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Good article. >> But if that’s so, then why do most engineers, even the good ones, stay put at their full-time, salaried positions? Fear, wives, families.

• wisevehicle 13y ago
  >> But if that’s so, then why do most engineers, even the good ones, stay put at their full-time, salaried positions? Or because you have to spend an egregious amount of time doing biz dev, and accounting, and software, and PM work, oh and don't forget about Wives, Families.
  • bdunn 13y ago
    Not necessarily. A lot of Rails contracts tend to be multi-month, and if you play your cards right your rate should be upwards of $150/hr. Doing just one 20-week project a year (FT) could net you around $120k, which leaves the rest of the year to do whatever with the family.
    • mattgreenrocks 13y ago
      150/hr? Seriously? Considering how much Rails does for you, that's crazy. Where is it like this?
      • bdunn 13y ago
        A rate like that has little to do with "CS complexity" and everything to do with selling a solution that makes the client better off than they were without said solution. I'm in near-rural Virginia and my last hourly consulting rate was over $200, and I'm not anything close to being an amazing Ruby developer.
        • robflynn 13y ago
          Damn. I need to increase my rates.
        • rahimnathwani 13y ago
          Did you quote that hourly rate to the client ($200/ph and I expect it will take x hours), or did you quote a total for the deliverable? What was the source of the client? If they went looking for a 'programmer', I'm curious why they weren't (like many others) lured by others who are cheaper per hour but worse in every other respect.
          • bdunn 13y ago
            This is from a while ago, but checkout the script at the end of this post: http://planscope.io/blog/my-most-effective-newsletter-to-date/ http://planscope.io/blog/my-most-effective-newsletter-to-dat... This is how I landed many of our clients (I also did a lot of edu-seminars, etc.) Whether I was billing by the hour or the week, I always estimated in a ballpark number of weeks a project would take, which translated to an estimated budget.
            • mratzloff 13y ago
              Great link, thanks! I think my current job will be my last salaried position, at least for awhile. I have a broad range of technical skills and can talk to potential clients, but have always been a bit nervous about taking the plunge (Where will my next client come from? Will I just find cheapskates who want some website for $500 total? Etc.)
      • aantix 13y ago
        +1 for Brennan's response. It's not about the technology used. It's never been about the technology. You're selling yourself. You're selling your track record. You're selling you. It's always about the solution and the peace of mind you bring to the client.
      • patio11 13y ago
        Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Austin, Nuremberg, London, Boston, Ogaki, and anywhere else you can convince a business owner or decisionmaker that you're solving a problem worth $X for some price which is $Y where $Y is less than $X. There are projects which have the technical complexity of the Rails 15 minute blog demo which are worth $100k to the right business. Concrete example: for example, the central SEO tool for Bingo Card Creator is "a purpose-built CMS which is superior in only one hyper-specific way over WordPress." (WordPress doesn't have a "turn this blog post into a bingo card" button. BCC's code does.) That tool comprises about, hmm, 500 lines of code. It has a crank attached to it that can be turned by anyone who has done teaching. That tool plus $3,000 of teacher time equals more than $200k of software sales. BCC is very much not the only software company in the world that can get that scale of benefit out of that scale of software complexity. Or, lets see, you know ActionMailer? You know Rake? You know cron jobs? You know how you could have a cron job fire a Rake task which would send an ActionMailer email? That plus a few hundred words of copy plus a three line if statement can increase the yearly recurring revenue of some businesses by 7+ figures. You can charge $150 an hour if you can write that if statement given a description of the desired behavior. You can charge $30,000 a week (representative number, not a ceiling) if you can people what that if statement should say. Back when I was a consultant, Rails was one tool in my bag of tricks and most of my clients were B2B software companies. It is very much not the case that B2B software companies are the entirety of the solution space for "clients who a computer system could make a shedload of money for."
      • girvo 13y ago
        Brisbane, Australia, for one.
• thezoid 13y ago
  It might be good to generalize that a bit. Fear, spouses, family commitments.
  • somone 13y ago
    Now you're going down this road: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...
