Where are SWEs working for 60? I want to hire some.

In my fair city you're lucky to find talent under $200/hr.

I'd like to know which country/region has a low average of >$400K/y for a SWE so that you'd be "lucky" to find one for less. I know we're well paid, but definitely not that well.

It's contract work on the US west coast. Typically 3-12 month projects bringing some obsolete system into the current decade.

The rule of thumb I have seen is that you should charge around double the hourly rate when contracting compared to what you would make on salary to account vagaries of contracting. So this would be closer to $200k given that rule of thumb.

$200/hr is $416,000/yr. The world is bigger than Silicon Valley, but even there that's a huge salary.

That goes to the comtracting agency. The individual engineer might see a quarter of that if they're lucky.

There are many staffing agencies that only take 20-30% extra per head.

It translates to probably around $170k pre-tax income, definitely less than $200k, after overhead if you're an employee working for a contracting company. Actually that's for govt contracting companies with mandated limits of how much profit they can make, so normal contracting companies are likely worse.

Europe?

US west coast

I don't buy that for a second. Are you looking for specific niche skills?

Contract SWE gigs on the US west coast. I have a guy at $175, a full stack dev who does fantastic work, but he's booked out a year in advance and it's like pulling teeth to get him to accept more than 5-10 hours a week.

"Can I pay you a higher rate to take on project Z?"

"Nah man I'm as busy as I want to be. Maybe next year."

I'm sure he does the work in half the time stated, which is fine by me.

You might do well to add contact info to your profile

$200/hr fully loaded cost or $200/hr wage? Because a $60/hr wage isn't really that far away from a $200/hr fully loaded cost in some cases.

If you're hiring a non-employee contractor through some other company for $200/hr ... the SWE making $60/hr might just be that same person. Taxes, benefits, and overhead are very expensive.

It's contract work paid straight to the dev, with a 1099 when tax season rolls around.

Ok so they're paying the rest of the full load.

The overhead costs of highly paid employees in the US are something like 25-50% of the wage. $200/hr gross will pencil out at $1xx/hr received.

Depends on the company. I have seen people making $40k/yr being billed out between $180-210/hr... about $20/hr for the employee after PTO.

How do I tell an employer I just want my 'fully loaded' cost in cash?

Become a contractor. If you go this route, be aware an additional ~1/8 your income will be confiscated as taxes.

Worth it for the flexibility, IMO.

$60 an hour, or around $120,000 is the average rate for software developers currently in DC. There's plenty of places that employ developers for less too.

$200 an hour is FAANG rates, at least, but there's an entire economy outside of that.

For example, I know a guy who does custom software development for a sawmill in rural Maryland. They don't pay $500k (I think they pay $180k), but he seems pretty happy with his McMansion and 4 kids in private schools. So long as your housing costs aren't in the $1 million range, you can have a lot of disposable income with less money.

You can hire SWE's at the no-bullshit rate of $60/hr as soon as you ditch your own bullshit: the take-home exams, the 10 interview rounds, and the brain teasers.

I am available for part-time work at $60/hr

Most of the country? I was happy to cross the $60 barrier after a decade of experience and job hopping a few years back and now all of the jobs are in the high $40s now. I got laid off and I can see why now. These companies wanted to save $20 an hour at least per developer per team and they can.

Hell, I make much less than that with 7 years of experience. I work for my state's government, and that is the reason why.

I feel this so hard. Whenever I read HN people are like "obviously we SWE's are economic elites who will never struggle financially, unlike everyone else"

Bro I have over ten years of dev experience, dozens of significant bug bounties including well-known projects like Chromium and Github, am a great competitive coder (love leetcode and codewars type challenges), and my brother makes much more money fixing air conditioners than I do as a dev.

Appsec is my specialty but my background is in React frontend (Node and Flask backend).

If it's hard for me, it must be brutal for new grads and people just coming out of bootcamps. I'm lucky that I focused on open source instead of going to college, because when I started looking for work I already had a portfolio and real experience, plus FOSS friends.

If anyone is looking for an appsec person who can find vulnerabilities, report them in a way that clearly explains the issue to other devs, and then write patches, please do reach out. Glad to work for WAY less than $60 an hour lol.

Currently I'm a freelancer, can show projects I've worked on. I don't mind hoops at all, send me a coding challenge or CTF or whatever you want :)

The job market is not great right now, but sounds like you could have moved up last year.

> Glad to work for WAY less

That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.

> instead of going to college

It's fine if you just want to have work. But won't cut it if you'd like a coveted job, as your resume is filed to /dev/null within minutes. Ask me how I know.

>The job market is not great right now, but sounds like you could have moved up last year.

What do you mean by moved up?

I have more work than I can even do - but I may have a different idea of what a coveted job is.

>That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.

ikr <3

Moved up to a higher position/salary/rate.

"More work than I can do" ---> raise your rates; econ 101.

I recommend the patio11 piece about charging more, should be easy to find at the search box at the bottom of the page.

But as mentioned, at times of slowdown expect a lower upside.

Oh yeah, I understand, last year I was indeed making boatloads of money.

Right now I'm focused on something other than making tons of money tbh. There's a job I covet, so I've been just focusing on maxxing relevant skills so I can join this elite club of extremely cool people working on this very cool thing.

But after that I'm gonna go back to money, for sure.

Btw I love your blog. That same essay "How to be a hacker" is the one I consulted as a teenager, which led me to switch from QBASIC (my first lang, on the recommendation of an IRC channel that was probably trolling me) to Python.

And then the other side of this is that many tech companies are still spending more than they can afford long term with the current investor/interest climate.

Supply and demand: there are more people in your profession. It’s why cashiers make so little. Truth is programming ain’t that hard so there are thirty years worth of new programmers competing for your same job.