40 ms·

You'll need some mechanism to raise rates to attract top developers. Even without the first free minute and time spent reading questions, the most a dev could

You'll need some mechanism to raise rates to attract top developers. Even without the first free minute and time spent reading questions, the most a dev could hope to earn with this service is ($0.75/min)(60 min/hr) = $45/hr. Perhaps for students or devs who barely meet the 100 rep minimum requirement, that might be attractive, but for the experts who've written the best Stack Overflow answers, that's likely to be a (small) fraction of their bill rate. Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping. Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$. Poorly paid contribution often loses both incentives.

dheera 6y ago
What if there were really good devs on StackOverflow in developing economies that were willing to take on $45/hr consulting because their day job pays them $20/hr? Just because Silicon Valley developers want $300/hr doesn't mean the whole world regards that as a standard.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Agreed, plus the day to day answering developer questions is going to be a little more tame than if you were in a job constantly putting out fires or maintaining a tight and stressful schedule
- jasonkester 6y ago
  They’ll still lose money. $45/hr, billed by the minute for a bunch of short gigs spread out across the day with the need to do fresh business development between each one will never leave you anywhere near half utilized. Put the bill rate at $200/hr in this situation and you might replace that steady $40k/year salary. But it’ll be a lot more stressful.
crazypython 6y ago
Exactly. My usual hourly rate is a minimum of $70/hour. (I only recently became a freelancer, and am still learning to maximize my rates– I suspect my current rate is a small fraction of what I could earn.) The only thing this provides for me is a more liquid/elastic way to earn money. I can and do regularly solve problems that save people hundreds of hours. I would gladly pay to have someone solve my technical challenges that cost me hundreds of hours. (I am an expert in Python and a deep Generalist with experience across many domains and types of software.)
- etothepii 6y ago
  Isn't the thing to do to charge $200ph and offer "significant discounts" for interesting work. Now people have a reason to pitch you their projects and you can still charge $70ph for the interesting ones.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  Someone once told me “Take your salary and double it, and that’s your minimum contracting rate”. It seemed impossible to me for years, but ended up working just fine when I finally did it. In fact I more than doubled my salary, and no one really bats an eye. If you have skills people need, they’ll pay. For what it’s worth I was earning a salary around $110k CAD, and my contract rate (assuming I worked full time) worked out to around $240k CAD. No one has had a problem with it yet (although I went back to a salary position since then - I have kids and contracting was hard to organize around family and the pandemic).
  - jasonkester 6y ago
    The fun part will happen when you double it again and people still agree to pay it without batting an eye. Give it a try for your next new client. The hard part is quoting the rate with a straight face.
    - m-ee 6y ago
      I recently started contracting for a consulting shop I had a relationship with, took some back and forth to get them to agree to $100/hr and I felt pretty good about it. Then I got placed a project for a FAANG client where I'm the only contributor and saw what they're ultimately paying for my time...
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      > The hard part is quoting the rate with a straight face The best anecdote I heard about that was the guy (wish I could remember his name, but he was interviewed by Matt on Freelance Transformation) who found that it was much easier to quote a high rate if he had a cigar in his mouth because it made him feel like a mogul :-) I'm guessing that was on the phone...
kop316 6y ago
I would also argue that possibly doing it per time may be the wrong incentives. I have had issues that took me several hours to try to debug, only to have someone else show me how to fix it in under 2 minutes. So that dev gets paid $1, but I would easily pay much more for the fix in that issue because of how much time I sunk in it.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Like the old saw goes: The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue. The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant. Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again. The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay. Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price. Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies. The new, itemized bill reads…. Hammer: $5 Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995
  - slt2021 6y ago
    you know that some developers intentionally add "time bomb" bugs and introduce bugs that trigger after certain period of time - just so that they knock it off with the hammer in one minute an justify their "maintenance support" contract. there was a story about one european company and an Excel spreadsheet with VBA code that would stop working after 3 months and a developer who would "unlock" it for another 3 mo if he has a maintenance contract
