$35/hr was writing post-processors for CNC machines. Went up to $75/hr for interactive media work (Flash/Flex). Went up to $150/hr for business systems integration (Netsuite, Salesforce, etc.) Eventually got that up to $300/hr. The astute observer will notice that the rate was inversely proportional to the actual difficulty of the work. This was mostly 10-15 years ago.
$350/hr+ was distributed database related consulting, and then started going North from there for increasingly niche and specialized consulting services. Though only on very rare occasion these days. The highest rate I've ever been able to negotiate was $1,000/hr. But, it was also for a very short engagement (~10 hours) for some especially weird knowledge I have about replacing critical mainframe infrastructure with commodity systems.
Point being, you might be surprised how much you can charge for the right services to the right customers who have a clear sense of need and appropriately value a solution.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you find those clients? I assume it was all mouth to mouth advertisement? How did you switch between those types of work?
Reason I'm asking is because I recently started freelancing in software/web development (about 6 months ago) and I think I'm doing okay. I love to design and think out all of the odd, interesting or difficult back-end problems and so far all of my clients love my work, and with that I'm slowly increasing my rate, started at 50eu/h ($55/hr) and am currently at 75eu/h ($82). This is all in Europe (The Netherlands) However I feel like I'm a bit stuck, the clients I'm able to find don't want to pay more then $80 and with that the work isn't as challenging as I'd like it to be. At the same time it feels like the clients that do want to pay more aren't looking for me.
A combination of word if mouth and eventually targeted business development activities (not sales, but business development).
To make it easier to charge more you have to go after customers who are less price sensitive, whose problems are costing them a lot of money, and who are accustom to acquiring outside help for things outside what they consider to be their core business & expertise.
In my case this was big enterprises. Nationwide law firms, banking & fin. tech. institutions, international distribution & logistics companies, etc.
It took a long time to build up to that point and to get access to those parts of the market. The way it worked for me was, early-on, I'd be doing smaller jobs for big companies. Sometimes with another vendor as an intermediary. So, I might work with Boeing or Lockheed indirectly, but I was fastidious about establishing direct personal relationships. Once I hit the media & marketing world, it was the same pattern. Work through an existing vendor of say Pepsi or Nike, and then make direct personal relationships that could grow later for their adjacent or orthogonal needs.
Eventually you have enough contacts and enough of a reputation that you don't need to leverage the credibility of intermediaries anymore.
I don't know that such a path would work for everyone for all kinds of work (everything I ever did was kind of esoteric for its time), but that's what worked for me.
This is just under what I charge per day for fully remote full-stack JS development and whilst I do need to charge more in future I am happy with my current client and the work is challenging and engaging. As the OP says, if you don't find the work engaging then move on.
Happened like this: one very huge phone company wanted some very specific self contained component written in Java. They shopped around and did not find anyone willing to do it. My friend was working there and told them that he knows that genius consultant (yours truly). So they called me up and during negotiations I told them that I will do it for $20,000. I was prepared to bargain but they told me that I am very reasonable for that functionality. At no point they asked about exact time frame/hourly rate. They just said that the expect it to take no longer than a month.
Came home, fired up my PC and spent 3 very long days coding it. That was all about it. I wish I could nail contracts like this more often ;)
Sometimes average corporate developer just does not cut it. Like you've got a bunch who know how to take data from a database and feed it to web form. Ask them to do anything else and they would expect you to send them to a training courses. I've met quite a few shops like that.
Meanwhile. This project required some imagination and multi-disciplinary knowledge. Sure the company have some geniuses but the company is huge multinational and for one department of their branch it was probably way simpler and cheaper to get someone from outside then shop their other brunch. Big companies are very bureaucratic
I've done freelancing and I'm currently developer on a corporation.
I've seen a lot of talent go in and out. Usually it goes out like this:
- PM is seeking resources internally, you could be reached out and be told on what they are trying to do.
- The project can be complex or easy. Honestly it doesn't matter within the context of working for a company. As far freelancer, you can go on a nitty-gritty with the client on what it takes to do and justify your rates to them... for a already-hired developer:
- There's absolutely no guarantee they will incentivize you after all the efforts (working as a developer for a company). So it really doesn't matter if the project is super complex or not. Management is pretty stupid most of the time and they can't see the level of effort in things even if you break them out to them. Or they can simply be ignorant about it.
