $208K/yr.
This isn't a perfect system, but it's a good rule of thumb.
[1] https://www.iofficecorp.com/blog/space-management-empty-desk
After the company was more up and running, I switched to a flat $1,000 per day to avoid being asked to do too many "small" tasks.
Now moved to and working in Europe as a TAC engineer for $18.5/h.
I think this highlights an issue with this poll: the potentially huge disparity in cost of living.
Where I live (Western Canada) this is below our minimum wage mandated by law. But renting a single bedroom apartment is also nearing $2000/month.
Renting single bedroom apartment must be something around $500 here for good apartments and down to $200 if you're not very picky (we don't really use concept of bedroom, we use total number of rooms excluding kitchen, and one-room apartments probably are most popular for renting).
But if you setup an offshore company in another country (e.g. Seychelles) you pay a small yearly fee (e.g. 1500 EUR) and would be able to keep all of your income, provided you don't send the money to Thailand in the same year that you've earned it (so you need about a year in savings to live on). In such situations I think it's not too much work involved.
Regulations for digital nomads might improve soon in Thailand I believe, so working legally as a single person company in Thailand could become easier hopefully.
I remember I used to only bill for like 70% of hours I worked because I felt bad if there was some task that I couldn't implement right away or a bug I had to figure out.
These days my rate is about $60/h working for a US company with 9 years of experience.
We connected and now we both work for an Aussie company as freelancers (me doing mobile). Now he has a much more reasonable rate at around 40 USD which is quite ok in Malaysia (where he moved to).
As a result I decided to base my rates on what's the average for my particular position in my country. This way I feel at least a bit less guilty.
It's a good salary here, though I think some are making more by working directly with clients abroad, but it's difficult to bring your money to the country.
But below that contracting beats everything else, assuming you can get a fullish pipeline