11 ms·

High-wage skills, or why you might want to learn Clojure if you're not a lawyer

82 points by Panos 15y ago

swalsh 15y ago
On a completely unrelated note, I'm curious if anyone has tried odesk from a developer point of view? Freelance websites like elance seem to play host to a pretty poor type of client, so I've stayed away. Curious if odesk is any bettering that way?
- john_horton 15y ago
  So my anecdotal impression is that the most successful freelancers learn to get very picky about who they work with---they want to see a verified payment method (esp. if the client is proposing a fixed-price contract), a history of hires and successful projects at reasonable wages and a good job description.
- talkingquickly 15y ago
  I've tried a few Freelancer sites and found them to be a good way to find new clients but it's been worth being very selective about clients and never competing on price. There are actually quite a few excellent clients out there on those sites but they actively won't talk to people who bid at the level of the bid-on-everything-then-outsource "suppliers" who plague freelancer markets.
- garethsprice 15y ago
  Problem is, you're competing with people in places with a far lower cost of living - especially in "mainstream" technologies. oDesk clients tend to be one of two types: Skilled project managers/architects/agencies looking for subcontractors, or businesses looking to save a buck by not hiring the former. The first group are great, they know exactly what they want and will pay for quality. The latter are hell as they often have no idea how to communicate requirements, scope, process, etc and want everything cheap. If you live in the first world and have the communication skills, the best place to find freelance development work (IME) is still community networking.
- tluyben2 15y ago
  I tried it both ways; employer & developer; both work fine on oDesk. Much better than other sites I have tried. Basic thing is ; don't go for mainstream. You cannot compete on price doing PHP or something like that. If you have something 'niche', you can pretty much ask what you want and get it.
prof_hobart 15y ago
Apologies if I'm missing this in the article, but it doesn't seem to take into account the level of demand for those skills. It's all very well having a skill that demands $50/hr, if openings for that skill only come up once in a blue moon.
- john_horton 15y ago
  You're right---there's nothing about the demand side yet. That's my next blog post. I'll show the earned wages by skill and some measures of demand & trade volume in different skills.
  - larrys 15y ago
    John - Can I get a link to the "controlled, centralized vocabulary of about 1,400 skills"? Not finding it anywhere I've looked.
berntb 15y ago
Comparing MongoDB (in absolute bootom) to Redis (5th place) makes me think I've missed something? Is Redis that hard to use or does the number of Redis users increase exponentially with a resulting lack of skills? (Or is the web site not a good salary predictor?)
- achompas 15y ago
  MongoDB is a VC-backed technology, which has spurred its adoption at funded startups. Since they're funded, those startups can also afford to pay engineers more.
  - simonbrown 15y ago
    MongoDB is one of the lowest-paid, not highest.
  - getsat 15y ago
    MongoDB was also hyped to hell and back, which probably accounts for more of its adoption than the fact that it's VC-backed. IIRC, most of the big name adopters (Foursquare, etc.) were using it before it got funding, too.
- rythie 15y ago
  It's the top 50 of 1400 skills.
- cageface 15y ago
  Particularly when indeed.com lists MongoDB as their #2 hottest skill: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends
tom_b 15y ago
This analysis is deeply flawed. The association between skills listed in a worker's profile and hourly wages is accidental. The actual analysis we want to see should be project based, showing what projects (in which I would like to see technologies used as variables) command the highest hourly wages. I would guess that most HN'ers do believe that using a better blub makes them more effective as hackers. What we don't see FTA is a link between USING the better blub and hourly wages. Maybe Clojure developers are a subset of the top 5% of Java hackers. One possibility is they are then hired to work on projects using Java and that they might command higher hourly wages (being in the top 5% of Java hackers and assuming this is demonstrable to hiring orgs) rather than being especially valued for their Clojure skills. And, make your chart x-axis start at 0 instead of 25. :) Tufte rules.
- john_horton 15y ago
  1) The data are what they are - these are the rates people are charging by listed skill. It would be very interesting to look at prices by actual completed projects, but that's just another approach one can take. 2) I make it very clear that there's an association, not a causal claim. I flag the fact, make a lame joke about it and put "might* in the title. 3) There's no Tufte rule about starting charts at 0 - you make choices that make it easier for people to make comparisons. Paul Krugman said it better than anyone on this topic: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/