- I've said no. Usually I'm very driven with new challenges but I've learned the hard way that it doesn't matter at all. These days I just say "I don't know, sorry." and "yea I just never worked on that". I've seen people gone the road of talking about training courses so they could stall management a lot if they don't have many options.
Why? Because there's really no end goal. You are already hired within the company. Employers take for granted that that's reason enough for you to do it.
Honestly it could go many ways. Not all companies will be as awful as mine. If you are lucky enough to land with a company that recognizes your efforts and incentivizes you for it good for you. I don't think many people are that lucky.
I'd say, believe me there are quite a lot of geniuses, but I've yet to meet a fool that takes the bait of taking more complex work in without proper incentive. (excluding fresh graduates and those still in their starting years)
"I'd say, believe me there are quite a lot of geniuses"
I did not say they were not. Some products said company did develop do require a genius. But from my experience those tend to compartmentalize in appropriate departments and the rest is just average.
I've had a couple of those projects come along. I remember one in particular for a UK pharmaceuticals company. I went to see them and the first thing they said was "We are so glad you are here, we have been looking for a solution for months without any success. At the moment it's costing us a million pounds a day."
It turned out they couldn't produce their compliance documentation and that was delaying the release of a new drug.
The solution wasn't that complex but it did involve the intersection of several different skills. They had in-house devs but none of them wanted to touch it, to them it looked like a problem, to me it looked like an opportunity.
> They had in-house devs but none of them wanted to touch it, to them it looked like a problem, to me it looked like an opportunity.
It wasn't an opportunity for them. The Risk/Reward was probably insanely bad. If they fixed it, they are just "doing their job" and get a pat on the back. If it was that big of a deal though, if they screwed it up its possible they would get fired.
> To them it looked like a
> problem, to me it looked
> like an opportunity.
This is probably the biggest lesson here- finding a reason why to do something versus not doing it is important!
I currently work as a lube tech for a local dealership. (Saving up for the future, and they have better hours and pay than $LocalFastFood.) My coworkers dislike A) vacuuming vehicles and B) doing tire rotations- because both of them take time and effort.
I like doing both of those- they take time- which means I get paid (job security!) and also helps the customer want to come back (arguably more important than any time savings from skipping a rotate or not vacuuming underneath floor mats.)
Turf. Big orgs aren’t good at sharing developers or other staff, people “belong” to their feudal lord. I had a friend billing $300 to zone luns on a SAN (ie he had nothing to do and spent his days studying) while the team 50 feet away was working 16 hour days on something he could do.
The difference was that they worked for different big shots.
A more charitable way to put it is that people have "day jobs" that are being paid for out of someone's budget. I'll help people in other teams out--I have a pretty flexible job description anyway. But if someone wants a week of my time you can be sure they'll need to get my manager's approval. Which seems pretty reasonable. Most organizations wouldn't work very well if everyone just worked on whatever caught their fancy on a given week.
I know a lot about Erlang & Elixir, but almost none of my daily work now would lead me to learn what I know. Some things are probably 3 days of work if you know it, and 3 months of work if you don't.
It is cool when that happens, but it is extremely important to define the scope of work very well when it does. As if the client had a different expectation for the time frame don't be surprised if they then continue bothering you about details of integration of your feature with the rest of their project for a month.
Yeah, also be careful before you say yes; I had a similar opportunity, insanely good money , but when I interviewed a few devs who’d work for them they had a terrible rep for getting out of scope, moving the goalposts and communicating badly.
I worked at a minicomputer manufacture (okay, Prime Computer). Software enhancements large enough to need a proposal always included a section "Non-goals of this change."
This section laid out the things that might sound like they are related but would not be part of the enhancement. For example, a speed-up of the filesystem might have a non-goal of adding new file types.
The rate is partly a function of how deep/rare your subject matter expertise is. Companies will not see $1000/hr as unreasonable if you can deliver sufficient value.
