4 ms·
You're going to get wildly different answers from people who 1) Contracting for the same company all the time (common with people outside the US contracting 40
by cj 4y ago
You're going to get wildly different answers from people who
1) Contracting for the same company all the time (common with people outside the US contracting 40 hrs/week with a US company). These hourly rates will be much lower
2) Contracting for many different companies. These hourly rates are much higher because you need to budget for idle time, searching for your next contract, etc.
- ghaff 4y agoAs contracting blends into consulting, you can easily get into a situation where your on-the-clock time is very valuable but you're not actually on-the-clock all that much. It doesn't mean you're not doing anything but you may be writing/speaking/researching/etc. for "free."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoIs $125/hr for 8 hours a day 5 days a week at a corporation (in lieu of salary) competitive?
- pc86 4y agoWhat's the yearly rate? If you take 3 weeks/year of vacation (standard PTO for a full-time employee in the US), that's $245,000 cash comp. Excluding the SV/HN outliers, that is an extremely good salary for even a senior developer. Until very recently Amazon's cash comp was capped at $160k. Startups lean very heavily on perks and paper stock that is worth nothing 95% of the time. Wider industry (banks, mom/pop shops, design firms, etc) will top out at high 100k/low 200k and usually don't have bonuses more than 3-5% of salary and almost never offer stock.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> that is an extremely good salary for even a senior developer. Is there any kind of "outlier" there with like... it's good for a senior developer but not a principal/architect level developer? I'm just curious why the poll on this post has people saying they are making $150-$300/hr... Are they "lying" and it isn't steady 40 hour a week pay?
- pc86 4y agoArchitect and developer are very different roles, you can be good at one and terrible at the other. And honestly it's going to be hard for you to convince me that a quarter million a year is not a good cash comp for any level of developer. I don't think anybody is lying but if your first reaction is to compare consulting/contracting engagements with W2 FTE salaries you're just in for a bad time. They're just too different. $300/hr does not immediately correlate to $600k/yr (in fact it almost never does).
- granshaw 4y agoIf you go solely for the true contracting, long term staff aug type engagements then you can completely fill your pipeline and it correlates well You’ll need to worry about finding new clients at most twice a year, and can easily find gigs through recruiters or agencies if you don’t wanna do your own marketing Granted it doesn’t pay as well - low risk low reward
- granshaw 4y agoIf you’re quite experienced in a certain tech (nothing special, for example just Rails) 150+ is quite doable even subcontracting or on long 6mos+ engagements where you don’t worry much about finding clients I subcontracted for about 6mos with a late stage startup at closer to the 100/hr rate, then negotiated up to closer to 150 for the next 6 I wasn’t doing anything special, literally just another dev on a given team just without benefits and without having to attend company events or having a boss And this was my first ever contracting engagement too (was all fulltime before that)
- seabrookmx 4y agoBased on my experience as a Canadian who has done the 40-hour week "contracting" thing (basically they were too lazy to set up Canadian payroll), I'd say definitely!
- treespace8 4y agoYes 125 CAD/ 40 hours a week "Contracting" is very doable in Canada. Especially for a USA company.