My salary as a full-stack developer • Hacker News Board

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#111

Post by misterremote » Thu, May 13, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

transparency21 wrote: post #71

misterremote wrote: post #2

Is my salary fine or should I ask more? I feel like I should ask more. Would be helpful to hear about your salary and hourly price?

8 years of experience, doing mostly frontend dev, some UX design, and occasionally some full-stack. Rule of thumb: Whatever you were making as a full-time employee, divide your annual salary by 2,000 to get your hourly rate, then multiply by 2-3x to cover your overhead costs (rent, equipment, health insurance), as well as client uncertainty (won't pay (on time), time between projects, etc.). Contracting for public te…

Thanks for a detailed comment. I asked them for more money, here's the result:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27140093

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#112

Post by misterremote » Thu, May 13, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

RobRivera wrote: post #22

>I hadn't really thought about my price fascinating

Why fascinating? :) My reason for not thinking about my hourly price was that I had a very flex schedule. I knew that I got paid very little for my experience, but I finished my tasks really quickly and had a lot of free time.

But when I needed to log my hours, yes – this got me thinking about my hourly price. Because now I just don't do a flat $6k invoice every month, but have to present the hours...

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#113

Post by misterremote » Thu, May 13, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #46

If you are paid hourly and it is that low why on earth would you want to be a contractor?

I agree. I don't :D I had a call with the startup today and here's the result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27140093

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#114

Post by misterremote » Thu, May 13, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

jowdones wrote: post #50

I think it's pathetic to moan about your salary in some Hacker News plea for sympathy. It's a free market, there's a million job ads, recruiters and what else. If you are worth $500k/year, you'll get $500k/year. If you can't take $500k/year either coze you're incapable of putting up with the job requirements or you're just incompetent in general, that's entirely on you. You're not starving. Just penible.

Yeah, I get how this can sound like a pathetic moan about my salary. But I was really looking for some comments and data about dev salaries from the HN community.

And it was super helpful, really. After reading the comments, I had a call with the startup this morning and here's the result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27140093

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#115

Post by ahD5zae7 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 9:46 AM UTC

I'll go on a tangent to most of the comments I read here. In my opinion it's mostly based on your location. Some would say it shouldn't and I tend to agree, unfortunately it usually is. In the US your rates are (no offence) laughable, and not even taking SV rates into account. For some parts of Europe they would be far too low (e.g. Scandinavia). For some parts of Europe (eastern mostly, e.g. Poland where I work) they would be okay-ish, that's about what I get (senior-ish position) but in a stable situation, not as a contractor. In Belarus or Ukraine I believe this might be quite good money (e.g. Belarus in 2019 I found around $1500 to be the average pay in this industry, as far as I could google this). tl;dr: it depends.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#116

Post by misterremote » Thu, May 13, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

ahD5zae7 wrote: post #115

I'll go on a tangent to most of the comments I read here. In my opinion it's mostly based on your location. Some would say it shouldn't and I tend to agree, unfortunately it usually is. In the US your rates are (no offence) laughable, and not even taking SV rates into account. For some parts of Europe they would be far too low (e.g. Scandinavia). For some parts of Europe (eastern mostly, e.g. Poland where I work) the…

Nice that you brought up the location. I'm in Europe.

There are two sides of me when I think about the salary and location:

1) you write code and produce stuff and it doesn't matter where you live. you can live anywhere you want, just do the job and get paid. from that POV it seems weird to think that one person gets a lot more money than the other for the same output, the same work

2) another POV in me is that your costs are different depending on where you live. so while the salary's number on paper can be the same for people working from different countries, the "worth" of the money is different.

But mostly I tend to agree with POV number 1 I think.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#117

Post by darkhorse22 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

Yea well my penis is eleven inches.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#118

Post by nicolas_t » Thu, May 13, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

When I first started I charged $40/hour and met a developer who was working for a new client who told me I was crazy, that I was underpaying myself and that by charging too little I was giving reasons to clients not to take me seriously.

I then started charging 100$/hour and I got better results when looking for clients, ended up being more respected by those same clients and was less overworked so happier overall.

Over the last 10 years, I've steadily increased that rate until it's now 300$/hour. I don't charge that all clients, in some cases I worked for a lot less in exchange for equity (which has proven to be a very good idea) but having a high rate allows me to have the flexibility to offer that with some clients.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#119

Post by lowercased » Thu, May 13, 2021, 12:13 PM UTC

wooque wrote: post #77

misterremote wrote: post #2

Is my salary fine or should I ask more? I feel like I should ask more. Would be helpful to hear about your salary and hourly price?

It's fine if you are in Eastern Europe or something like myself, I have ~$5400 monthly salary (don't log hours, so don't know hourly rate, also logging hours is a red flag for me). But if you are in the US that is very low for your experience. Also look into lowering taxes, 50% is super high. I manage to pay low (flat) tax in my country because I registered self-proprietorship/registered entrepreneur company and have…

50% is super high in the US, generally speaking, especially for income in that range. The person may be overpaying in taxes, or is including other stuff in 'taxes', or has an incredibly high local/state tax rate. A single person with no dependents earning $72k/year would, generally speaking, have a federal tax burden of around $8900 - 12%.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#120

Post by JshWright » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

imustbeevil wrote: post #101

lostmsu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to understand how the progressive taxation works. In U.S. you pay 0 tax on first ~20k income, 15% on the next 35k, 22% on next 40k and so on (random numbers). The 22% is what you pay on anything above 55k in this example. But for the first 55k you pay only 20k * 0% + 35k * 15%=5250, e.g. 9.5%

Not sure how you missed the second sentence, or why you would use made up numbers in your response when I provided the brackets. In the U.S., as a single filer, you pay 10% on your first $9,875, 12% from $9,876 to $40,125 and 22% from $40,126 to $85,525. It does end up at 13% of $72K, assuming the $10K standard deduction. Since only the initial percentage was posted, no one would have any way of knowing if it was com…

> no one would have any way of knowing if it was coming from the total calculation

Ah, sorry, I thought the tilde made it clear that "13%" was the approximate result of a calculation.