Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#181

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

dmje wrote: post #166

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 r…

>I charge £500 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.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#182

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #115

aantix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 o…

>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.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#183

Post by eatYourFood » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

hnthrow29475792 wrote: post #165

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 maki…

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?

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#184

Post by orangepurple » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

dmje wrote: post #166

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 r…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#185

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

rtlfe wrote: post #48

joshmanders wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#186

Post by zer0tonin » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #181

dmje wrote: post #166

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 r…

>I charge £500 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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#187

Post by trhoad » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

dmje wrote: post #166

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 r…

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it's easy to say money isn't everything when you're already earning £120k/$140k pa.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#188

Post by dmje » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

orangepurple wrote: post #184

dmje wrote: post #166

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 r…

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.

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 :-)

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#189

Post by SavageBeast » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

joshmanders wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

#190

Post by throwaway74829 » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

tyurok wrote: post #66

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.

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.