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Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

devquarterly.com

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#21

Anyone know why they gave a whole section to "Web" and omitted Ruby? Even C and Visual Basic are present.

Because these are agencies. They're often called in to maintain legacy systems, which don't get to use shiny new tech. Hence low or missing numbers for things like Ruby or React, despite their prevalence otherwise.

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#24

Given how wildly the framework usage [1] differs from the long-standing and well known State of JS survey results [2], I'd be fairly wary of anything else they claim. Not saying the results are wrong, probably just different samples, more so that it seems the variance is way too high to get any useful insights. [1] https://devquarterly.com/report/q2_2020/web#developers_worki... [2] https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-en…

The survey in this article claims to have reached about 1000 times more people (though not all JS devs) than the stateofjs survey. I would expect some differences due to selection bias

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#25

Anyone know why they gave a whole section to "Web" and omitted Ruby? Even C and Visual Basic are present.

As another commenter pointed out, their numbers don’t line up well with other broad surveys like State of JS or Stack Overflow, so I would say it reflects a low-quality survey.

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#26
post #21

Anyone know why they gave a whole section to "Web" and omitted Ruby? Even C and Visual Basic are present.

Because these are agencies. They're often called in to maintain legacy systems, which don't get to use shiny new tech. Hence low or missing numbers for things like Ruby or React, despite their prevalence otherwise.

Sadly, that would actually point the other direction. Ruby was red-hot circa 2010, and while it’s still widely used, it’s not the new shiny thing anymore. I would expect to see more “legacy maintenance” Ruby work than brand-new ruby work these days.

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#27

Given how wildly the framework usage [1] differs from the long-standing and well known State of JS survey results [2], I'd be fairly wary of anything else they claim. Not saying the results are wrong, probably just different samples, more so that it seems the variance is way too high to get any useful insights. [1] https://devquarterly.com/report/q2_2020/web#developers_worki... [2] https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-en…

This is a report for agencies. They cover a completely different set of customers and most of the time are called in to maintain. Maintaining leaves a little space to introduce new technologies and processes, which leaves you with older technologies. Also, these companies have no reason to switch to other (newer/shinier) technologies since the software they deliver is tied closely with the chosen language. Switching would mean finding new customers.

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#28

Page layout is not great, got to the end and saw founders pictures so I thought that was the whole article. I'm interested so I reopened to double check and there's more on the left.

Yeah, I would have missed it too, if you hadn't mentioned it. The sidebar is not visible unless the browser is fullscreen. That's fine, but then the button on the bottom that continues to "II. Mobile dev agencies >>" should be above the founder pictures. That way, it'd be clear to those who the sidebar is not presented to that the content continues. If that's not appropriate because the founder pictures are meant to be part of the content, then perhaps they should be on the last page, because it does kind of signal the end.

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#29
post #12

Hourly rates seem very off for Italy as well, as the real average is much much lower to the declared $80/hr (web&software). It is especially suspicious that France ($64/hr) and Germany ($55/hr) have a much lower hourly rate, when in reality salaries and rates in these countries are at least 20-30% higher than Italy.

Agencies like Reply, Accenture, Avanade and Engineering are quite overcharging other companies for their consultants in Italy, taking advantage of the fact that a lot of big companies are hostile to keep devs in house (almost all of the big banks for example). I had the chance to see for how much I was being sold as a consultant some years ago and it was almost 3x the salary I was going to get (3 x 32k before taxes).

Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

#30
post #29
post #12

Hourly rates seem very off for Italy as well, as the real average is much much lower to the declared $80/hr (web&software). It is especially suspicious that France ($64/hr) and Germany ($55/hr) have a much lower hourly rate, when in reality salaries and rates in these countries are at least 20-30% higher than Italy.

Agencies like Reply, Accenture, Avanade and Engineering are quite overcharging other companies for their consultants in Italy, taking advantage of the fact that a lot of big companies are hostile to keep devs in house (almost all of the big banks for example). I had the chance to see for how much I was being sold as a consultant some years ago and it was almost 3x the salary I was going to get (3 x 32k before taxes).

Lot's of commenters in this thread are trying to draw conclusions about dev salaries from this data, but you really can't do that for exactly the reasons you described. It gets even more disproportional for some of the bigger, high price tag consulting firms. In the Big 4 it's common to have entry level devs making $80k/yr ($~40ish/hr) while being billed out to customers at $200-300/hr.
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