    - judge2020 6y ago
      The original PaaS!
      - ASalazarMX 6y ago
blackrock 6y ago
$45/hour is a good rate for Ukrainian developers, I think. Or Philippines developers. That’s about USD $90,000/year. This is good money, if you live remotely in a lower cost of living, foreign country. But it’s a mediocre salary in the United States. You can barely pay your expensive rent with $90k/year. Actually, you’d be at poverty level. And there is zero possibility of affording a house with this salary. But you might be able to eke by if you live in the less competitive Midwest.
- dstick 6y ago
  The only issue is billable hours - will these be 100%? If the platform has that liquidity, then yes - if not, chasing assignments and lowering prices leads to a race to the bottom.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The poverty line for a family of 4 is $26,500 USD. [0] Median full time income in the USA is $35,977. [1] 90,000 is well away from poverty. [0] https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics,a%20base%20year%20of%201980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_....
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    4 people? That's nuts I was making that washing plates as a single person no dependents. I think maybe less actually after taxes.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      You were probably making that in California though, not WV or SC. Houses are less than a year of developer pay there.
      - jcun4128 6y ago
        I was in KS and I was just paid "highly" eg. $12+/hr although I was multi-role edit: maybe less was making $11-12/hr and not full time, my math was off. I was freelancing on the side though before I got into the industry but yeah $20K range was my figure at that time eg. just over 3 years ago(it did suck, I was mad broke still am but working on it).
Solvitieg 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers and OSS pays $0/h and attracts great developers.
- debaserab2 6y ago
  > Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers Eh...
- xboxnolifes 6y ago
  Covered > Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping
- GVIrish 6y ago
  This is true, but it illustrates a key dynamic. For most people, as soon as you put a dollar value on a task that someone may have done for free or for fun, you have now fundamentally changed that relationship. If someone is doing something for only the intrinsic motivation, putting a dollar value on it changes it to an economic calculation. The person may still do it for money, but they're more likely to only do a level of effort commensurate to the economic reward. Whereas if they're doing things for intrinsic reasons they may be willing to do more work. There are a couple of behavioral economics experiments that bear this out. The Soma Experiment from the 70's gave participants a puzzle game to solve, and measured how long they tried to solve it. One group of participants was paid for their time, the other wasn't. The paid group on average spent less time trying to solve the puzzle than the group that wasn't paid. There are a couple of other experiments in that vein, but the common thread is that intrinsic motivation can be more powerful than economic rewards in multiple contexts. So someone might be willing to contribute some code to OSS for free, but if you ask them to develop some code for $30/hr they might pass.
  - 6510 6y ago
    They pass then everyone else is unwilling to do anything for free ever again.
- armadsen 6y ago
908B64B197 6y ago
And to filter out who can answer questions. 45$/h will attract a LOT of attention online. And not from the folks who should be answering questions. Just look at what happened with Hacktoberfest [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052
- tyingq 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I apparently missed the story the first time. Unfortunately, Twitter suspended the @shitoberfest account (https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/ https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/) Would have loved to have a look.
  - ev1 6y ago
    TLDR: Imagine every single major repo being inundated with tens or hundreds of thousands of absolute rubbish PR's that do nothing but change one line and break the build. Like fork React or Linux and then open a random file in the web editor and type "GIVE ME SHIRT" in a random position. Then save it and commit and submit a PR. Followed by opening a dozen issues demanding that it be accepted so it counts for the free shirt. I contributed to a small (<5k star) repo at the time and after telling the issue/PR-creators to stop, started getting newsletter signup spam and hate mail directed to my git commit email too.
    - tracker1 6y ago
      I don't even know who I pissed off, but a couple months ago wound up on every dating site one could think of's mailing/user list... I mean whoever did it obviously spent a fair amount of time just finding all the damned places... I was hitting block and report spam for weeks...
tyingq 6y ago
