81–90 of 328 posts
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How long are your engagements?
They can go anywhere from one hour (e.g awareness training) to a full month (e.g complex web application pentest)
Have an annual salary in mind for a similar role, chop off the last three zeros, and that's my hourly rate. It works out to approximately double which is just enough to account for things you would normally get from an employer: - payroll taxes (SS/Medicare) - PTO/sick days - equipment & supplies - training/conferences - health insurance - retirement savings Etc
In Amsterdam NL a backend engineer could expect 80-100 euros/hr. > 100 is also possible, but you may get into specialization territory.
Also based in NL, "Amsterdam" area (Utrecht). As people have mentioned elsewhere, it depends. My current long-term (6+ months) contract is at €95/hr, working as part of a great team of developers on an Elixir backend, and being able to learn Elixir (which I didn't know beforehand) on the job. I have also done smaller projects (2 months), a bit more specialized, on the side for €125/hr. By the way, I am not totally co…
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Is it controversial that meetings should count as billable time? I mean, it’s not like you’re there because you just really like meetings!
I bill double for meetings. Suddenly was invited to a lot less meetings that I never needed to be in as a contractor. Perfection.
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They can go anywhere from one hour (e.g awareness training) to a full month (e.g complex web application pentest)
I’ve seen some companies charge very little ($2-$5k) for a pen test. How are you able to charge $350/hour for essentially the same work? Is there some pitch or playbook you’re using to justify the price for doing the same work?
For $350/hr you get
- someone knowing which pentest tools to start with
- someone knowing how to follow up with more focused attention on problem areas and run additional tests
- someone analyzing the raw reports to understand the causes of the vulnerabilities
- a multi-page written formal report with interpretations and recommendations for mitigation, including a cost/risk/benefit summaries.
Edit to add: in my experience the companies offering cheap pentests and handing you the logs are the ones that then say, "If you want to understand these logs and know what to do about them, you can contract with us at $VERY_HIGH_RATE"
I’m not sure if I qualify as generalist, but this should still be relevant: It depends. Did I go through an agency, or find the client myself? Do they need _me_ or a butt in a seat? Will the work be fun, or awful, or is there any on-call expectation (which is worse than awful and probably a hard no)? Discounts for bulk and prepayment. Also, hourly rates are the worst. Value pricing is a hard leap; a much easier thing…
I have a friend, a great sydadmin/devops/infrastructure person. He never takes full-time jobs; his deal is always for 32 hours/week. His reasoning? 32 hours is 32 hours, but full time is all the time. He leads a much happier life than most ops-ish people I know.
Maybe you have the sort of clients where day/weekly rates work. But for the sort of client that has crunch mode or deadline rushes, there is no way in the world I'd give them a weekly rate. If I'm going to do an 80-hour week to get something out in time, I'm going to get paid for every bit of it, and I want them to feel the pain when they see the bills.
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Have you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to be much higher.
Why's that? Large companies generally don't need single generalists; what they mostly have is teams of specialists, people who can get much deeper into a subject than a generalist can. Is there some role at a FAANG where generalists would thrive?
In my personal experience everything except infrastructure and mobile UI favors generalists. The people I worked with were constantly jumping around between backends, protocols, business logic, web UI, test suites, architecture, data analysis, small-scale UI design. This was on public-facing products. I'd expect internal tool teams have even greater need for generalists.