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Headhunters for contract work at one FAANG company offer me $50 an hour for gigs utilizing the same skill set I’ve billed them $500 an hour for in the past.
by staticautomatic 6y ago
Headhunters for contract work at one FAANG company offer me $50 an hour for gigs utilizing the same skill set I’ve billed them $500 an hour for in the past.
- giantg2 6y ago"I’ve billed them $500 an hour for in the past" !!!...
- eganist 6y agoFor unsteady contracted project work, this doesn't sound off the mark for high-value niche skillsets at a senior or principal level. I wouldn't expect FAANGs to pay it for steady work, though. Well, Netflix might come close. I can count two principal-level architects pulling north of 700k/y, but I doubt they work just 40 hours a week.
- giantg2 6y agoI just have trouble wrapping my head around how someone can be that valuable. I'll never even hit $75/hr (excluding inflation).
- usmannk 6y agoNew grads in SFBA make well north of $75/hr. Sometimes it's all about geo.
- leesalminen 6y agoHere in Boulder $100/hr is the cheapest you can find for a freelance developer worth their salt.
- giantg2 6y agoI'm just worthless
- munk-a 6y agoYou are not. You're just poorly compensated and that doesn't say a damn about your personal worth.
- giantg2 6y agoEh, everything in life is about money, so I think it does.
- munk-a 6y agoWell, honestly, if that's your opinion then change your circumstances - work on your resume and get a job with higher compensation, they certainly exist and the requirements for them and expectations on them are far lower than you think... And, most importantly, the price for failure is negligible. If you're a wiz with databases in your current position and are considering moving to a fancy silicon valley job with high compensation the worst that can happen is you'll fail your probationary period and still make a fair amount of money.
- giantg2 6y agoThere really aren't many FileNet or Neoxam options out there. My wife refuses to relocate, so I'm stuck where I am.
- benibela 6y agoAs open-source developer, I make $0/hr :/
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoIt's not unheard of to give people who were party to the creation of some critical thing the company does pay that simply can't be matched elsewhere in order to make them stick around. Usually you pair it with a fancy title like "global architect" or some other mumbo jumbo like that. Pretty much any time you hear about someone making 500k+ without being personally responsible for the success or failure of a heck of a lot of stuff it's a role like that. Think of it as a $200k salary with $500k of "just to ensure you won't find a better offer elsewhere" on top. These aren't the kind of roles you can work your way into. You have to be in the right place at the right time and be there for a long time.
- necubi 6y agoThat's not true at all. Tons of people in Bay Area/NYC/Seattle are making $500k+ just for being relatively good at their jobs at a company that values software engineers. That's a typical Staff+ comp at a FAANG or similar company. You don't have to be some mythical engineering genius or be in the right place at the right time (to make it to $1MM+ probably does though).
- unclekev 6y ago> These aren't the kind of roles you can work your way into. You have to be in the right place at the right time and be there for a long time Sorry for grammar. On mobile but wanted to quickly contribute. I was incredibly lucky in my last role. Something I don't think I'll ever be able to match again. When I joined the company as a sysadmin there were 30 staff, and they really liked the work I did and eventually they put me on this innovation incentive scheme that basically said "If you keep delivering innovative solutions and driving the technology direction in the way that you are, we will pay you a bonus of 1.5% of the profit made from e-commerce sales every 4" At the time sales profit from e-commerce channels was about 250k for each period, so a very nice $3500~ bonus every 4 months. When I left the company ~15 years later: - 5000+ staff - Had moved into a role managing a large team of sysadmins and was responsible for the technical innovation strategy/direction of the business overall. - Same CEO and and my original "IT manager" was now the CTO who I still reported into. - They kept me on the same bonus scheme for my whole time at the company. - By the time I left online sales profit for each 4 month period was $50,000,000. Right place, right time, right people. :-) I gave up a lot for that job and worked damn hard though. I let it consume me and ended up very unhealthy.
- cccc4all 6y agoFor 1099 contract work, $200/Hour is the sweet spot for in demand fields, javascript, React, FE, etc.
- rubin55 6y agoWhat’s 1099?
- munk-a 6y agoTheir labour can absolutely be that valuable due to how many customers you are effecting with a single hour of work - it's sort of the same principle as athletic stars - paying outrageous salaries to athletes is probably the least bad way to do things (it's certainly better than the companies just pocketing lots of cash). That said, I think this is only achievable because of how relatively young and greenfield software is - the industry hasn't existed for more than a eighty years in any real sense (and arguably didn't really begin until things moved from academic to commercial in the seventies or so) and thus a lot of software can add massive value to society while doing relatively simple things. I think in a few hundred years all the low hanging fruit will be gone and software development will be extremely different from these wild-west days but right now yea - the value you can produce for a business can absolutely justify pretty ridiculous salaries. I think the important counter point for humility here is that those folks aren't particularly special, maybe a 700k architect is a literal genius at the peak of their career, but there are other folks out there that are just as creative and making 80k. Maybe we just need to think of the strange wage imbalance in development as being as fickle and arbitrary as celebrity - could that actor at the local playhouse have been the next Jennifer Lawrence if only they'd gotten cast for the role? Quite possibly, but luck wasn't on their side and passed them over. I'd say that people that command such high salaries are certainly worth it (in the cases I've seen at least) but they have also benefited from some fantastic luck in their career progression - they could've been someone else and be earning far less for the same set of skills.
