In my personal freelancing experience, I need a certain amount of money before I feel it's worth using my spare time to work for someone else. I'm curious as to what that level is for HNers. How much do you bring in on an average freelance job?
Working in the chemical engineering area. Hard science + all the cool technologies you can read on HN => Fun + money. Usually a contract starts at $15k (2 weeks) and goes up to 2 months of work on average.
I always advice people to go the hard science way if they like computer science, because there is a really big big lack of people being good at both. I should write about it.
If you ever get a chance, please do, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I've thought about going into a hard science industry but never did anything about it because 1) I'm not really qualified in the science side, my skills/experience/qualifications are in computer science and 2) I don't really know how to get started.
the one thing about hard science - it's a specialty that can distinguish you from general programming, which may increase the rate. however, you don't want to get in the business of competing with graduate students, who are accustomed to doing very difficult work for very little money.
I did a lot of operations-research type programming in grad school, and I thought it would set me apart, but I've found that the jobs that want programming and OR skills don't seem to pay any better than other types of programming. This is jobs, not consulting gigs, though, and I'm only basing this on a few data points.
I'd also be interested in what you have to write about it.
Off-topic: what books do you recommend on chemical engineering? What's the equivalent of The Art of Electronics for analog electronics, or HDL Chip Design for digital chip design, or Code Complete or Algorithms in C or CLRS or The Pragmatic Programmer or SICP or TAOCP for software?
Yeah, please do. And if you can, please, I need to know if it's possible to do it remotely (or with a meeting or two at most).
- I mean, I'm not from a developed country. Is that still possible that I can take advantage of mastering both skills? I'm currently a Medicine student with good programming skills. -
that brings up a question for me. when you say $15K/2weeks, is that for a task that can be accomplished by a single person (2x40h), or do you have to break the job up amongst other people?
I'm a chemical engineer myself, and often wondered if there were any others interested in programming as much as I am. I'd be interested to see what sorts of marriages you have made between the two fields. Do you have any links you could post or send me?
My Dad is an engraver, he's good at it, he was complaining to me that he had more work than he could handle. I suggested he raise his price then. He responded with the typical "I couldn't in good conscience charge that for something that takes me only a few hours to do!" And then we had a long discussion about how the market sets the rate, not you, and if you hold your rate under market it will overwhelm you because you're leaving money on the table, if you don't have enough work to keep you busy then you're over market. The key here is the market sets the rate, you don't.
Once we established that it was pretty easy to see how letting his rate float up would help with his workload, he would not only be less overloaded but he would be collecting more of the market value of his work. Since in his case (he's nominally retired) not working at all was just fine, he had a lot of freedom in over shooting the market and then coming back.
I recognize that its not as useful for someone who is wondering where rent money will come from.
Funny thing is, my parents (who are both near-retirement service providers in their own professions) won't adopt such a model in either direction (raising their rates or decreasing their rates based on workload).
They also just recently chastised my brother (who is in his mid-20s) for doing an arbitrage play where he could get a plentiful supply of iPad 2's on discount and sell them above market rate on eBay.
Threads like this remind me that I wasn't bought up in a capitalist family.
Yeah. It's weird to think about making a lot of money for a small amount of work, but it does make sense in the market.
I mean, if 16 people are willing to pay for an hour of your time on Monday, and you're only going to work 8 hours, how do you decide which lucky 8 people get your services? 1) First come first serve? 2) Pick 8 at random? 3) Pick the 8 who want it most?
#3 is most easily measured in "dollars they will pay," so you raise your price. Of course, it also favors the wealthy, so if you feel badly about that, do some pro bono or find a way to provide tiers of service at different prices.
This is so true and the funny thing about it is that it makes sense logically yet it runs so contrary to our natural inclinations or at least mine and I'm sure many others.
That's the basic thesis of Earn1K - the "I will teach you to be rich" course. I won't link here, as it's commercial, but the blog is worth a look even if you're not a paying customer.
Moreover, for many services, clients have no idea who is good at providing the service, and one of the best ways you can "advertise" that you can deliver the service well is to raise your rates. Some clients will assume, perhaps with warrant, that the most expensive providers do the best work, and thus really are least expensive in terms of value to the client. Try it.
He could charge extra for fast turnaround. If someone needs a job done quick they can pay a fixed or variable surcharge. That way your dad doesn't have to feel bad about charging more for the work itself.
