Hey guys..MASSIVELY OFF TOPIC!!!!!! :( :( :( At 12:24 AM 10/3/2001 -0400, Michael Bacarella wrote: > > I've had about two years of experience with perl, and one year of > > experience with mod_perl and MySQL. > > > > I've been doing contract programming jobs for people and charged by the > > hour. The rate I currently charge them ($40) was kind of chosen randomly. > > I'd like to find out if this figure is too high/too low. Does anyone here > > have any experiences to share? > >Contract programming is entirely different from salaried work. > >Assuming you live in the United States and are charging US dollars, >Consider: > > Taxes (including an additional self-employment tax). > > Insurance (health, general liability, and possibly others) > > (Home) Office Expenses -- stuff you use to generate invoices, > stuff you > use to do your actual work if done in your home, rent, etc. > > Continued education -- consultants are expected to be experts. > > Greater risk. You generally will also never work as much as > you'd like to. > > Your clients also get to wash their hands of you completely. Your > expenses are a direct tax writeoff, rather than an additional > accounting headache. > > >After deducting all of the above, a $40/hr rate starts looking more like >an $18/hr rate, and maybe even less. Consultants don't _just_ bill >$100/hr because they're scam artists. :)
It depends on your location of course. I notice that Michael is in Manhattan which is a pretty expensive salary area of the USA. And it also depends on how long you are on a contract -- 6 months? A year at a time? or just a week or two to solve a specialized problem? >You're charging effectively half of what a salaried perl/mysql hacker >costs. Humility is a valuable business trait, but I'm positive you're >worth more than you're charging. Maybe.