6 ms·

With all due respect, your comment reads like a case of 'I don't know math'-ism. - $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary. That would

With all due respect, your comment reads like a case of 'I don't know math'-ism. - $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary. That would have been low for me when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000; in Silicon Valley in 2020, you could make more than that working at Panda Express. (This is not an exaggeration for effect, I promise.) - doubling it to $20,000 is a $60K/year salary equivalent, right? That would have been just fine when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000! In Silicon Valley in 2020, it is…not super great, let's just say. BUT! - problem #1: "equivalent" is a dodge in practice, since actually it's, well, just $20K flat. WHICH LEADS TO! - problem #2: the "extra six months" the article referred to the employer trying to add on after the fact did not refer to adding more money to the contract. Now we've gone from $20K for four months to $20K for ten months -- which is actually worse than the original offer -- and at this point we are handily back to "screw this, I'm gonna make more money slinging orange chicken at the mall". tl;dr: the problem is not with the author wanting their time to be properly valued. "But building hardware is expensive, man" is not sufficient justification for this kind of nonsense.

zackbloom 5y ago
My understanding is the company wasn't paying for her time, it was paying for a job to be done by an ostensibly part-time contractor. I'm not sure how the deadline changing increases the amount of work that was to be done.
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  They are asking for a timed exclusive on a product that isn't part of the contracted work. Timed exclusive release rights typically cost significantly more than straight-up contract work.
swiftcoder 5y ago
Also keep in mind that contractor rates typically need to be 1.5-2.0x higher than salaried wages, since the contractor has to cover all healthcare+benefits themselves, plus whatever time it takes to find a next contract/gig/job when the current contract is over.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Everything else aside, let's pick a math and stick with it :). The offer was not (as I understand it) $20k for 4 months of life, it was $20k for estimated 300-400hrs of work, freely estimated by the author themselves. Which comes out to $50-$65 USD/hr. Which is atrociously low for Silicon Valley consultant rates, and quite high in much of the world. So it may well not be worth author's time, but does not on its own indicate atrocious personal intentional malignant disrespect worthy of international outrage. (everything else, I'm leaving intentionally aside - I understand a small snippet of one person's perspective about the issue, and nothing about the framework of hardware development, where I hear margins to be slimmer than slim, unlike in the wider world of purely-software development).
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Which is atrociously low for [deleted] consultant rates I don't think $50 an hour is a reasonable salary for consulting period. An experienced/senior developer working full time for a company with benefits in a cheap area should still (off the top of my head) probably be looking for at min $100,000 to $120,000 yearly salary (roughly $50 an hour). Depending on the situation you might be able to get more than that, I'm sure I could find people who would tell me that my estimation is also low. It is a very low salary for developers living in San Francisco, but let's leave that area out of the conversation for a second since it's something of an anomaly. When you consult/contract, you are now paying for your own health insurance, your taxes are now more complicated, you are paying for most of your own gear, your situation is more complicated and your work is short time, you don't have the same level of job security, you are more self-directed, and you are taking on a greater amount of responsibility for the success of the project you're working on. You need to charge more for consulting work than you charge for normal full-time development. And all of that even ignores that at the point you're doing consulting work, you're doing it because you're likely a domain expert. A full-time domain expert in a company should be making way more than $120,000 a year, and similarly should be charging even more for consulting work. Contractors undervaluing themselves and choosing to charge too little is a pretty big cause of burnout and failure for people who are trying to get into that kind of work. I would not entertain for a second a $50 an hour rate for contracting work even if I lived in a rural area with cheap housing. Everyone's situation is different, maybe there are people who can make that work and it makes sense for them, but on average people undervalue what their salaries should be when contracting. The overwhelming advice that I hear from contractors is "take what you think is fair to pay yourself and at least double it to get your minimum rate." Huge cause of burnout for people who get into self-employment, they give away their work for too little and then can't keep up because they're over-stressed and overworked.
beervirus 5y ago
$10,000 was for moonlighting, not a full-time job.
xondono 5y ago
> $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary. I have a senior dev on my team at 35k€/year. Prices in SV != Prices in the rest of the world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

zackbloom 5y ago

My understanding is the company wasn't paying for her time, it was paying for a job to be done by an ostensibly part-time contractor. I'm not sure how the deadline changing increases the amount of work that was to be done.

swiftcoder 5y ago
They are asking for a timed exclusive on a product that isn't part of the contracted work. Timed exclusive release rights typically cost significantly more than straight-up contract work.

swiftcoder 5y ago

Also keep in mind that contractor rates typically need to be 1.5-2.0x higher than salaried wages, since the contractor has to cover all healthcare+benefits themselves, plus whatever time it takes to find a next contract/gig/job when the current contract is over.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

Everything else aside, let's pick a math and stick with it :). The offer was not (as I understand it) $20k for 4 months of life, it was $20k for estimated 300-400hrs of work, freely estimated by the author themselves. Which comes out to $50-$65 USD/hr. Which is atrociously low for Silicon Valley consultant rates, and quite high in much of the world. So it may well not be worth author's time, but does not on its own indicate atrocious personal intentional malignant disrespect worthy of international outrage. (everything else, I'm leaving intentionally aside - I understand a small snippet of one person's perspective about the issue, and nothing about the framework of hardware development, where I hear margins to be slimmer than slim, unlike in the wider world of purely-software development).

danShumway 5y ago
> Which is atrociously low for [deleted] consultant rates I don't think $50 an hour is a reasonable salary for consulting period. An experienced/senior developer working full time for a company with benefits in a cheap area should still (off the top of my head) probably be looking for at min $100,000 to $120,000 yearly salary (roughly $50 an hour). Depending on the situation you might be able to get more than that, I'm sure I could find people who would tell me that my estimation is also low. It is a very low salary for developers living in San Francisco, but let's leave that area out of the conversation for a second since it's something of an anomaly. When you consult/contract, you are now paying for your own health insurance, your taxes are now more complicated, you are paying for most of your own gear, your situation is more complicated and your work is short time, you don't have the same level of job security, you are more self-directed, and you are taking on a greater amount of responsibility for the success of the project you're working on. You need to charge more for consulting work than you charge for normal full-time development. And all of that even ignores that at the point you're doing consulting work, you're doing it because you're likely a domain expert. A full-time domain expert in a company should be making way more than $120,000 a year, and similarly should be charging even more for consulting work. Contractors undervaluing themselves and choosing to charge too little is a pretty big cause of burnout and failure for people who are trying to get into that kind of work. I would not entertain for a second a $50 an hour rate for contracting work even if I lived in a rural area with cheap housing. Everyone's situation is different, maybe there are people who can make that work and it makes sense for them, but on average people undervalue what their salaries should be when contracting. The overwhelming advice that I hear from contractors is "take what you think is fair to pay yourself and at least double it to get your minimum rate." Huge cause of burnout for people who get into self-employment, they give away their work for too little and then can't keep up because they're over-stressed and overworked.

beervirus 5y ago

$10,000 was for moonlighting, not a full-time job.

xondono 5y ago

> $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary. I have a senior dev on my team at 35k€/year. Prices in SV != Prices in the rest of the world.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]