Seems like there's a good incentive not for the best developers, but for the most patient ones. Since patience in this case means more paid minutes.
andrei_says_ 6y ago
> Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping. > Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$. This is crucial. Changing incentives changes the social contract and relationship and does that irrevocably. I recommend Dan Ariely’s book Amazing Decisions on this topic. Example: You don’t pay for the thanksgiving turkey dinner at your inlaws’ and if you did that’s be rude no matter the amount. If you give your neighbor some fruit from the tree in your yard that’s one kind of relationship. If next year you try to sell it that’s a very different one. Transitioning from one to the other is significant. Lastly, financial incentives kill generosity. The giver now starts to worry if they’re providing too high of a value.
- etothepii 6y ago
  A girlfriend's mother once asked to pay me after fixing her computer. I said a bottle of wine will be fine. (I'd just turned 18) She said no I insist. I said well my rate is £100 an hour and it took three hours. She chose to give me a bottle of wine.
  - erhk 6y ago
    Is 18 the drinking age in this story?
    - pugz 6y ago
      Given the currency (£), I suspect so.
      - xarope 6y ago
        A UK colleague was devastated when he came to Texas for a project; luckily he turned 21 a few weeks later...!
        Aeolun 6y ago
        I was so surprised and annoyed that they tried to ask for my ID almost everywhere in the US. I’m 33, I don’t look anywhere near a student any more. At the time I was allowed to drink from 16 in my home country.
mcadenhe 6y ago
I liked what another commenter said about adding tiers for devs with higher S/O rep. So if the dev has a higher rep, they can make more $ per minute. Something I'll look into adding. I don't think anyone is going to make much money off of it starting out since I don't have a large supply of questions coming in yet, but there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do. I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. So they post the questions hoping someone can guide them. Call a Dev isn't a competitor to S/O. S/O is a wiki. Call a Dev is basically Clippy in human form that you pay per minute.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do. Maybe there's a reason they are unemployed > I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. Isn't is the point of engineering? To know how to get information and what to search for? If the 15$/hour dev knows and the guy on my team doesn't, why am-I not employing the person answering questions? My company sure pays more than 15$/hour...
p1necone 6y ago
45 USD an hour is quite a lot outside of the USA (even just outside of silicon valley?).
- dboreham 6y ago
  > even just outside of silicon valley No, you're going to pay $70/hr for car repair and roofing work in the middle of the US.
- ido 6y ago
  It's ok for a normal job (guaranteed 40h/week) but for hour-based freelancing (let along minute based!) it's really not. $45 is €37 and you can absolutely get more than that as a freelance developer here in Germany. People who are used to getting a salary severely over estimate how much money an hourly rate translate to per year when you don't have guaranteed work lined up. As a rule of thumb $x per hour is equivalent to roughly $xK per year for a salaried position when you account for unpaid time between gigs, paying your own insurances, paying for your own equipment, not getting paid vacation and sick leave, etc.
keithnz 6y ago
some how if you can leverage reuse of questions so someway for someone paying for an already answered question then it would scale up and keep paying somewhat like SO rep works. I'm currently in the top 0.58% of SO users with a reach of 4.3 million people, if you can monetize that to a small extent it could somehow provide a scalable pay scale.
ChrisRR 6y ago
Unfortunately I suspect this may go the way of many freelance sites, and get absolutely flooded with low quality indian developers. Where the wage is lower $0.75 may seem a lot more attractive and there are a lot of fresh out of university indian devs. If you've ever tried bidding on remote dev jobs online, you'll practically always get undercut by an indian dev at a price you can't even come close to matching, and unfortunately I suspect that given how often they appear in comments online asking people to do their entire project, I suspect they may often be bidding for jobs they don't know how to do.
mywittyname 6y ago
Seems like a silly mechanism. I think a better tactic would be to offer "bounties" on problems, then devs can decide whether or not the problem is worth the effort. As long as the requester defines the input/output for the change, then this should work out well. There are times when I'd spend 15 minutes writing a small bash script for $30. Sometimes I feel guilty about buying luxuries like delivered food, and I wouldn't feel so guilty if I use half the saved time earning enough to pay for the meal, even if it is well under my typical billing rate.
Smithalicious 6y ago
Only for Americans. Everywhere else in the world that's a lot of money. Your average software engineer in Europe can hope to earn maybe €50k per year late into their career at most.

