71–80 of 110 posts
My current daily rate is $9/hour, I work in Indonesia I work as iOS Developer, I have 8 years of experience in IT and only 1 year in iOS Dev. But I hope my hour rate will increase soon :)
http://www.smh.com.au/national/minimum-wage-up-3-per-cent-ri...
$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 o…
I think you're sorely mistaken about lawyer salary.
1) most lawyers do not work in front-facing roles in law firms. They are in house counsel, or consultants, or work in finance or employment or for charities or many other fields where salaries are low.
2) the hourly rates they see are 2-3 times higher than the lawyers salary on the low end. In big law firms the multiple is much higher, because there's a massive amount of support staff (e.g. my ex practised at a law firm big enough to have a 24/7 team to print documents, 24/7 IT support helpdesk for staff etc.), and because that's how the partners make their profit.
3) there's a small core of really, really expensive lawfirms that gets all the headlines. E.g. in the UK we have the "Magic Circle" lawfirms (the five largest UK firms - of which 4 are in the top 10 largest lawfirms worldwide - the rest of the top ten are US firms), then the "Silver Circle", and then the rest. The Magic Circle lawfirms have training contracts that pay in the GBP 40k+ range, and 1 year post-qualification lawyers can earn 60k-100k (GBP). Salaries then tend to go up by huge steps every 6-12 months, so up to several hundred k GBP for senior associates, and a couple of million for partners in some of these firms. Far more for equity partners in some niche firms. Now consider the mean salary again, and consider how much these firms pull it up...
4) many of the "best" paying firms works people to the bone, and so absolute salaries are high, but hourly rates are not. My ex. qualified at one of the Magic Circle firms, and though she made more than twice the UK average salary, two years out of university, she worked so many hours that her hourly rate was less than what her secretary was paid (she's since shifted to a non-practising role in the same firm for exactly this reason; coming home at 3am was not enough to make the money worth it). She was billed out at 200 GBP per hour, but her salary was fixed, so of course it was in the firms interest to work people as hard as possible. And everyone in these firms are asked if they will "voluntarily" sign away the EU Working Time Directive restrictions (UK has an exception from the Working Time Directive that allows UK employers to do this; in theory it is illegal to punish staff for not signing a waiver; then there's practice). She could easily earn in her yearly salary for the firm in 5 weeks of billing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe the argument is that most top commenters (which I suspect correlates quite well with high rates) are not pseudonymous, and thus unlikely to respond. See: patio11, tptacek, etc.
But in my view there is no apparent co-relation between top commenters or rates. Most HN posters are likely anonymous independently of their rates, as in most programming forums.
I'm primarily a C# developer, but I have experience in C++, Java, SQL, and a little bit of webdev(HTML/JS). I've worked on a few mobile apps in iOS and Android(the latter with Xamarin). I'm been programming for about 15 years, and I'll be coming up on 10 years of those which have been for professional companies.
I swear, reading some of these responses makes me feel very underpaid.
$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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, mistaken. 3yrs experience at $1000/hr? Not to mention the rates you see are usually firm rates not net to an individual so you have to take out other costs.
But what part of the curve are you looking at? You really think that top 0.01% of lawyers are making less than $900k/year? How good do you have to be at year 4 to hit that kind of target?
Note that this is per equity partner. Many of the largest firms are increasingly choosing to award "partner" status without an equity share as they grow larger, and a non-equity partner will already earn much less.
Most of the top firms will pay a maximum of about $300k/year to 4 year PQE (post qualification experience) in the UK, with UK offices of leading US firms at the top. There may be exceptions for people that make themselves really noticed and manage to land big bonuses. That's generally 6 year after leaving university because of the UK system of training contracts. 2 year PQE's in UK Magic Circle firms can earn about $100k/year.
Some smaller boutique firms in niches may pay substantially more, but they will also generally not take trainees and instead hire away top talents from the leading firms.
To get those kind of salaries you mention by year 4, the answer would be you'd need to bring in big enough clients that your firm is worried you'll walk.
$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 o…
I do devops, development and architecture work, in Ruby, PHP, C++ and a variety of other languages, and have about 20 years of commercial experience.
Let me give a quick rundown of rates I've heard for contract developers in London. Please add comments if you feel this doesn't reflect the truth or you have additions to make. Do note I'm specifically referring to contract developers in London . Highest rates are working in finance. For specialised skills one can get around £1000 per day. £700 is more typical. This is in the context of Scala and "big data" developer…
Fully agree with your "go-to person" comment.
If you're not well known in a niche, at least network so you're well known to a reasonable group of people with hiring/contracting budgets. Even if you're not seen as a leading expert in your field, being consider a high quality person in your field that your contacts know and trust will deliver also adds quite a bit to what you can bill.
I know guys that'll happily pay twice the amount to someone they know well than to some random developer that they have to take a chance on. Especially for short term contracts. "Losing" a month on a 3 month contract to an unknown quantity, for example, will very easily cause any savings to evaporate.
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…