Nearly every gig has been over $50K with the most being $250k for 12 months. Most of my work has been in Silicon Valley with a couple of telecommuting stints in LA and Chicago (which lasted for a decade).
Most gigs have been with companies where software is the product or an integral part of the offering, so price was not really an issue. Almost always I bill hourly because the work involves existing system where a fix is 5 lines of code. but finding where the 5 lines go may take two days of work.
I got two significant jobs off of Craigslist, but most have come from people that I have worked with.
One lesson I learned this year as a newbie consultant: there is a heck of a lot of dynamic range in that top bucket. It's like software: even if everyone you know pays $5 or $10 or $30 for software, don't necessarily let that set your expectations, because software can get arbitrarily expensive.
I found that I had been undercharging for the past few years when quoting projects. While my hourly rate had been fine (around $75 for design, $100 for programming), my estimation of how many hours a project would take was always way off. I guess the assumption I made was "no one would pay a lot of money for a website," and so I typically got tedious lower-end clients that were much more work than they were worth.
The last few projects I've gotten average to about $7k each and are about 1-2 months in duration. The highest I've gotten is $10k for a 2 month design and development gig, working very casually over that time (enough time to work on other projects freely). I'm now learning that people are willing to pay for high quality work and consistent/reliable communication.
This poll seems to be doin it rong. I couldn't put a single figure on it and say "I won't get out of bed for less than this" because so long as my hourly rate is satisfactory, I'll do 30 minutes work and bill someone for it.
I work out my hourly rate like this:
There are about 219 work days in a year after leave and entitlements. As a freelancer I'll probably stay billable 3/5 of those and on average I can hope for 6 effective billable hours per day, so there are about 788 billable hours per year.
I then think of my target yearly salary and divide by number of billable hours per year. I actually have some indirect overheads, too so I add a margin on that, but if you're straight up freelance you may not need to.
That's your base rate. So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes) you can work for 30 minutes, charge for half an hour, issue the invoice and be done with it.
If I get a longer contract, I usually reduce the hourly rate commensurately by increasing the ratio of billable to non-billable hours I'm expecting in that year as a result.
So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes)...
What systems do you recommend? Excel spreadsheet for tracking + invoice template is really inefficient for me.
My last 3 side-projects (while working fulltime at BigCo):
$750, $750, $2700
Over time, I have become less and less interested in these kinds of side-projects as I have become more focused on owning the upside of my own products. But, its occasionally nice to get paid for my late-night coding adventures.
Do you have projects that generate cash flow? If so, how did you decide on those projects and how long did it take for you to see a meaningful amount of cash flow?
My freelance gigs tend to be as a subcontractor building out Film marketing websites and games. It generally involves a significant amount of interactivity either in Flash or HTML5/JS/CSS3, and since I know that Film marketing budgets are usually relatively robust, I feel no qualms starting my bids at about $8000 for 3 weeks worth of part-time work (nights and weekends). Usually the projects are more like 6 weeks, so I often charge around $12-14k, and my clients rarely counter.
Additionally, this is usually 80%-90% coding. The firm that hires me is usually responsible for all the design comps and photoshop files.
I quit my job this year and have been making a reasonable living via Elance and oDesk. Mostly GWT/Google App Engine projects, but starting to dip into Android as well.
On oDesk I was lucky enough to meet a great client almost immediately. I got an ongoing project with him for ~30 hours/week. I think I'm grossly undercharging him, but it's a steady gig that leaves me able to pick up other projects on the side.
For fixed price projects I generally don't even bother considering anything under $5K. I try to stand out by bidding high rates (by Elance standards). So far it's working fairly well. I hope to develop enough happy customers so that eventually I'll be able to move off of those sites and just get clients by word of mouth.
Some people seem to get it backwards. They think they are their own client. WRONG!!
It does not matter one bit what I or others charge. What matters is WHO IS YOUR IDEAL CLIENT?
If you know that, you know what VALUE you bring to them and you can charge whatever you want to solve a real problem.
Otherwise you are trading time for money. AKA - Job.
Does Rolls Royce consult Honda as to what to charge for their products? No. Two different markets with two different clients and two very different ways of solving a clients/customer's problems.
