Kent Parker wrote: > Interesting costing system Don, but hardly of much relevance to a > student.
It's all relevant and especially to students. As as student, if you one day want to move on to doing programming as a full time job, you'll want to understand this stuff. > It's of very little relevance to me either and I've been > full time freelancer for 8 months. Because I'm not charging $70 an > hour I spend 40 hours a week on billable work. It's been several > months since I've had to seek work and I am full up until February at > least. Ok, that comment just suggests to me that you didn't understand the purpose of the template, hence I've updated it with some colour and more info. In your case you should put your own numbers in. If you can get 40 hours billable and still put some time back in to FLOSS development and community support that's great! > If you are spending 20 hours a week seeking potential work then that > is a sure sign you are charging too much. It could also suggest that you want a better quality of work life. You don't want to have to code hard out all day every day for 8 hours a day but still want to make a reasonable wage - would you call $55k unreasonable? > > Because I work from home, petrol and rent are irrelevant. Wrong. Petrol to visit your clients and suppliers is relevant. Rent is tax deductable. >IRD > wouldn't let me even if I tried to include rent as a business > expense. Wrong - we claimed 30% last year alone. > At least half those items are totally irrelevant to > freelancers and apply only to software houses. Wrong - other than the data projector, I claimed all of those last year. > > The normal market process is that freelancer starts off with a > competitive rate because they have less overheads. If freelancer > succeeds and gets reputation then freelancer becomes established > business, employs staff and charges more on the basis of reputation/ > brand. Perhaps on your moon :) I've spent years doing freelance stuff and don't currently have plans to employ staff though I do use contractors. > Don't want to spoil your fun No fun spoiled at all. :) You're views are very welcomed here... though I don't agree with you, think you're just wrong on some counts, you've raised some really good points and highlighted that I failed to explain my point well in the first instance. Spoiling the fun would have been to just ignore my error! > but this costing is too much too soon for > any newbie. If this costing is to much for a newbi who is wanting to be a good PHP programmer then, with respect, I suggest they go off and get a job at KMart. You may not recall, but the orginal post was about how much to charge. Most people responded with comments centered around charging a market rate so as not to disturb the market. I responded by saying that answer is unacceptable. It's, in part, not ok because the current market rate may be being set by a large player who has a reason to drive market prices down. The correct answer to the question is to cost out what you should be charging then work from there. Cheers Don --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
