Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take part in local meetups who are always looking for speakers and apply to CFP.
CFP?
Call for presenters.
Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
301–310 of 328 posts
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes now. Series A is harder to raise but 2M seed rounds are still happening. 1M seems pretty standard now.
2M seed without an MVP would be incredibly difficult right now. Certainly not impossible. But way, way harder than it was 12 months ago
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing. Any oncall type of work? What if things go down at 3am?
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.
Those huge cloud deployments are exactly the ones that do unexpected bs at 3am
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python contractor here - in the current market, 500£/day is low enough that you can still bill the entire year if you’re not too picky as to what kind of work you take - just like the parent post, I have to turn down work constantly. Indeed, the IR35 debacle and general downturn given the current events have put a damper on business, but at 500/day it’s still doable.
How fast are you arranging a new gig at the end of the last one lately? A lot of the negative stories I've been hearing seem to be about gigs only lasting a few months now instead of being 6/12 initially and maybe renewing like before. So then even if there's more work available straight away through your network you probably still end up having to do the interview dance several times per year and maybe losing a few…
My experience wouldn't be representative - my rate is higher and I'm picky about the clients & projects I choose (I prefer quality over quantity and have long-running projects to take up all my downtime anyway).
What I meant to say is that given what's happening in my inbox, if you weren't picky about what work you take on, at the 500 mark you should still be able to fill up pretty much an entire year's worth of work by actually following up on all those emails.
> A lot of the negative stories I've been hearing seem to be about gigs only lasting a few months now instead of being 6/12 initially and maybe renewing like before
Agreed, though in my case I've always preferred short-term gigs so not really a problem in my book. I feel like if you need someone for 12+ months, it looks like an employee might be more appropriate.
> I think they typically do charge rates a bit higher than £500 though so maybe there's just less work available at that level or more competition for each gig.
Correct - I believe that in the current market, you can get a continuous stream of work at 500. Beyond that it gets tougher.
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#305Everyone 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…
It's interesting and positive that the top rated comment in this thread is one in the "money isn't everything vein". Programming has made many people so well-to-do that it resonates with them above all the pricing replies. And that is excellent, and speaks volumes about how effective our profession is at supporting comfortable lifestyles.
But I'd like to say something close to my heart, that unless you've felt what a desperate lack of money does, it's hard to really understand why someone would be obsessed about it above all else. Even long after the problem is gone.
Lack of money creates a visceral, chronic fear of death. It's not like "I'm about to be killed", but it's like a feeling of existential desperation. It makes you feel you're not guaranteed to be alive in the near future. It makes you feel you're "close to the earth". It is horrifying, and if you ever feel it you never forget it. And it transforms you and your thinking, often permanently.
It's just something worth remembering. Being able to worry about money below all else is a luxury that many people will never have the fortune to understand.
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
> 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 fo…
It definitely depends on the client. If the team is crunching to hit a deadline and I'm saying, "Sorry, I'm at my weekly cap, so I'm leaving early today and won't be joining you this weekend; see you on Monday" then I'd be surprised to be invited back for the next project. I certainly wouldn't expect to be given any important work.
But I also feel you on time tracking, so I think a weekly rate is great if the client's culture is such that there's a natural cap and it's a good match for the work.
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#307Everyone 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…
It's interesting and positive that the top rated comment in this thread is one in the "money isn't everything vein". Programming has made many people so well-to-do that it resonates with them above all the pricing replies. And that is excellent, and speaks volumes about how effective our profession is at supporting comfortable lifestyles. But I'd like to say something close to my heart, that unless you've felt what a…
Agreed, especially the anticipation of a rent increase which you can't afford leaving you potentially homeless. Many in so-called affluent economies now live with this daily reality.
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair. Let's be realistic, or even conservative. 90th percentile? (£58k)
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.
Yeah my points above all stand, despite people silently disagreeing.
No issue with those salaries. With contract work you're providing a much need service.
Just don't pretend those salaries are what they are.
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing I do is on-call worthy. I may build the product but I don't run the product after it's built.
Just be clear, $10K/week only for you or for your whole company time (aniftyco.com)?
I would say whole company time, but NiftyCo is no longer just me for the past 25 years and now I have a financial partner. Sooooo just me now, billed under NiftyCo.
Re: Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?
#310I 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.
""your whole business""
How does that work?
Business plan, hiring, locale, factory, ???? , ERP, ?
Or "your website" ?