Ask HN: What is your daily rate?
I did not find anything against this in the guidelines, but if there is something wrong with the submission then apologies in advance. I believe that services companies and recruiters make a living of hiding this information from the developer community, and often take a 20-25% cut just for sending an email with a CV, a second email to schedule an interview and sending a contract for signature over the post. This is a proposal for replies:
Top level entry: "My current daily rate is RATE / hour or day, I work in COUNTRY"
Second line : "I work as a LANGUAGE Developer/Architect, I have X years of experience and my main skills are ..."
Extra details of whether is a remote position would be interesting as well. For replies to top level entries, comments of whether the person is being lowballed or not would help, even if you prefer not to give your rate yourself.
109 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI work as a Developer/Architect in whatever language, I have 30 years of experience and my main skills are drivers, OS development, embedded and networks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350
... and here's my explanation from that thread, on why it's a very bad idea to rely on the responses you'll get when you ask the question here:
This would probably work better as a poll or an offsite, anonymous survey. I don't think you'll get very accurate results from limiting yourself to the small fraction of developers who:
I'd personally be happy to tick a box, but I'm not going to quote my rate here.EDIT: Here's a recent poll, with numbers severely skewed because the author initially capped it at $200k/year, thus losing granularity from the roughly 50% of early responders who were earning north of that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725
But it's true I wouldn't advise people disclosing their rate if their are not anonymous.
Take a quick look through the "Top Commenters" list here, and you'll notice that nearly all of them use either their own name or a strong pseudonym tied to their real identity. Several of those guys are billing out at the kind of nice-to-have rates that a young dev with any sense aught to make his mission to replicate.
The guys responding below with silly pseudonyms, quoting two digit hourly bill rates, don't tell anybody anything interesting. Worse, they might just convince some poor soul that "you know, maybe $65/hour isn't so bad after all", and invite him into a lifetime of being underpaid when the reality is that he could 5X-10X that if he wanted to.
The name of the site is Hacker News, so I would expect a lot of people here to be security aware and in general use pseudonyms anyway.
But in my view there is no apparent co-relation between top commenters or rates. Most HN posters are likely anonymous independently of their rates, as in most programming forums.
I didn't mean to pick you two out as particularly high earners among the top HN users, FTR. You're just the two username/real name pairs I can come up with off the top of my head.
http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28term%29#Hacker_defini...
I'm interested in making 5X-10X of what I currently am. What should I do?
Try reading Breaking The Time Barrier from Freshbooks (free PDF): https://breakingthetimebarrier.freshbooks.com/
I've also heard good things about Brennan Dunn's "Double Your Freelancing Rate", though I've not yet read it myself and am generally reluctant to recommend 'courses': http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/
I work with python/flask/postgresql/mongodb and have 2 years of experience in this stack.
I work as a Java junior developer, I'm an entrant in the industry, started working in february. My main skills are Hibernate, SOAP web services, Wicket, Nvidia CUDA, and a little hint of C++.
I work as a "Student" Developer, I have programmed for 2 years My main skills are php and java. using linux platform for everything. EDIT: I'm charged about 40% of all my earnings in tax
C#/.NET Developer, 0.5 years of experience, C#, ASP.NET MVC, Front-end web development
I know its fashionable to bash recruiters - and man do a bunch of them deserve it. But for contractors/freelancers - if you don't like selling then service companies/recruiters are your friend. Quit thinking of them as useless and start thinking about them as a sales channel who do something for you that you don't like. The key is to find the smart operators - who want to build a long term relationship (want to meet face to face etc etc) and don't talk crap. But thats about you taking the time to vet. Although I seldom need to employ because I'm doing a lot of my own sales, its a good backup and this works well in my market place (and I know of others in other markets who follow similar strategies), your mileage may vary.
That's not precisely how it works, but companies accept there's a recruiter fee in the cost of a permanent hire, but will have a salary range they can offer, usually set as a policy by HR to stop wage inflation. Also the recruiter fee then is seen as a one-off cost.
For contract wages, companies tend to have an all-in price they're willing to pay, which they'd happily pay the contractor directly. At that point, the recruiter is usually taking the difference between that and what they pay the contractor. In most contract positions (in the UK) via recruiters, invoicing is done via the recruiter.
The recruitment agency gets money, because they've taken the time to build a relationship/do sales stuff/navigate a procurement department/convincing someone they can solve the clients problem (I need more resource!).
In the age of the internet, if a company needs some resources then the hiring manager could place the job description directly in some website instead of asking a recruiter to do it for him.
He can filter out CVs much more effectively by keywords using some GUI rather asking a recruiter to ask for the keywords on the phone.
He sends a mail/phones the candidate for an interview, how hard could it be? He needs to interview the candidate anyway.
I don't see how a few hours of administrative work for a hiring manager could justify the fortune that the procurement department will spend with the margin payed to the intermediary.