Couldn't agree more on value vs time. It doesn't matter at all how long I slave over the hot laptop, it's the value I bring to the client! One hour of optimization that saves $5000 a year in server costs is a steal at $2000/hr over 2-3 years.
I work 100% remotely, from not a first world country, and my hourly rate has been escalating with each project. Currently at around 40$/hour. But instead of cashing in, I am rather investing time into improving more, and preparing some interesting personal projects that define myself.
I love great challenges, and want to eventually get into something really interesting. Or maybe I will go by myself, and launch a startup that I has been thinking about for some time.
Sadly this can be a very skewed number as it will differ per project type, length of project and locality. I would be more interested in hearing what people charge on an hourly basis - but alas this same issue would occur there. Without a literal "How much would you charge to do X (and where do you live)?" type question it is hard to come up with a number that could be used for comparison.
I was very much into freelancing until I joined my full time job since last 3 months.
I started out with $10/hour (in India) and was up to $50/hour which made me some decent money. I usually charged hourly as estimates are fragile (even after a lot of experience). It used to come to around $30000/year (considering some 600 hours of work yearly). Adjusting lifestyle, that is equivalent or more, compared to $100K in the US.
I have looked at sites like odesk or elance and those just suck for US freelancers as they do not pay shit. No one can outbid some russian company charging $3 per hour.
It's actually not that hard to get good clients on Guru and the sites you mention. You just need to differentiate from that Russian kid on something other than price.
Back in my eLance days, I charged $75/hour for my time and wrote good thoughtful proposals for jobs that sounded interesting. Those two things set me so far apart from the rest of the field that potential clients would essentially have two piles of proposals on their desk:
- Pile A: 100 broken english canned proposals quoting $14/hr and dripping with flakiness
- Pile B: 1 proposal from the expensive guy who sounds like he knows what he's doing
So the thought process then changes to "do I take a risk, or do I spend the money to do the job right". I'd only hear back from 1 in 10 proposals, but the conversation was always the same from there:
"Wow, you really nailed what we're looking for, but, well, you're a bit expensive. Any chance you can give us a break on price?"
"No."
"OK, well we've talked it over and we think we'd like to give it a shot."
I'm curious about this as well. I've posted my skills on craigslist and sent stuff out to my friends, but I always receive requests from people who can only pay very little. Either that, or I'm not doing a very good job of advertising myself - which is a definite possibility.
From personal and professional networks. Work at BigCo or Startup or wherever for a while, make connections with real people, don't sabotage your reputation with shoddy work or burned bridges, then transition to contract work for the people you know, advertise yourself so you can freelance work from people you don't, self-incorporate/brand yourself/etc. It can't be done overnight, but very little worth doing can.
Definitely stay away from those sites unless you plan on doing volume/mass work to compensate for the low wages (or unless you have a big reputation). Like I mentioned in another post, at least 85% of my freelance gigs come from my existing network and their word-of-mouth referrals. I've found clients are much willing to pay more when they trust the consultant and a verbal referral from a friend can go a long way in providing that trust.
Some tips for this:
* Make sure your friends know what you do - update your Facebook profile, hand out business cards, start a blog, etc.
* Make sure your friends think/know that you are the best developer that they know and that you are the first person they think of when someone says "I'm going to need a website"
* Use LinkedIn - surprisingly enough, I've had old contacts connect with me via LinkedIn, view my profile and hire me for a project
* Exploit whatever niche you're a part of - if you are active in your church, approach them or another local church to see if they need a site. Apply same strategy for a youth group, social club, etc.
I'm in the Midwest US and I've used RentACoder (now vWorker) but you have to be careful. The key is to cherry pick specialty work that you can do quickly and still charge a reasonable fee for. In my case, I do almost exclusively hardware designs that I can knock out in a few minutes. Simple stuff, but I rarely get more than $250 or so. There is more involved work available, but I refuse to work for $10/hour!
I've bid on only three projects in the past year and been outbid on 2, 1 is pending.
The high and low ends vary greatly. I've done little one hour wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am gigs and then I've done projects that run 4-6 months and bring in 5 figures. On average I'd say about $5000. The most I ever brought in on a single project was $24,000. BTW those projects were all done using the .NET Framework. Take THAT, Expensify!
Just trying to make sense of the data points here... Your username and the description of your one hour gig leads me to believe that your projects need more than just programming skills. Do you work in San Fernando valley?
