I’m confused ... this says Andorra has >15k people working at dev agencies. The country has a total population of I feel like these numbers don’t add up.
Yeah, this sounds like an artifact of some kind of tax shenanigans rather than a real number
Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#72These rates are quite interesting. After I did one freelance project (managed team of 3devs, created prototype of 5G API network component), I am thinking about starting my own small software agency. I was expecting to charge 30-35EUR/hour (Central Europe region), but according to these rates, my expectations are quite low.
Can anyone give me any advice, books or podcasts, how to get better in business negotiation, to be more confident to ask a proper charge?
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of outsourcing for a writing job is weird. You don't see The New Yorker outsourcing their essays to Pakistan, Hollywood outsourcing their scripts to Ukraine, the NYT outsourcing their reporting to the Philippines, etc. Tech seems to be the only industry that thinks that hiring writers from overseas to produce content is somehow going to result in anything viable.
It's not that weird if you consider that a large chunk of software engineering is CRUD apps and digital plumbing, which doesn't require a lot of creativity. Nevertheless, I'm sure India, Ukraine and other countries have tons of talented developers that due to global economics are willing to work for a lower pay. Maybe the problem with the outsourcing model in these cases is that it's being poorly executed. It's alrea…
as a 3rd world developer now living comfortably on the 1st world this is exactly my experience, people in the developing world are in general more ignorant on technology, so even if you are an excellent developer it is still going to be a hard sell to ask for a US dev rate. The emerging economies are not technology driven in most cases. In my case I had to look for work outside my own country first to more reputable South American countries and eventually in North America.
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#74Something really, really annoying about this site: it uses automatically-progressing carousels that cause content reflow below them in the page. I encounter this sort of thing so often , and it’s really, really bad. Positively awful . Super disconcerting. In most cases like this, it’s just that one slide is longer than the others. In this case, there are a couple like that, but also for the rest, image tags have been…
http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ :)
Now I am irritable
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of outsourcing for a writing job is weird. You don't see The New Yorker outsourcing their essays to Pakistan, Hollywood outsourcing their scripts to Ukraine, the NYT outsourcing their reporting to the Philippines, etc. Tech seems to be the only industry that thinks that hiring writers from overseas to produce content is somehow going to result in anything viable.
You picked a bad industry to make that point. Newspapers, magazines, etc frequently outsource work, including writing: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/business/worldbusiness/19... https://archives.cjr.org/short_takes/outsourced_edit.php https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/oct/07/reuters.pressa... more recent: https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/jul/27/jou...
If you read the articles, I would say that the companies listed above (like the NYT) are not the ones outsourcing, the outsourcing is quite limited in scope, and mostly is design jobs, not writing jobs.
I thought it was a great analogy.
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#76The first pages made me very skeptical, so I stop to read this. Beyond that there is no data intelligence on these reports, the numbers are weird. It's showing Colombia's hourly rate more expensive than Sweden's. Also, I know very much my homeland market, I am sure that it's wrong. I did not go further.
It’s a clickbait article... any article that claims something about rates, salaries, sales is basically that. They are often completely inaccurate, with data coming from either self reported numbers (best case), or a guess based on a sample of job postings they scraped from somewhere.
Yeah, the whole thing looks to be basically an ad for agencies that have registered with them.
Nice for the agencies, not all that useful to this crowd for data collection. Alot of the numbers are just way, way off from industry standards so it makes me wonder where they got them.
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#77Something really, really annoying about this site: it uses automatically-progressing carousels that cause content reflow below them in the page. I encounter this sort of thing so often , and it’s really, really bad. Positively awful . Super disconcerting. In most cases like this, it’s just that one slide is longer than the others. In this case, there are a couple like that, but also for the rest, image tags have been…
http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ :)
I've been saying this for years but marketing guys love carousels.
If you can afford to hide content why even put it in the first place? Specially on the most prominent part of your website.
If you want to deliver a message focus on essential content that cannot be hidden.
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of outsourcing for a writing job is weird. You don't see The New Yorker outsourcing their essays to Pakistan, Hollywood outsourcing their scripts to Ukraine, the NYT outsourcing their reporting to the Philippines, etc. Tech seems to be the only industry that thinks that hiring writers from overseas to produce content is somehow going to result in anything viable.
It's not that weird if you consider that a large chunk of software engineering is CRUD apps and digital plumbing, which doesn't require a lot of creativity. Nevertheless, I'm sure India, Ukraine and other countries have tons of talented developers that due to global economics are willing to work for a lower pay. Maybe the problem with the outsourcing model in these cases is that it's being poorly executed. It's alrea…
I think the problem with outsourcing is it adds a layer of indirection between the stakeholders and the developers. As a developer myself, I find it almost impossible to work effectively unless I have direct contact with the stakeholders.
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#79I oversee the hiring of dev shops for a mid-sized company in the US and the rates for e-commerce/web development are all in the $120-$150/hour range. The funny thing is that some of these companies outsourced to the Ukraine and India and the rates didn't change. I would have thought that we would at least see some of the cost savings. Both companies that outsourced ended up being complete disasters (we are still clea…
The concept of outsourcing for a writing job is weird. You don't see The New Yorker outsourcing their essays to Pakistan, Hollywood outsourcing their scripts to Ukraine, the NYT outsourcing their reporting to the Philippines, etc. Tech seems to be the only industry that thinks that hiring writers from overseas to produce content is somehow going to result in anything viable.
This is not the way to look at it. Software engineering and content writing are not even close to being similar in any sense. You don’t need cultural context to write good software
Re: Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are these freelancer rates or bill rates to clients? Usually there's at least a 20% margin added to bill rates by agencies.
In this kind of discussion context, typically the OP's rates are the bill rates to clients (the OP's company). I normally see the smaller agencies clear 40-50% margin, and the big names are clearing 50-80%, so I wouldn't be surprised if those agencies in Ukraine and India were paying their teams in the $60-75 per hour USD range at most, which is considered really good in those parts of the world.
I used to do margin calculations at a mid-size US agency that staffed a lot of roles. In terms of actual project margin, we rarely got past 30% and was usually more like 15-20. The trick is that there is a lot of cost in operating an agency beyond just salary. The cost to the agency of employing a developer (or a designer or a tester or whatever) is more than just what they're paid.
We had a rate card that included both the cost to the agency per hour for a particular role and the agreed rate we had settled with the client. We had a fixed rate for each role/locale even though we paid people different amounts. I knew my own salary and handful for my direct reports and the "cost" side of the rate card was a lot more than I was getting paid. And that cost was the base on which padded to get profit from the client.
And that profit itself wasn't pure profit for the company because a lot of paid for our fixed costs (office space, hardware) and non-billable roles (HR, receptionists). And of course a lot of it ends up in the hands of our holding company and their stock holders.