- Swizec 6y agoIt’s not about skills, it’s about the value those skills provide. If you write a webapp to solve a $5000/day problem, that’s worth $X. If your company sells that to 10 companies, your work is worth 10X. But if it’s sold to 10000, wow. Think of your work in terms of value provided to the buyer, not in terms of cost to yourself. Thus you unlock career potential
- munk-a 6y agoI absolutely agree and that's where the price differential is coming in, but it causes some perverse effects to the wage market. Is the work of the person solving that 5k/day problem that's then sold to ten clients worth ten times as much as the work of the person who's work is only sold to one client? I think it's important to recognize the semi-arbitrary source of where this value is coming from and understand that while employees impacting a lot of customers are indeed creating a lot of value the work they are doing isn't significantly different from the work made by folks with more modest salaries. Basically, at the core, I think there's a significant ethical question here and I would highlight the relative infancy of the industry. It's likely that in a few hundred years all this incredible value creation will be highly commoditized and that innovative development will be relegated to academic pursuits that companies only adopt and bring to market after a lot of investigation and research. Uh hrm - as another parallel you might compare this to speed running. Right now we can do relatively simple things to dramatically create value (time saved off the run) but as time goes on and the run gets more "perfected" then the ability to shave time off the run (or create value for the business) will require a lot more investment of effort. I'm not certain if this will happen since everything in how development works points to this being a really hard state of the industry to accomplish - but looking at economic trends it feels inevitable that eventually it will be more profitable to, for instance, produce a cheaper better whatsapp then being the first market entrent into the coveted Deciduous Tree Vlog Platform market.
- cosmodisk 6y agoI'm nowhere near $75/h. A couple of years ago I built a solution for the company I work for that heavily contributed getting hundreds of thousands in revenue( and continues to do so). All it took was a few weeks. Didn't even get a bonus or something and this is a tiny company. Right work can be worth millions,so even $2000/h may not look high enough.
- giantg2 6y agoYeah, but like your example, the company keeps the money.
- avereveard 6y agoA solution expert usually brings a baggage of knowledge of previously working solutions in the problem space, knowledge that has been acquired over many months of hard work Short gigs where you being in a solution, point a team/company on the right direction and then jump off compensate for the accrued knowledge transfer more than for the hour worked Think of it like a top end athlete, they aren't paid for the few hours of play, but for the years of training that keep them competitive
- cascom 6y agoYour comparing apples and oranges - when you take a salary you take a lower hourly wage to eliminate volume risk, works in the spot market get compensated for taking the volume risk
- ghaff 6y agoWhen I was an analyst we'd get paid $10K+ per day for speaking/consulting (not including travel time) and the one expert witness job I did was about $500/hour. But for the bulk of the 200ish workdays a year, we were earning much less or nothing at all.
- walshemj 6y agoI know someone who (CTO) Billed several k for an hours consultation on 4G
- dboreham 6y ago$500/hr is usually reserved for work done for lawyers ;)
- staticautomatic 6y agoYeah to be fair I have a lot of specialized knowledge and experience around the high paying work. But under the hood the approach, methods, tools, and way of thinking are fundamentally identical. I get hired for the high paying stuff in part due to the domain expertise, but really I command that price because I’m $450 an hour better at the $50 an hour work than most other people with the domain expertise. Or maybe I just want to believe that.
- anonymouse008 6y agoOld southern joke: An oil man had a pump on the fritz and needed someone to fix it, fast. He sought the advice of the best expert he could find, and luckily when the expert listened to the problem he said, "let me spend a day with it and see what I can do." The old expert pulls up in an empty pickup with only a hammer and nail in hand, calmly walks over to the pump, places the nail on the side, and taps it. Then, the expert dusts himself off and hands the oil man a slip of paper that reads, "Total $1,000. Nail $1. Where to place the nail $999"
- epr 6y agoI knew I had heard another version of this story, but it was about Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Found it on the smithsonian website. Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection. Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill. Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following: Making chalk mark on generator $1. Knowing where to make mark $9,999. Ford paid the bill.
- croon 6y ago$500/h for a one day/week contract compares to stuff like $80/h for a 6 month contract. There are vanishingly few people getting $500/h and getting 40 hours worth of contract a week, 50 weeks a year. I don't think I've ever heard of one.