  - tom_b 15y ago
    Yes, but not rates being charged for using the listed skill. As to the dreaded axis values: I think your chart, in this context, does exaggerate the variation in hourly wage by skill. At first glance, almost all your data points are between $25 and $35. Clojure hourly wage is around $31 per hour from the interactive chart. Your lowest hourly wage for a skill, haml, is $25.90. This simply is not much of a difference and your chart should make that clear. I like your article. It is interesting, and I appreciate your efforts to take this data and provide some value out of it to the community. I think we need to be more conservative in drawing any conclusions out of this data though.
fshaun 15y ago
With a cap of $100/hr does the data really reflect "high-wage" skills? Lawyers start well above that and it's smack in the middle of a poll from a few years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553794 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553794.
- jandrewrogers 15y ago
  That was my impression as well. The rates are from the lower end of the pool, people with general experience and no deep expertise. I have worked off and on for many years as a contractor working on high-end database scalability and performance issues as well as parallel algorithm design. While the rates fluctuated with the market and how much I liked the project, I was always charging well above $100/hr even for terms that ran several months. A lot of it has to do with who your customers are. If you are working on the design of a system that will be moving $250M per year if it performs correctly, spending an extra $100k to hire a deep expert in the design of such systems is below the noise floor. You might be a "database scalability consultant" but you are not fishing in the same pool as most of the people that claim similar labels for themselves.
- vidarh 15y ago
  > Lawyers start well above that Do they? My wife works at one of the largest law firms in the world, and trainees there makes about $10-$15/hour. On paper their salary is high, but the hourly rate is pushed far down because of ridiculously long hours. Their secretaries make as much or more than them. Newly qualified lawyers there make $20/hour if they're lucky. This is in the UK, specifically in a London "magic circle" firm - one of the highest paying law firms in the UK. US firms in London pay up to about 1/3 more total yearly salary, commensurate with the same firms salary levels in the US, but also tends to expect even longer hours. It's first quite a few years post qualification that their salaries get high enough that their hourly rates starts to become decent. Average salary for a solicitor in the UK was around $37k/year a couple of years back, for longer than average hours, at a time when the national average salary in the uk was ca. $40k/year... I'm sure there are lawyers who start out at high hourly rates from day one, but I'd be surprised if more than a tiny fraction starts out around the $100/hour rate. Actual billed out rate from a major law firm, sure - my wife is billed out at around $300/hour as a trainee.
balloot 15y ago
The article is only looking at the relationship in one direction. It's not entirely that learning clojure makes you money, it's that high level academic types that are predisposed to high wage jobs are more likely to know clojure. I would actually argue that this is the far more significant causation relationship. But what do I know - I don't know clojure. :)
tluyben2 15y ago
Point: if you want to make nice money on oDesk, offer a niche expertise. I started a small company doing node.js/mongodb/redis and I can pretty much ask what I want. There is no competition. On the other hand, when i'm short handed, it's impossible to find people with these skills on a non-beginner level who are not really insanely expensive, so it's not exactly a highly scalable business ;)
jnbiche 15y ago
This data only reflects the oDesk labor market (which is notoriously a race to the bottom). I would hesitate to draw any other conclusions. However, it would be interesting to see this data broken down by geographic region.
modoc 15y ago
There are many niche skill sets out there where the demand far exceeds the currently supply, and as such hourly rates from $100/hour (lower level) to $200+/hour (architect level) are quite common and you really can pick your job/location/work from home, etc... The trick is finding one, and learning it quickly/well. I've often thought about grabbing a bunch of folks with a similar relevant skill set, investing 6-12 months in training them, and then running a hugely profitable consulting company for a while. The problem being it's hard to prevent people from hanging out for your 12 months of training, and then jumping ship to do their own thing afterward...
- jandrewrogers 15y ago
