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Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#31

Post by peteretep »

majc2 wrote: post #26

I don't think your hypothesis is correct. There are sites out there that already aggregate the permanent and contract markets. (i.e. itjobswatch.co.uk) - I'm sure others exist for other territories. 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 us…

Generally in the UK a recruiter's fee comes from the candidate if it's a contract role, and from the employer if it's a permanent role.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#32

Post by instakill »

$80 - $150 per hour (depending on the project) capped at 10 hours per week. Live in a GMT +2 area.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#33

Post by justacoward90 »

$1600/day, 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, remote (NO TRAVEL), USA. I write software for startups that have raised in the $5-20M range with at least $1M/year revenue. My software is mostly written in C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. I began programming more than 15 years ago, although I only "officially" entered the industry during 2010.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#34

Post by timwaagh »

my current employer gives me 11 EUR/hr. However i charge 15 EUR/hr for smaller freelance jobs.

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).

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#35

Post by TamDenholm »

£400 + VAT, UK.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#36

Post by huskyr »

timwaagh wrote: post #34

my current employer gives me 11 EUR/hr. However i charge 15 EUR/hr for smaller freelance jobs. 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).

Even with only six months of experience, €15 is really low for a freelance rate in the Netherlands. Remember that you usually need to reserve about half of your rate for taxes, rent, investments, etcetera, so you're actually getting paid less for freelance jobs than with your regular job.

Freelance rates i've seen in the Netherlands usually range somewhere from €50 on the lower end to €120 on the higher end.

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#38

Post by surreal »

xpto123 wrote: post #19
jasonkester wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That alone will skew the results downward. 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…

Just to understand, why do you believe using an anonymous handle skews the results downward? Most persons use anonymous handles online, except on places like facebook its a generalized practice. I personally don't see the correlation between those two things. 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.

"Hacker" meaning a good programmer, not hacker as in someone who maliciously gains access to systems.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28term%29#Hacker_defini...

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#39

Post by nrzuk »

TamDenholm wrote: post #35

£400 + VAT, UK. 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…

Nice, do you mind sharing which region you work in?

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is your daily rate?

#40

Post by FLUX-YOU »

instakill wrote: post #30
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I'm interested in making 5X-10X of what I currently am. What should I do?

Charge more.

How do I know I'm worth what I'm charging?
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