$20k bounty was claimed • Hacker News Board

Re: $20k bounty was claimed

#341

Post by etruong42 » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 12:16 AM UTC

andai wrote: post #152

wentin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not set a bounty to improve Prettier instead of building a competing project just to increase the motivation to improve Prettier? There are three reasons, I think: 1. Writing a rust compiler is separate from prettier project because of its nature. Prettier is not written in Rust, and Rust has proven to be a robust option to write a formatter, so the goal really is to write a formatter in Rust itself, and it can…

>Great programmer who has the skill to answer this bounty get paid at least $200 an hour (extremely conservative estimate) Dang! What do you base this estimate on? The Rust aspect, or parsing aspect, or intersection of both?

I imagine someone who has this skill has a shot at being L4 or L5 at Google. levels.fyi estimates a year salary of an L5 engineer at Google to be 362,248. If we naively divide that by 50 (weeks in a year) * 40 (hours of work a week), we'd get $181.12 an hour. Googlers also get health insurance, free food, other perks that may push the effective hourly compensation even closer to $200. Googlers also get equipment to do the coding, whereas this competition does not provide a workstation, so another possible line item to consider.

It's not a perfect comparison/analogy, so I'd rather not get nitpicked, as the overall thrust of my argument is that $200/hr is not outlandish imho.

Re: $20k bounty was claimed

#342

Post by parasubvert » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 10:17 AM UTC

jihiggins wrote: post #332

parasubvert wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT developers are often around $100/hour outside Toronto, Toronto being a bit more. Upwards of $150-200 if its speciality work or you're a team lead. It varies though, the market also exists for $80/hour java developers, which tend to be new grads Contract Developers going to technical companies will earn more like $180+.

every time rates come up on this website, people come out of the woodwork claiming "most" developers in every north american country make half a million or more a year. it's hard to not feel like this is just a few people using this as an opportunity to brag about their rates in niche industries (or people are just lying) i have been a contract developer, and have worked at technical companies in canada, and have nev…

Well if you've never used Java (or c#), that might be your main problem. I'm telling you my experiences hiring as a manager over 10 years ago - all the senior Java devs on the program (about 8) were $90-120/hour. Architects were $150. PMs were $150. All independents through an agency with minimal markup ($3-4 per hour). I'm also speaking as an IC at times that's charged $150-250 an hour for over 20 years depending on the role. Rates these days are even higher.

These rates are at financial services , banks, transportation / logistics, manufacturing, telecom, etc. in Canada, US, and Japan.

You should read patio11's posts on this topic on HN or his website, for example : https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick...

Re: $20k bounty was claimed

#343

Post by 946789987649 » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:46 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #328

hectormalot wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the geography and/or whether the knowledge is highly specific. As a datapoint, the average Dutch contracting rates I see for IT development (think: Java, Swift, Kotlin) range somewhere from €75 - €150/h. Higher is possible, but then you're talking very specific expertise and typically shorter projects. I'm on the hiring side, this is a figure across some 20 external devs. I think it's representative of the…

but those are for at least a few weeks of engagement, no? 8h/day, right?

In London contracting rates of £700+/day are not abnormal and those are usually minimum 6 month full time.

Re: $20k bounty was claimed

#344

Post by twodave » Thu, Dec 07, 2023, 3:05 AM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #299

twodave wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say that $200/hour is only "extremely conservative" in very few and small geographic parts of the world. Where I'm from (in a large city in the US) this number would be described as extravagant. I've charged $200 or more on only one occasion myself, and it was a very short-term arrangement.

> very few and small geographic parts of the world There's reasonably good data about this that contradicts this? $1000 as a day rate isn't unusual or unreasonable for a specialist IT contractor; and I don't say that idly; I say it from both experience and you know; aggregated data: - https://www.hays.com.au/documents/276732/1102429/Hays+Techno... - https://www.itcontracting.com/rate-checker/ - https://news.ycombinat…

$1000/day is $125/hr. That’s a lot less than $200/hr. That’s the difference between being a top 10% earner and a top 5% earner.

Re: $20k bounty was claimed

#345

Post by kjs3 » Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

chefandy wrote: post #325

kjs3 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most? I can't think of a gig beyond maybe a couple of folks in a coworking space where I wouldn't be laughed out of the room with "just make it 150% of salary and we'll figure out the real number whenever". Virtually every company I've ever worked with budget the actual number, because they know how much the overhead cost is. There's a huge difference between "a number I use when asked 'ballpark how much a new hire i…

Depends on the kind of work you do and the competition. A former employer was really desperate for pretty journeyman-level Django Dev help a few years ago and for some reason it was just super tight. Ended up paying more like 350% after looking a few weeks. We obviously weren't going to hire someone at that rate for a 6 month contract but for short term help? Sure.

Well, sure...there's always a one-off where you have to throw out the rulebook on salary. But any HR team worthy of the name can still compute the actual overhead on that base pretty much to the dollar.