  The kind of expertise that consistently commands the high rates requires a level of experience that cannot be developed through training. It requires in-field domain expertise developed over a few years. What you are talking about is what many consulting companies actually do, and it is one of the reasons that consulting companies have such a poor reputation for execution. Customers are paying for the expertise you will not pick up in training or by reading a book. I ran a successful consulting business many years ago (and hated it). One of the things you learn is that you live and die by the quality of the people you can deploy because that goes straight to your reputation. In practice, consulting businesses are very difficult to scale. While you may start out high-end with a great reputation because you really know what you are doing, it is very difficult to bring in additional people with your level of skill because there is almost no overhead to them working independently. As a result, "scale up" often involves diluting the quality of your overall team to the point where the rates you can charge decline as well. Consequently, you either have to run a very small boutique consulting shop that can maintain its standards and billing rate or run a large generic shop that makes up for the lower billing rate in volume. For people that care about the quality of their work, the former is more rewarding but the economics work out such that you will make about as much money by going direct as a highly-paid contractor to another company.
  - modoc 15y ago
    In this particular case I'm not talking about grabbing random people, I'm talking about people who are very skilled in a similar tech stack (which has a much higher supply/demand ratio, and getting them up to speed with the very similar but niche stack. Basically you're just learning some new APIs and some new service providers (i.e. proprietary ORM instead of Hibernate). But I agree with your assessment of consulting firms and the scaling/quality issues therein. I also feel that consulting shops expenses tend to scale a lot closer to profits than some other businesses, so I stay out of it:)
itmag 15y ago
I didn't RTFA yet but what I want to ask HN readers: what are some good niches in IT work that are proven to reap high wages in consulting? If I'm going to be a highly paid consultant instead of an underpaid employee I have to do something more desirable/uncommon than .NET boilerplate coding...
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  The article is short, you should just read it.
  - itmag 15y ago
    It's just a particular way to analyze some data on oDesk, I wouldn't take it as a gospel of pure truth. I want to find out about the tried and tested niches that HN readers might know about. Background: my goal is to find some in-demand yet rare skill and hammer the crap out of that so I can get paid more per hour and cut down the percentage of my life that is spent generating income for food, shelter, clothes, etc. Working 40 hours per week doing boring C# code is very inefficient when I have so many other projects that need to be done. And for the time being (ie until I build the next Facebook :)) I think consulting will be the best way for me to reach my objective.
Zak 15y ago
These wages are shockingly low. Who's actually working as a programmer doing NLP and only charging $30/hour?
- fbuilesv 15y ago
  You'd be amazed at how much $240 a day is in developing countries. In some latin american countries $240 is the minimum wage for a month; earning $4800 per month is more than what a typical worker makes in an entire year. $30/hour would make you part of the 1% in these countries.
- jimbokun 15y ago
  People looking for work on oDesk.
larrys 15y ago
"High-wage skills on oDesk (or why you might want to learn Clojure if you're not a lawyer) " Totally a link bait title. Clojure hasn't been around that long and therefore hasn't been in demand that long. Heading off in any one particular direction based upon the way things appear to be now vs. what they will be long term wouldn't be what I would do. Do you think "clojure" is like "plastics". I don't think it is. Also, as has happened with many career/skill (nursing at some point, law now) once the word gets out that something is in demand (because of supply and demand in balance) that changes as people are drawn by the chance to make money. And clojure is a skill it's not a profession. That skill can quickly be replace by the next new thing.
mootothemax 15y ago
Judging by the number of people who contacted me about Python work when I accidentally implied I had Python experience, I'd say that's a pretty hot market right now. Certainly compared to PHP at least ;-)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
klochner 15y ago
I take "Amazon RDS" being in the top 6 as a sign that these numbers are pretty worthless - the whole point of RDS is that it's easier to set-up and administer than a do-it-yourself install.
ux-pro 15y ago
Information architecture is the 4th item? What does that even mean?

