7 ms·

ok, so you've identified that the US isn't Finnland. Very inquisitive. Also, what place in the US, at those pay levels, is hiring a new grad for remote work?

WWLink 9y ago
Word! I know a lot of places paying a lot less than that lol. Shoot, when I graduated from college a few years ago I knew people taking up jobs at $70k/year. In programming. XD In California, in the Bay Area even! I dunno where people are getting these $200k/year jobs but I'd totally take one...
- kobeya 9y ago
  You may have misread or I wasn't clear. My first job out of college was $72k. I'm now in a position to earn 3-4x that, remotely if I choose. (Less than 10 years into my career.)
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Do you actually make that much money now? Or could you if you wanted to, but don't?
    - doublerebel 9y ago
      Well I think many of us with these skills choose to try to start our own full-fledged business, because it's great for work experience and consulting is a fine fall-back. Similarly, consulting at those rates can be a smart way to bootstrap a startup as long as a balance can be found between the two. And some consultants just work at that rate for a while and then take 6 months off. So there are a few ways to "could, but don't". I'm turning down work left and right. It does take self-motivation and research to talk to the right people until there's a steady source of leads. But that's typical for any consulting.
kahnpro 9y ago
And specifically that San Fransico isn't Finland. I don't think the average developer in most of the US is getting $240k
- lwhalen 9y ago
  A gross income of $240k is just an hourly rate of $120/hr. That's "meh" consulting/contracting rates. The mid/senior folks I know - and I can think of at least a half dozen - don't even get out of bed for less than $200/hr. They generally work a client FTE for 3/6/12 months, make them wildly happy, move on, rinse, and repeat
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    120 might be meh, but it's a pretty satisfying amount even with self-employment tax and health care costs. What are the specific tech roles that pay 200/hr? Are these people that were CTOs or extremely senior managers prior?
    - lwhalen 9y ago
      High-impact devops consulting. "Migrate me from expensive on-premise hosting to a private cloud running Openstack, because I have regulatory requirements that prevent me from going public cloud. This will save me $1.5M/yr in hosting costs". Great, that'll be a half-mil right to the engineer's pocket, TYVM, we'll be ready to launch in 8 months. "We have zero CI/CD expertise in-house, build us a pipeline that does all the things vis a vis testing, deploy, etc". OK, that'll be $90k, we'll have it done in 2 weeks, plus another week for training your team on its use and upkeep. "Our CTO is actually the tech person, and he's tired of provisioning VPCs and VMs by hand. His time is better spent doing more business-ey things" Poof, here's your CM deploy that lets your CTO either update a single YAML file and press 'go' to spin up all the things, or allows him to hire a junior/mid-level to twist all the knobs and pull all the levers. $300k please, it'll be ready to go in six weeks. so on, and so forth.
      - kobeya 9y ago

WWLink 9y ago

Word! I know a lot of places paying a lot less than that lol. Shoot, when I graduated from college a few years ago I knew people taking up jobs at $70k/year. In programming. XD In California, in the Bay Area even! I dunno where people are getting these $200k/year jobs but I'd totally take one...

kobeya 9y ago
You may have misread or I wasn't clear. My first job out of college was $72k. I'm now in a position to earn 3-4x that, remotely if I choose. (Less than 10 years into my career.)
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Do you actually make that much money now? Or could you if you wanted to, but don't?
  - doublerebel 9y ago
    Well I think many of us with these skills choose to try to start our own full-fledged business, because it's great for work experience and consulting is a fine fall-back. Similarly, consulting at those rates can be a smart way to bootstrap a startup as long as a balance can be found between the two. And some consultants just work at that rate for a while and then take 6 months off. So there are a few ways to "could, but don't". I'm turning down work left and right. It does take self-motivation and research to talk to the right people until there's a steady source of leads. But that's typical for any consulting.

kahnpro 9y ago

And specifically that San Fransico isn't Finland. I don't think the average developer in most of the US is getting $240k

lwhalen 9y ago
A gross income of $240k is just an hourly rate of $120/hr. That's "meh" consulting/contracting rates. The mid/senior folks I know - and I can think of at least a half dozen - don't even get out of bed for less than $200/hr. They generally work a client FTE for 3/6/12 months, make them wildly happy, move on, rinse, and repeat
- mancerayder 9y ago
  120 might be meh, but it's a pretty satisfying amount even with self-employment tax and health care costs. What are the specific tech roles that pay 200/hr? Are these people that were CTOs or extremely senior managers prior?
  - lwhalen 9y ago
    High-impact devops consulting. "Migrate me from expensive on-premise hosting to a private cloud running Openstack, because I have regulatory requirements that prevent me from going public cloud. This will save me $1.5M/yr in hosting costs". Great, that'll be a half-mil right to the engineer's pocket, TYVM, we'll be ready to launch in 8 months. "We have zero CI/CD expertise in-house, build us a pipeline that does all the things vis a vis testing, deploy, etc". OK, that'll be $90k, we'll have it done in 2 weeks, plus another week for training your team on its use and upkeep. "Our CTO is actually the tech person, and he's tired of provisioning VPCs and VMs by hand. His time is better spent doing more business-ey things" Poof, here's your CM deploy that lets your CTO either update a single YAML file and press 'go' to spin up all the things, or allows him to hire a junior/mid-level to twist all the knobs and pull all the levers. $300k please, it'll be ready to go in six weeks. so on, and so forth.
    - kobeya 9y ago