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> 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 pr

> 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 ago
Architect 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 ago
  If 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 ago
If 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)

pc86 4y ago

Architect 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 ago
If 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 ago

If 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)