82 points by Panos 15y ago

On a completely unrelated note, I'm curious if anyone has tried odesk from a developer point of view? Freelance websites like elance seem to play host to a pretty poor type of client, so I've stayed away. Curious if odesk is any bettering that way?

john_horton 15y ago
So my anecdotal impression is that the most successful freelancers learn to get very picky about who they work with---they want to see a verified payment method (esp. if the client is proposing a fixed-price contract), a history of hires and successful projects at reasonable wages and a good job description.
talkingquickly 15y ago
I've tried a few Freelancer sites and found them to be a good way to find new clients but it's been worth being very selective about clients and never competing on price. There are actually quite a few excellent clients out there on those sites but they actively won't talk to people who bid at the level of the bid-on-everything-then-outsource "suppliers" who plague freelancer markets.
garethsprice 15y ago
Problem is, you're competing with people in places with a far lower cost of living - especially in "mainstream" technologies. oDesk clients tend to be one of two types: Skilled project managers/architects/agencies looking for subcontractors, or businesses looking to save a buck by not hiring the former. The first group are great, they know exactly what they want and will pay for quality. The latter are hell as they often have no idea how to communicate requirements, scope, process, etc and want everything cheap. If you live in the first world and have the communication skills, the best place to find freelance development work (IME) is still community networking.
tluyben2 15y ago
I tried it both ways; employer & developer; both work fine on oDesk. Much better than other sites I have tried. Basic thing is ; don't go for mainstream. You cannot compete on price doing PHP or something like that. If you have something 'niche', you can pretty much ask what you want and get it.

prof_hobart 15y ago

Apologies if I'm missing this in the article, but it doesn't seem to take into account the level of demand for those skills. It's all very well having a skill that demands $50/hr, if openings for that skill only come up once in a blue moon.

john_horton 15y ago
You're right---there's nothing about the demand side yet. That's my next blog post. I'll show the earned wages by skill and some measures of demand & trade volume in different skills.
- larrys 15y ago
  John - Can I get a link to the "controlled, centralized vocabulary of about 1,400 skills"? Not finding it anywhere I've looked.

berntb 15y ago

Comparing MongoDB (in absolute bootom) to Redis (5th place) makes me think I've missed something? Is Redis that hard to use or does the number of Redis users increase exponentially with a resulting lack of skills? (Or is the web site not a good salary predictor?)

achompas 15y ago
MongoDB is a VC-backed technology, which has spurred its adoption at funded startups. Since they're funded, those startups can also afford to pay engineers more.
- simonbrown 15y ago
  MongoDB is one of the lowest-paid, not highest.
- getsat 15y ago
  MongoDB was also hyped to hell and back, which probably accounts for more of its adoption than the fact that it's VC-backed. IIRC, most of the big name adopters (Foursquare, etc.) were using it before it got funding, too.
rythie 15y ago
It's the top 50 of 1400 skills.
cageface 15y ago
Particularly when indeed.com lists MongoDB as their #2 hottest skill: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends

tom_b 15y ago

This analysis is deeply flawed. The association between skills listed in a worker's profile and hourly wages is accidental. The actual analysis we want to see should be project based, showing what projects (in which I would like to see technologies used as variables) command the highest hourly wages. I would guess that most HN'ers do believe that using a better blub makes them more effective as hackers. What we don't see FTA is a link between USING the better blub and hourly wages. Maybe Clojure developers are a subset of the top 5% of Java hackers. One possibility is they are then hired to work on projects using Java and that they might command higher hourly wages (being in the top 5% of Java hackers and assuming this is demonstrable to hiring orgs) rather than being especially valued for their Clojure skills. And, make your chart x-axis start at 0 instead of 25. :) Tufte rules.