dheera 6y ago

What if there were really good devs on StackOverflow in developing economies that were willing to take on $45/hr consulting because their day job pays them $20/hr? Just because Silicon Valley developers want $300/hr doesn't mean the whole world regards that as a standard.

vsareto 6y ago
Agreed, plus the day to day answering developer questions is going to be a little more tame than if you were in a job constantly putting out fires or maintaining a tight and stressful schedule
jasonkester 6y ago
They’ll still lose money. $45/hr, billed by the minute for a bunch of short gigs spread out across the day with the need to do fresh business development between each one will never leave you anywhere near half utilized. Put the bill rate at $200/hr in this situation and you might replace that steady $40k/year salary. But it’ll be a lot more stressful.

crazypython 6y ago

Exactly. My usual hourly rate is a minimum of $70/hour. (I only recently became a freelancer, and am still learning to maximize my rates– I suspect my current rate is a small fraction of what I could earn.) The only thing this provides for me is a more liquid/elastic way to earn money. I can and do regularly solve problems that save people hundreds of hours. I would gladly pay to have someone solve my technical challenges that cost me hundreds of hours. (I am an expert in Python and a deep Generalist with experience across many domains and types of software.)

etothepii 6y ago
Isn't the thing to do to charge $200ph and offer "significant discounts" for interesting work. Now people have a reason to pitch you their projects and you can still charge $70ph for the interesting ones.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
Someone once told me “Take your salary and double it, and that’s your minimum contracting rate”. It seemed impossible to me for years, but ended up working just fine when I finally did it. In fact I more than doubled my salary, and no one really bats an eye. If you have skills people need, they’ll pay. For what it’s worth I was earning a salary around $110k CAD, and my contract rate (assuming I worked full time) worked out to around $240k CAD. No one has had a problem with it yet (although I went back to a salary position since then - I have kids and contracting was hard to organize around family and the pandemic).
- jasonkester 6y ago
  The fun part will happen when you double it again and people still agree to pay it without batting an eye. Give it a try for your next new client. The hard part is quoting the rate with a straight face.
  - m-ee 6y ago
    I recently started contracting for a consulting shop I had a relationship with, took some back and forth to get them to agree to $100/hr and I felt pretty good about it. Then I got placed a project for a FAANG client where I'm the only contributor and saw what they're ultimately paying for my time...
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    > The hard part is quoting the rate with a straight face The best anecdote I heard about that was the guy (wish I could remember his name, but he was interviewed by Matt on Freelance Transformation) who found that it was much easier to quote a high rate if he had a cigar in his mouth because it made him feel like a mogul :-) I'm guessing that was on the phone...

kop316 6y ago

I would also argue that possibly doing it per time may be the wrong incentives. I have had issues that took me several hours to try to debug, only to have someone else show me how to fix it in under 2 minutes. So that dev gets paid $1, but I would easily pay much more for the fix in that issue because of how much time I sunk in it.

mlyle 6y ago
Like the old saw goes: The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue. The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant. Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again. The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay. Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price. Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies. The new, itemized bill reads…. Hammer: $5 Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995
- slt2021 6y ago
  you know that some developers intentionally add "time bomb" bugs and introduce bugs that trigger after certain period of time - just so that they knock it off with the hammer in one minute an justify their "maintenance support" contract. there was a story about one european company and an Excel spreadsheet with VBA code that would stop working after 3 months and a developer who would "unlock" it for another 3 mo if he has a maintenance contract
  - judge2020 6y ago
    The original PaaS!
    - ASalazarMX 6y ago

blackrock 6y ago

$45/hour is a good rate for Ukrainian developers, I think. Or Philippines developers. That’s about USD $90,000/year. This is good money, if you live remotely in a lower cost of living, foreign country. But it’s a mediocre salary in the United States. You can barely pay your expensive rent with $90k/year. Actually, you’d be at poverty level. And there is zero possibility of affording a house with this salary. But you might be able to eke by if you live in the less competitive Midwest.