    • thezoid 13y ago
      I actively practice using gender neutral nouns whenever I write stuff. Sometimes I'll slip up, but I'm pretty confident this isn't the case with the HN crowd. Using they, spouse or partner is pretty safe and only the only people that are likely to get offended are more than likely already a part of an entitled group anyway.
  • iends 13y ago
    Should probably save this pedantry for elsewhere.
• jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  Not all full-time, salaried positions are bad. He mentioned he wasn't satisfied with the meetings and late nights, but that can't be the case for everyone. Some people like stability, don't want to deal with clients, and just want to code all day. That's fine for some, not for others.
• brandall10 13y ago
  I did it for a little over a year. Here's my reasons, which include none of those - Spent less time coding, but more time overall on overhead to make roughly the same amount when it's all said and done. That said, I was at the point where I could have begun raising my rates significantly. - Nagging clients for payment. It's nice that payment is entirely decoupled from your work. Even if it happens every once in a blue moon it is somewhat disheartening, esp. when they give plenty of praise but "whoops, thought it was sent!" messages. This can be more of a reflection on their bankroll which should be less of an issue as you move further up the client food-chain. - I hate to admit this, but damn that was lonely. Spending days in cafes, at co-working spaces, at the park, at home, etc, sounds wonderful at first - and it is - but the novelty of that can wear off quickly depending on how you carry something like this. For those less outgoing amongst us, a cool company with bright people is quite a nice thing to have around you. - A unified 'big thing' to accomplish with said team. Working on very early stage internet startups to help get something off the ground is fun, but it lacks the depth of what I'm doing now. I can see myself returning to consulting. But I don't see employment vs. consulting as one clearly being better than the other...
  • girvo 13y ago
    The loneliness thing is fixed for myself by working on-site for digital agencies. In terms of pay, I get to ask for 5x what I'd get full time, so it's worth it for me anyway :)
• phamilton 13y ago
  It's easy to be a product builder as a freelancer. It's hard to be a technology builder as a freelancer. The chances are good that you won't be handling millions of requests a day on a freelance contract. You won't hit the limits of the standard Rails stack. You generally won't have to do much to scale the product. That's why I stay put.
  • patio11 13y ago
    It actually isn't too difficult to be involved in a system handling millions of requests a day or hitting the limits of the standard Rails stack as a consultant. It probably won't happen if your client is Ma's Diner and you're building them a brochureware site. Many clients are not Ma's Diner. Many projects are not brochureware sites.
• emperorcezar 13y ago
  For a lot of people health insurance is something they can't go without, and until recently, were unable to get for one thing or another. I don't know if the ACA changed that.
  • OldSchool 13y ago
    If the Affordable Care Act providers deliver what they seem to promise, it's tremendously helpful to small-scale entrepreneurship. Pre-ACA, once you had a family with any health claim history it became increasingly difficult, expensive and invasive to obtain individual health insurance. In some states, maternity coverage was not offered in any usable form. In short, the system was heavily in favor of being a slave to any company large enough to have a group plan. Not only does the ACA makes it easy with its "no questions asked" approach, pricing is 30-50% less than the real cost of similar pre-ACA products. Also, if you have a slow business year, you can get a substantial premium refund via the tax credit, making insurance no longer a primary reason to "get a job."
    • jlees 13y ago
      pricing is 30-50% less than the real cost of similar pre-ACA products. sure, but for many people who didn't need the full scope of what is now the baseline ACA coverage, our individual health insurance bills are much higher. (mine has gone up nearly 3x.) you win some, you lose some.
  • rmc 13y ago
    If it was health insurance, then you'd presume places with national health systems (like the UK) to have drastically more entrepenureship, which is not the case. There is something else going on here.
• djur 13y ago
  Because of a desire to avoid "long nights, excessive meetings" even at an hourly rate. Not all salaried positions are nights-and-weekends affairs. ETA: Rereading, it looks like the article implicitly adds "at a SF startup" after "full-timed, salaried positions". Maybe those positions always involve crazy hours.