john_horton 15y ago
1) The data are what they are - these are the rates people are charging by listed skill. It would be very interesting to look at prices by actual completed projects, but that's just another approach one can take. 2) I make it very clear that there's an association, not a causal claim. I flag the fact, make a lame joke about it and put "might* in the title. 3) There's no Tufte rule about starting charts at 0 - you make choices that make it easier for people to make comparisons. Paul Krugman said it better than anyone on this topic: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/
- tom_b 15y ago
  Yes, but not rates being charged for using the listed skill. As to the dreaded axis values: I think your chart, in this context, does exaggerate the variation in hourly wage by skill. At first glance, almost all your data points are between $25 and $35. Clojure hourly wage is around $31 per hour from the interactive chart. Your lowest hourly wage for a skill, haml, is $25.90. This simply is not much of a difference and your chart should make that clear. I like your article. It is interesting, and I appreciate your efforts to take this data and provide some value out of it to the community. I think we need to be more conservative in drawing any conclusions out of this data though.

fshaun 15y ago

With a cap of $100/hr does the data really reflect "high-wage" skills? Lawyers start well above that and it's smack in the middle of a poll from a few years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553794 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553794.

jandrewrogers 15y ago
That was my impression as well. The rates are from the lower end of the pool, people with general experience and no deep expertise. I have worked off and on for many years as a contractor working on high-end database scalability and performance issues as well as parallel algorithm design. While the rates fluctuated with the market and how much I liked the project, I was always charging well above $100/hr even for terms that ran several months. A lot of it has to do with who your customers are. If you are working on the design of a system that will be moving $250M per year if it performs correctly, spending an extra $100k to hire a deep expert in the design of such systems is below the noise floor. You might be a "database scalability consultant" but you are not fishing in the same pool as most of the people that claim similar labels for themselves.
vidarh 15y ago
> Lawyers start well above that Do they? My wife works at one of the largest law firms in the world, and trainees there makes about $10-$15/hour. On paper their salary is high, but the hourly rate is pushed far down because of ridiculously long hours. Their secretaries make as much or more than them. Newly qualified lawyers there make $20/hour if they're lucky. This is in the UK, specifically in a London "magic circle" firm - one of the highest paying law firms in the UK. US firms in London pay up to about 1/3 more total yearly salary, commensurate with the same firms salary levels in the US, but also tends to expect even longer hours. It's first quite a few years post qualification that their salaries get high enough that their hourly rates starts to become decent. Average salary for a solicitor in the UK was around $37k/year a couple of years back, for longer than average hours, at a time when the national average salary in the uk was ca. $40k/year... I'm sure there are lawyers who start out at high hourly rates from day one, but I'd be surprised if more than a tiny fraction starts out around the $100/hour rate. Actual billed out rate from a major law firm, sure - my wife is billed out at around $300/hour as a trainee.

balloot 15y ago

The article is only looking at the relationship in one direction. It's not entirely that learning clojure makes you money, it's that high level academic types that are predisposed to high wage jobs are more likely to know clojure. I would actually argue that this is the far more significant causation relationship. But what do I know - I don't know clojure. :)

tluyben2 15y ago

Point: if you want to make nice money on oDesk, offer a niche expertise. I started a small company doing node.js/mongodb/redis and I can pretty much ask what I want. There is no competition. On the other hand, when i'm short handed, it's impossible to find people with these skills on a non-beginner level who are not really insanely expensive, so it's not exactly a highly scalable business ;)

jnbiche 15y ago

This data only reflects the oDesk labor market (which is notoriously a race to the bottom). I would hesitate to draw any other conclusions. However, it would be interesting to see this data broken down by geographic region.

modoc 15y ago

There are many niche skill sets out there where the demand far exceeds the currently supply, and as such hourly rates from $100/hour (lower level) to $200+/hour (architect level) are quite common and you really can pick your job/location/work from home, etc... The trick is finding one, and learning it quickly/well. I've often thought about grabbing a bunch of folks with a similar relevant skill set, investing 6-12 months in training them, and then running a hugely profitable consulting company for a while. The problem being it's hard to prevent people from hanging out for your 12 months of training, and then jumping ship to do their own thing afterward...