dstick 6y ago
The only issue is billable hours - will these be 100%? If the platform has that liquidity, then yes - if not, chasing assignments and lowering prices leads to a race to the bottom.
MattGaiser 6y ago
The poverty line for a family of 4 is $26,500 USD. [0] Median full time income in the USA is $35,977. [1] 90,000 is well away from poverty. [0] https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics,a%20base%20year%20of%201980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_....
- jcun4128 6y ago
  4 people? That's nuts I was making that washing plates as a single person no dependents. I think maybe less actually after taxes.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    You were probably making that in California though, not WV or SC. Houses are less than a year of developer pay there.
    - jcun4128 6y ago
      I was in KS and I was just paid "highly" eg. $12+/hr although I was multi-role edit: maybe less was making $11-12/hr and not full time, my math was off. I was freelancing on the side though before I got into the industry but yeah $20K range was my figure at that time eg. just over 3 years ago(it did suck, I was mad broke still am but working on it).

Solvitieg 6y ago

I'm not sure I agree. Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers and OSS pays $0/h and attracts great developers.

debaserab2 6y ago
> Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers Eh...
xboxnolifes 6y ago
Covered > Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping
GVIrish 6y ago
This is true, but it illustrates a key dynamic. For most people, as soon as you put a dollar value on a task that someone may have done for free or for fun, you have now fundamentally changed that relationship. If someone is doing something for only the intrinsic motivation, putting a dollar value on it changes it to an economic calculation. The person may still do it for money, but they're more likely to only do a level of effort commensurate to the economic reward. Whereas if they're doing things for intrinsic reasons they may be willing to do more work. There are a couple of behavioral economics experiments that bear this out. The Soma Experiment from the 70's gave participants a puzzle game to solve, and measured how long they tried to solve it. One group of participants was paid for their time, the other wasn't. The paid group on average spent less time trying to solve the puzzle than the group that wasn't paid. There are a couple of other experiments in that vein, but the common thread is that intrinsic motivation can be more powerful than economic rewards in multiple contexts. So someone might be willing to contribute some code to OSS for free, but if you ask them to develop some code for $30/hr they might pass.
- 6510 6y ago
  They pass then everyone else is unwilling to do anything for free ever again.
armadsen 6y ago

908B64B197 6y ago

And to filter out who can answer questions. 45$/h will attract a LOT of attention online. And not from the folks who should be answering questions. Just look at what happened with Hacktoberfest [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052

tyingq 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, I apparently missed the story the first time. Unfortunately, Twitter suspended the @shitoberfest account (https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/ https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/) Would have loved to have a look.
- ev1 6y ago
  TLDR: Imagine every single major repo being inundated with tens or hundreds of thousands of absolute rubbish PR's that do nothing but change one line and break the build. Like fork React or Linux and then open a random file in the web editor and type "GIVE ME SHIRT" in a random position. Then save it and commit and submit a PR. Followed by opening a dozen issues demanding that it be accepted so it counts for the free shirt. I contributed to a small (<5k star) repo at the time and after telling the issue/PR-creators to stop, started getting newsletter signup spam and hate mail directed to my git commit email too.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    I don't even know who I pissed off, but a couple months ago wound up on every dating site one could think of's mailing/user list... I mean whoever did it obviously spent a fair amount of time just finding all the damned places... I was hitting block and report spam for weeks...

tyingq 6y ago

Seems like there's a good incentive not for the best developers, but for the most patient ones. Since patience in this case means more paid minutes.

