41–50 of 328 posts
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
time to quit my fang job l m a o
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
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!
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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.…