I usually charge $10,000 per gig, 4-6 hour work. If you are good at something charge more, others may do the same for $500, you can either charge 10 customers at $500, or charge $10000, believe me 6 out of the same 10 will pay u $10000.
I have been on my own for over a decade and tend not to take a job that is less than 6 weeks work. All .NET work for customers at all different market segments and the rate varies from 110-195/hr.
[+] [-] Loic|15 years ago|reply
I always advice people to go the hard science way if they like computer science, because there is a really big big lack of people being good at both. I should write about it.
[+] [-] billpaetzke|15 years ago|reply
Please do.
[+] [-] dkersten|15 years ago|reply
I've thought about going into a hard science industry but never did anything about it because 1) I'm not really qualified in the science side, my skills/experience/qualifications are in computer science and 2) I don't really know how to get started.
[+] [-] hariis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geebee|15 years ago|reply
I did a lot of operations-research type programming in grad school, and I thought it would set me apart, but I've found that the jobs that want programming and OR skills don't seem to pay any better than other types of programming. This is jobs, not consulting gigs, though, and I'm only basing this on a few data points.
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
Off-topic: what books do you recommend on chemical engineering? What's the equivalent of The Art of Electronics for analog electronics, or HDL Chip Design for digital chip design, or Code Complete or Algorithms in C or CLRS or The Pragmatic Programmer or SICP or TAOCP for software?
[+] [-] csomar|15 years ago|reply
- I mean, I'm not from a developed country. Is that still possible that I can take advantage of mastering both skills? I'm currently a Medicine student with good programming skills. -
[+] [-] orenmazor|15 years ago|reply
its also an amazing learning opportunity (and play. but never take close up photos of your phone. you'll become OCD about clean pretty fast)
[+] [-] mohsen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rockorager|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
Once we established that it was pretty easy to see how letting his rate float up would help with his workload, he would not only be less overloaded but he would be collecting more of the market value of his work. Since in his case (he's nominally retired) not working at all was just fine, he had a lot of freedom in over shooting the market and then coming back.
I recognize that its not as useful for someone who is wondering where rent money will come from.
[+] [-] dotBen|15 years ago|reply
Funny thing is, my parents (who are both near-retirement service providers in their own professions) won't adopt such a model in either direction (raising their rates or decreasing their rates based on workload).
They also just recently chastised my brother (who is in his mid-20s) for doing an arbitrage play where he could get a plentiful supply of iPad 2's on discount and sell them above market rate on eBay.
Threads like this remind me that I wasn't bought up in a capitalist family.
[+] [-] billybob|15 years ago|reply
I mean, if 16 people are willing to pay for an hour of your time on Monday, and you're only going to work 8 hours, how do you decide which lucky 8 people get your services? 1) First come first serve? 2) Pick 8 at random? 3) Pick the 8 who want it most?
#3 is most easily measured in "dollars they will pay," so you raise your price. Of course, it also favors the wealthy, so if you feel badly about that, do some pro bono or find a way to provide tiers of service at different prices.
[+] [-] findm|15 years ago|reply
Economics you so crazy.
[+] [-] sc00ter|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phlux|15 years ago|reply
So, did he set his prices? What happened? What did he charge prior and how much did he change... and most importantly, is he happier?
[+] [-] russell|15 years ago|reply
Most gigs have been with companies where software is the product or an integral part of the offering, so price was not really an issue. Almost always I bill hourly because the work involves existing system where a fix is 5 lines of code. but finding where the 5 lines go may take two days of work.
I got two significant jobs off of Craigslist, but most have come from people that I have worked with.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdolon|15 years ago|reply
The last few projects I've gotten average to about $7k each and are about 1-2 months in duration. The highest I've gotten is $10k for a 2 month design and development gig, working very casually over that time (enough time to work on other projects freely). I'm now learning that people are willing to pay for high quality work and consistent/reliable communication.
[+] [-] dools|15 years ago|reply
I work out my hourly rate like this:
There are about 219 work days in a year after leave and entitlements. As a freelancer I'll probably stay billable 3/5 of those and on average I can hope for 6 effective billable hours per day, so there are about 788 billable hours per year.
I then think of my target yearly salary and divide by number of billable hours per year. I actually have some indirect overheads, too so I add a margin on that, but if you're straight up freelance you may not need to.
