You are saying never start a startup? If you don’t want to take a risk on a startup, you’re much better off taking a salary job than trying to get a high hourly

You are saying never start a startup? If you don’t want to take a risk on a startup, you’re much better off taking a salary job than trying to get a high hourly contracting rate. Strange analysis, these numbers mostly don’t add up. People contracting at an hourly rate almost never get constant consistent work, otherwise you’d get hired on a salary. You have to spend half your time looking for work, and you’re not accounting for that at all. At 400 hours/month, you are suggesting working 90 hours per week for 365 days per year. Having worked this many hours before for stretches, I know first hand this is a recipe for complete and total burnout and depression within a few months. And even 90 hours per week at $150 per hour doesn’t add up to 70k/month, it’s 60k/month. 2x/3x engineer is usually referring to productivity, but not pay. You generally can’t increase your pay by being more productive. Pay scales that you’re talking about ($300/hr, $450/hr, $600/hr) are extremely rare in engineering and come only with niche software markets. Almost nobody is making hourly rates like that, there’s nothing basic about it, this is an unrealistic goal.