andrei_says_ 6y ago

> Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping. > Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$. This is crucial. Changing incentives changes the social contract and relationship and does that irrevocably. I recommend Dan Ariely’s book Amazing Decisions on this topic. Example: You don’t pay for the thanksgiving turkey dinner at your inlaws’ and if you did that’s be rude no matter the amount. If you give your neighbor some fruit from the tree in your yard that’s one kind of relationship. If next year you try to sell it that’s a very different one. Transitioning from one to the other is significant. Lastly, financial incentives kill generosity. The giver now starts to worry if they’re providing too high of a value.

etothepii 6y ago
A girlfriend's mother once asked to pay me after fixing her computer. I said a bottle of wine will be fine. (I'd just turned 18) She said no I insist. I said well my rate is £100 an hour and it took three hours. She chose to give me a bottle of wine.
- erhk 6y ago
  Is 18 the drinking age in this story?
  - pugz 6y ago
    Given the currency (£), I suspect so.
    - xarope 6y ago
      A UK colleague was devastated when he came to Texas for a project; luckily he turned 21 a few weeks later...!
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        I was so surprised and annoyed that they tried to ask for my ID almost everywhere in the US. I’m 33, I don’t look anywhere near a student any more. At the time I was allowed to drink from 16 in my home country.

mcadenhe 6y ago

I liked what another commenter said about adding tiers for devs with higher S/O rep. So if the dev has a higher rep, they can make more $ per minute. Something I'll look into adding. I don't think anyone is going to make much money off of it starting out since I don't have a large supply of questions coming in yet, but there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do. I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. So they post the questions hoping someone can guide them. Call a Dev isn't a competitor to S/O. S/O is a wiki. Call a Dev is basically Clippy in human form that you pay per minute.

908B64B197 6y ago
> there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do. Maybe there's a reason they are unemployed > I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. Isn't is the point of engineering? To know how to get information and what to search for? If the 15$/hour dev knows and the guy on my team doesn't, why am-I not employing the person answering questions? My company sure pays more than 15$/hour...

p1necone 6y ago

45 USD an hour is quite a lot outside of the USA (even just outside of silicon valley?).

dboreham 6y ago
> even just outside of silicon valley No, you're going to pay $70/hr for car repair and roofing work in the middle of the US.
ido 6y ago
It's ok for a normal job (guaranteed 40h/week) but for hour-based freelancing (let along minute based!) it's really not. $45 is €37 and you can absolutely get more than that as a freelance developer here in Germany. People who are used to getting a salary severely over estimate how much money an hourly rate translate to per year when you don't have guaranteed work lined up. As a rule of thumb $x per hour is equivalent to roughly $xK per year for a salaried position when you account for unpaid time between gigs, paying your own insurances, paying for your own equipment, not getting paid vacation and sick leave, etc.

keithnz 6y ago

some how if you can leverage reuse of questions so someway for someone paying for an already answered question then it would scale up and keep paying somewhat like SO rep works. I'm currently in the top 0.58% of SO users with a reach of 4.3 million people, if you can monetize that to a small extent it could somehow provide a scalable pay scale.

ChrisRR 6y ago

Unfortunately I suspect this may go the way of many freelance sites, and get absolutely flooded with low quality indian developers. Where the wage is lower $0.75 may seem a lot more attractive and there are a lot of fresh out of university indian devs. If you've ever tried bidding on remote dev jobs online, you'll practically always get undercut by an indian dev at a price you can't even come close to matching, and unfortunately I suspect that given how often they appear in comments online asking people to do their entire project, I suspect they may often be bidding for jobs they don't know how to do.

mywittyname 6y ago

Seems like a silly mechanism. I think a better tactic would be to offer "bounties" on problems, then devs can decide whether or not the problem is worth the effort. As long as the requester defines the input/output for the change, then this should work out well. There are times when I'd spend 15 minutes writing a small bash script for $30. Sometimes I feel guilty about buying luxuries like delivered food, and I wouldn't feel so guilty if I use half the saved time earning enough to pay for the meal, even if it is well under my typical billing rate.

Smithalicious 6y ago

Only for Americans. Everywhere else in the world that's a lot of money. Your average software engineer in Europe can hope to earn maybe €50k per year late into their career at most.