jandrewrogers 15y ago
The kind of expertise that consistently commands the high rates requires a level of experience that cannot be developed through training. It requires in-field domain expertise developed over a few years. What you are talking about is what many consulting companies actually do, and it is one of the reasons that consulting companies have such a poor reputation for execution. Customers are paying for the expertise you will not pick up in training or by reading a book. I ran a successful consulting business many years ago (and hated it). One of the things you learn is that you live and die by the quality of the people you can deploy because that goes straight to your reputation. In practice, consulting businesses are very difficult to scale. While you may start out high-end with a great reputation because you really know what you are doing, it is very difficult to bring in additional people with your level of skill because there is almost no overhead to them working independently. As a result, "scale up" often involves diluting the quality of your overall team to the point where the rates you can charge decline as well. Consequently, you either have to run a very small boutique consulting shop that can maintain its standards and billing rate or run a large generic shop that makes up for the lower billing rate in volume. For people that care about the quality of their work, the former is more rewarding but the economics work out such that you will make about as much money by going direct as a highly-paid contractor to another company.
- modoc 15y ago
  In this particular case I'm not talking about grabbing random people, I'm talking about people who are very skilled in a similar tech stack (which has a much higher supply/demand ratio, and getting them up to speed with the very similar but niche stack. Basically you're just learning some new APIs and some new service providers (i.e. proprietary ORM instead of Hibernate). But I agree with your assessment of consulting firms and the scaling/quality issues therein. I also feel that consulting shops expenses tend to scale a lot closer to profits than some other businesses, so I stay out of it:)

itmag 15y ago

I didn't RTFA yet but what I want to ask HN readers: what are some good niches in IT work that are proven to reap high wages in consulting? If I'm going to be a highly paid consultant instead of an underpaid employee I have to do something more desirable/uncommon than .NET boilerplate coding...

bostonvaulter2 15y ago
The article is short, you should just read it.
- itmag 15y ago
  It's just a particular way to analyze some data on oDesk, I wouldn't take it as a gospel of pure truth. I want to find out about the tried and tested niches that HN readers might know about. Background: my goal is to find some in-demand yet rare skill and hammer the crap out of that so I can get paid more per hour and cut down the percentage of my life that is spent generating income for food, shelter, clothes, etc. Working 40 hours per week doing boring C# code is very inefficient when I have so many other projects that need to be done. And for the time being (ie until I build the next Facebook :)) I think consulting will be the best way for me to reach my objective.

Zak 15y ago

These wages are shockingly low. Who's actually working as a programmer doing NLP and only charging $30/hour?

fbuilesv 15y ago
You'd be amazed at how much $240 a day is in developing countries. In some latin american countries $240 is the minimum wage for a month; earning $4800 per month is more than what a typical worker makes in an entire year. $30/hour would make you part of the 1% in these countries.
jimbokun 15y ago
People looking for work on oDesk.

larrys 15y ago

"High-wage skills on oDesk (or why you might want to learn Clojure if you're not a lawyer) " Totally a link bait title. Clojure hasn't been around that long and therefore hasn't been in demand that long. Heading off in any one particular direction based upon the way things appear to be now vs. what they will be long term wouldn't be what I would do. Do you think "clojure" is like "plastics". I don't think it is. Also, as has happened with many career/skill (nursing at some point, law now) once the word gets out that something is in demand (because of supply and demand in balance) that changes as people are drawn by the chance to make money. And clojure is a skill it's not a profession. That skill can quickly be replace by the next new thing.

mootothemax 15y ago

Judging by the number of people who contacted me about Python work when I accidentally implied I had Python experience, I'd say that's a pretty hot market right now. Certainly compared to PHP at least ;-)

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

klochner 15y ago

I take "Amazon RDS" being in the top 6 as a sign that these numbers are pretty worthless - the whole point of RDS is that it's easier to set-up and administer than a do-it-yourself install.

ux-pro 15y ago

Information architecture is the 4th item? What does that even mean?