But I hope my hour rate will increase soon :)
http://www.smh.com.au/national/minimum-wage-up-3-per-cent-ri...
The assumption you are probably making is that $9 an hour is too low. That's right if you are in Australia, but is that low for Indonesia?
I worked in a company where they paid their head of mobile $13/hour and he was managing 3 Android devs and 3 iOS devs, each being paid between $6 and $9/hour.
One of the people I worked with directly as a marketing content writer was making $3/hour.
I work as a Full Stack .Net Developer/Architect for web applications, I have 16+ years of experience, with main skills in C#, MVC, jQuery, EntityFramework, SQL, Agile.
Am not an exceptional developer, but I have a good working relationship with my clients to help deliver on their projects. I don't actively network (that I'm aware of) but seem to get work through personal referrals, so must be doing something right.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say you've been a developer and architect for 16 years, with 12 years experience in .NET?
4 years rails XP. Help maintain a very big legacy codebase and have built a rails backend that served an education site that got thousands of concurrent visitors at peak.
Know enough devops to provision a secure server, and do deployments via capistrano or ansible.
Don't set my salary as some sort of goal. Lawyers with 1/5th of my experience or talent go for 2-5x easily. Hell, I should go get a JD.
Note that this is per equity partner. Many of the largest firms are increasingly choosing to award "partner" status without an equity share as they grow larger, and a non-equity partner will already earn much less.
Most of the top firms will pay a maximum of about $300k/year to 4 year PQE (post qualification experience) in the UK, with UK offices of leading US firms at the top. There may be exceptions for people that make themselves really noticed and manage to land big bonuses. That's generally 6 year after leaving university because of the UK system of training contracts. 2 year PQE's in UK Magic Circle firms can earn about $100k/year.
Some smaller boutique firms in niches may pay substantially more, but they will also generally not take trainees and instead hire away top talents from the leading firms.
To get those kind of salaries you mention by year 4, the answer would be you'd need to bring in big enough clients that your firm is worried you'll walk.
1) most lawyers do not work in front-facing roles in law firms. They are in house counsel, or consultants, or work in finance or employment or for charities or many other fields where salaries are low.
2) the hourly rates they see are 2-3 times higher than the lawyers salary on the low end. In big law firms the multiple is much higher, because there's a massive amount of support staff (e.g. my ex practised at a law firm big enough to have a 24/7 team to print documents, 24/7 IT support helpdesk for staff etc.), and because that's how the partners make their profit.
3) there's a small core of really, really expensive lawfirms that gets all the headlines. E.g. in the UK we have the "Magic Circle" lawfirms (the five largest UK firms - of which 4 are in the top 10 largest lawfirms worldwide - the rest of the top ten are US firms), then the "Silver Circle", and then the rest. The Magic Circle lawfirms have training contracts that pay in the GBP 40k+ range, and 1 year post-qualification lawyers can earn 60k-100k (GBP). Salaries then tend to go up by huge steps every 6-12 months, so up to several hundred k GBP for senior associates, and a couple of million for partners in some of these firms. Far more for equity partners in some niche firms. Now consider the mean salary again, and consider how much these firms pull it up...
4) many of the "best" paying firms works people to the bone, and so absolute salaries are high, but hourly rates are not. My ex. qualified at one of the Magic Circle firms, and though she made more than twice the UK average salary, two years out of university, she worked so many hours that her hourly rate was less than what her secretary was paid (she's since shifted to a non-practising role in the same firm for exactly this reason; coming home at 3am was not enough to make the money worth it). She was billed out at 200 GBP per hour, but her salary was fixed, so of course it was in the firms interest to work people as hard as possible. And everyone in these firms are asked if they will "voluntarily" sign away the EU Working Time Directive restrictions (UK has an exception from the Working Time Directive that allows UK employers to do this; in theory it is illegal to punish staff for not signing a waiver; then there's practice). She could easily earn in her yearly salary for the firm in 5 weeks of billing.
i work as an (mainly php)associate software engineer, in the netherlands, have a half year of experience. my main skills are LAMP.
I am interested in a remote positions, as well as local (but i am particular about which time of day I work).
Freelance rates i've seen in the Netherlands usually range somewhere from €50 on the lower end to €120 on the higher end.
PHP Developer and not even a top notch one, i'm solid, but no rockstar, i am however full stack and I have other generic business skills. I also have an excellent portfolio with some very large names on them as well as almost 10 years experience doing this.
You dont need to be an amazing developer to be successful, i'd actually say theres actually more value in getting complimentary skills rather than the last 10% developer skill which is what takes the longest to achieve anyway.
I'm in the midlands and lucky to get £350 and have been pretty lucky to work with some huge brand names to make my portfolio shine, but clearly this isn't enough!
Even with years of ZF experience I still seem to struggle to find good interesting contracts in the region.