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Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

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Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#11

Post by acangiano »

mattmanser wrote: post #8
acangiano wrote: post #5

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada . I don't see how you added anything to the conversation. Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs. For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a s…

No reason to be patronizing or get personal, Matt. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to those who earn even a third of that rate.

My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context.

- Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. Unusual in fact.

- Employee working 40 hours a week: very good rate.

- Contractor assigned to several projects throughout the year, with different companies, but essentially full-time for weeks at end: still good rate.

- Your typical consultant who has to promote themselves to get new clients, go on client's site (possibly with travel involved), etc, will normally book far less than 40 hours a week, even if they end up working 40+ hours to run their consulting business. In such a case £37.50 often ends up being peanuts. Common rates I see around here are about $100-150/hr for expert developers, exactly because of all the overhead of consulting.

That's why in my, admittedly very short, initial message I said "consultant" and not the generic term freelancer or contractor. I understand that you may have an issue with the term I used and the distinction from freelancer, but that's how I meant it.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#12

Post by ticks »

kingofspain wrote: post #9
acangiano wrote: post #5

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

In my experience it depends on the work. For consulting jobs where you go sit in a bank or whatever and bash out code onsite all day, £300 is low. But for freelance work, remote work, it's much harder to find anyone who will pay £300, let alone higher. It's not impossible but there's much more of a race to the bottom in the latter jobs than there is in the former.

Yep. It depends on the type of work, type of experience and type of clients. You might strike it lucky with a small client, but it's more than likely going to be low. For new media agencies, they will have years of experience with freelancers, so will push the price down to fit their budget. For big business and public sector, they aren't that bothered, plus you normally need very specialist (and expensive) training to do their work.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#13

Post by ticks »

davedx wrote: post #2

My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

Perhaps the rates are higher in the Netherlands because taxes are much higher compared to the UK. Even for people who work full time and benefit from the expat discount, it's still quite a bit more. So there's a higher cost of living.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#14

Post by lazy_b »

Wow. I guess dev in the us is a lot more expensive. I will say that a mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time, and I feel some obligation to charge more than that, with my fancy high school diploma and noticeable absence of gang tattoos, felonies, etc.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#15

Post by charlesdm »

ticks wrote: post #13
davedx wrote: post #2

My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

Perhaps the rates are higher in the Netherlands because taxes are much higher compared to the UK. Even for people who work full time and benefit from the expat discount, it's still quite a bit more. So there's a higher cost of living.

I'd say this is not the case. For example, taxes in Belgium are higher than the UK and average rates are lower than the UK.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#16

Post by mattmanser »

acangiano wrote: post #11
mattmanser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada . I don't see how you added anything to the conversation. Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs. For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a s…

No reason to be patronizing or get personal, Matt. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to those who earn even a third of that rate. My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context. - Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. U…

I didn't mean it personally either, it's more that I felt you didn't add anything to the conversation and seemingly ridiculed other people's rates.

My point was you're not talking about the UK, you're working for BIG CORP that hires out consultants in a scenario I outlined above, so why start declaring people's rate peanuts?

For the record I'm actually a UK Freelancer and these rates are exactly what I see.

For some reason the UK pays less than the US for programmers. I don't know if it's because we've got more or it's something cultural, but that's the way it seems to be.

EDIT: These are also similar to the rates I know others in the East Midlands region charge too. One peculiar example is a small embedded systems company I know of about 6 people that charges all their staff out at £250 p/d. The owner claims that's the market rate, but that seems low to me for fairly specialised work.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#17

Post by acangiano »

mattmanser wrote: post #16
acangiano wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No reason to be patronizing or get personal, Matt. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to those who earn even a third of that rate. My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context. - Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. U…

I didn't mean it personally either, it's more that I felt you didn't add anything to the conversation and seemingly ridiculed other people's rates. My point was you're not talking about the UK, you're working for BIG CORP that hires out consultants in a scenario I outlined above, so why start declaring people's rate peanuts? For the record I'm actually a UK Freelancer and these rates are exactly what I see. For some…

Just to clarify: I have lived in GB before, and I wasn't expressing my opinion based on my experience with IBM. I do not work as a consultant in IBM, nor do I know particularly well how they do business (or their rates) in that department.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#18

Post by thibaut_barrere »

kingofspain wrote: post #9
acangiano wrote: post #5

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

In my experience it depends on the work. For consulting jobs where you go sit in a bank or whatever and bash out code onsite all day, £300 is low. But for freelance work, remote work, it's much harder to find anyone who will pay £300, let alone higher. It's not impossible but there's much more of a race to the bottom in the latter jobs than there is in the former.

To give a data point: I'm doing only remote work (except 12 days on site this year) and I'm really, really north £300 (my usual daily rate is 900€).

(see http://www.logeek.fr/ if you're curious about the kind of work I do)

My opinion is that it's not a matter of money, but rather a matter of finding companies that work remotely and do it well.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#19

Post by Unosolo »

mattmanser wrote: post #8
acangiano wrote: post #5

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada . I don't see how you added anything to the conversation. Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs. For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a s…

Quoting http://stackoverflow.com/a/746854/22088:

Contractor is a temporary resource brought in from outside of organisation. Contractors' job is done when they finish delivering products or services specified in their contract.

Consultant is a specific kind of contractor. Their primary job is not just scaling up the existing team, but delivery of knowledge transfer. Consultants invest time into learning a specific topic or coming up with a new way of doing things, then they come to an organisation and transfer that knowledge to the locals, so that the team can carry on doing the job without need for the consultant to stay with the organisation.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#20

Post by tijs »

davedx wrote: post #2

My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

Are UK rates really that much lower than Dutch (NL) rates? In my experience (both as a freelancer and in hiring freelancers) is that in all areas of web development and design hourly rates start at €40 for wordpress stuff (charging less would be considered amateur range) up to €120 for really specific skills with most developers and designers charging around €60-€80.

Even with these rates it's pretty damn hard to find decent Python/PHP/Ruby or front-end devs. Designers (and Flash devs) are a bit easier to find as we are not lacking design/art schools.

Could it be there are simply more technically schooled people in the UK driving down prices?

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