Solo freelancers (to whom OP is referring) do not bill 40 hours a week unless they're working a ton or incredibly dishonest. A good portion of your time is spent marketing, doing unpaid pseudo-work-pseudo-marketing like GitHub side projects, billing clients, chasing unpaid bills, tweaking your website (marketing), networking (marketing), etc. Not to mention most freelancers become freelancers so they can avoid the 40 hour work week! When I freelanced full-time I tried not to work more than 30 hours a week all in. I usually billed about 15 hours a week but only because I had a few big clients and didn't need to do much marketing as they sustained me for the 2-3 years I was doing it.

A $150/hr freelancer who is busy for the year could reasonably expect to pull in about $100k gross (before any taxes, etc) assuming they take a few weeks off each year and bill about half their time or a little less. More if they automate a lot of marketing, have a local VA or someone doing the client phone calls, etc, allowing them to bill more. So the very successful ones are probably in the $150-175k gross revenue range before their taxes or paying anyone helping them.

I'm not saying @sidlls's implication that $150/hr is poorly paid isn't idiotic, because it absolutely is. Just pointing out that $300k will not happen strictly from trading 1 hour of work for $150 at any scale reasonable for a 1-person freelance shop.

It's a little more complicated than that for me - I stopped coding a long, long time ago and most of my work now is strategic and business focused. Some of those tasks are highly specialized and I can invoice $200/hr. Some are commodity tasks that the market is used to paying much lower rates for and I have to bill $100/hr (and then prove value by taking fewer hours to do it than a cheaper resource would). Other things are well-defined and I can charge a set price for and net greater than what any hourly rate I would have been able to negotiate would be.

I agree that the math is more complicated but that doesn't mean you're being poorly compensated or anything. I'll charge as low as $80/hr for stuff like documentation prep. I also won't do documentation prep in 99% of instances because I'd rather charge $145/hr to write code.

That's where I do a kind of a blended rate. If you need this deliverable and that deliverable I might just average it out. But, yea, where I can get the $150/hr+ work I take it over anything else.

Yeah, and that's a bit more than what I cost my current employer all-inclusive on an annual basis, so it's about right given the additional tax burdens I'd have to take on to maintain my current income and benefits.

You do realize there are people living in places where cost of living is 1/10 of SV and even working for "free" they have N times higher disposable income than someone pulling in 300K+ in SV?

I would need $330k/yr in San Francisco, over $450k in Palo Alto to match my current standard of living. Probably a little more since my state/local taxes are a low double digit percentage of what they would be in California. Not to mention the fact I can get from my home to my office in 15 minutes during rush hour. Which in either of those two places mean I'd need to be within walking distance.

Cue all the people saying it's "easy" or "just a matter of time" to get a $500k/yr job at Netflix or some garbage, but the truth is most software developers aren't going to work for any of the Big n companies, and will top out their comp around $125-175k cash and some RSUs that will be worthless 90% of the time. Even in Silicon Valley. So you get to make ~10% more in SV doing the same job you'd be doing in Minneapolis or Omaha or Pittsburgh or Charlotte or Reno for a cost of living that means you get to take home $500/mo in disposable income, sit in traffic for two hours each way, and pay one of the highest state tax rates in the country.

I'd rather make slightly less and have a maxed out 401k, Roth, be making double payments on my mortgage (how many people in SF can even have a mortgage, let alone pay it off in ~12 years, without being millionaires?), and be able to drive from my home to my office in less time than it takes the 2009 Patriots to make 5 touchdowns.

"alluding", not "eluding" (avoiding).

Ah yeah, I do know that but near homophones early in the morning get me sometimes.