That's your base rate. So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes) you can work for 30 minutes, charge for half an hour, issue the invoice and be done with it.
If I get a longer contract, I usually reduce the hourly rate commensurately by increasing the ratio of billable to non-billable hours I'm expecting in that year as a result.
[+] [-] mattdeboard|15 years ago|reply
What systems do you recommend? Excel spreadsheet for tracking + invoice template is really inefficient for me.
[+] [-] thetrumanshow|15 years ago|reply
Over time, I have become less and less interested in these kinds of side-projects as I have become more focused on owning the upside of my own products. But, its occasionally nice to get paid for my late-night coding adventures.
[+] [-] zackb|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthodan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theturtle32|15 years ago|reply
Additionally, this is usually 80%-90% coding. The firm that hires me is usually responsible for all the design comps and photoshop files.
[+] [-] kaffeinecoma|15 years ago|reply
On oDesk I was lucky enough to meet a great client almost immediately. I got an ongoing project with him for ~30 hours/week. I think I'm grossly undercharging him, but it's a steady gig that leaves me able to pick up other projects on the side.
For fixed price projects I generally don't even bother considering anything under $5K. I try to stand out by bidding high rates (by Elance standards). So far it's working fairly well. I hope to develop enough happy customers so that eventually I'll be able to move off of those sites and just get clients by word of mouth.
[+] [-] MichaelL|15 years ago|reply
It does not matter one bit what I or others charge. What matters is WHO IS YOUR IDEAL CLIENT?
If you know that, you know what VALUE you bring to them and you can charge whatever you want to solve a real problem.
Otherwise you are trading time for money. AKA - Job.
Does Rolls Royce consult Honda as to what to charge for their products? No. Two different markets with two different clients and two very different ways of solving a clients/customer's problems.
[+] [-] frankwiles|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nekoZonbi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jules|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliottcarlson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dytrivedi|15 years ago|reply
I started out with $10/hour (in India) and was up to $50/hour which made me some decent money. I usually charged hourly as estimates are fragile (even after a lot of experience). It used to come to around $30000/year (considering some 600 hours of work yearly). Adjusting lifestyle, that is equivalent or more, compared to $100K in the US.
Work areas - Front End Dev., JS, iOS Apps.
Me - http://about.me/dytrivedi http://advancewith.us/stuff/Resume.pdf
PS: Clients pay for quality work/code. Don't hesitate to raise rates if you think you're worth. Can be determined by demand.
[+] [-] jerryblack|15 years ago|reply
Where do you go to find projects?
[+] [-] jasonkester|15 years ago|reply
Back in my eLance days, I charged $75/hour for my time and wrote good thoughtful proposals for jobs that sounded interesting. Those two things set me so far apart from the rest of the field that potential clients would essentially have two piles of proposals on their desk:
- Pile A: 100 broken english canned proposals quoting $14/hr and dripping with flakiness
- Pile B: 1 proposal from the expensive guy who sounds like he knows what he's doing
So the thought process then changes to "do I take a risk, or do I spend the money to do the job right". I'd only hear back from 1 in 10 proposals, but the conversation was always the same from there:
"Wow, you really nailed what we're looking for, but, well, you're a bit expensive. Any chance you can give us a break on price?"
"No."
"OK, well we've talked it over and we think we'd like to give it a shot."
[+] [-] paydro|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdolon|15 years ago|reply
Some tips for this:
* Make sure your friends know what you do - update your Facebook profile, hand out business cards, start a blog, etc.
* Make sure your friends think/know that you are the best developer that they know and that you are the first person they think of when someone says "I'm going to need a website"
* Use LinkedIn - surprisingly enough, I've had old contacts connect with me via LinkedIn, view my profile and hire me for a project
* Exploit whatever niche you're a part of - if you are active in your church, approach them or another local church to see if they need a site. Apply same strategy for a youth group, social club, etc.
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|15 years ago|reply
I've bid on only three projects in the past year and been outbid on 2, 1 is pending.
[+] [-] eekfuh|15 years ago|reply
Since this all side stuff, after my 9-5 job, I'm very picky on what I take in, since I like to work on products that I have 'real' input in.
[+] [-] phlux|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthewDP|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Contractor69|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirubakaran|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krisrak|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithwarren|15 years ago|reply