> Why not set a bounty to improve Prettier instead of building a competing project just to increase the motivation to improve Prettier?
There are three reasons, I think:
1. Writing a rust compiler is separate from prettier project because of its nature. Prettier is not written in Rust, and Rust has proven to be a robust option to write a formatter, so the goal really is to write a formatter in Rust itself, and it can't be replaced with improving prettier within its current codebase
2. Asking someone to write a Prettier-branded and owned Rust compiler for $20k is not enticing enough. It is essentially equivalent to contracting someone to write some code for Prettier, with an open bid. It would cost a lot more to hire someone to write these code. Great programmer who has the skill to answer this bounty get paid at least $200 an hour (extremely conservative estimate), $20k is enough for 100 hours of work for one person, not enough to finish the project. But getting rewarded for $20k for stuff you write and will own is enticing!
3. Good ecosystem going forward. If prettier owns the winner project, prettier is responsible to maintaining and improving it. The good that the bounty did ends when the project is handed over. Prettier team get burdened with a project that they didn't write themselves, and the original team (the best people for the job) is not incentivized to keep maintaining it. There is no ongoing competition to keep this field active.
Keep in mind as a freelancer you have to make about for $2.50 for every $1 a salaried person makes, as you're on the hook for 100% of taxes, health care, business expenses, etc.
Part of being a freelancer is spending time finding work and doing a variety of things that clients would consider non-billable but still cost time. If you're going to work 40 hours a week, not all 40 will typically be billable in freelancing.
My mother did NGO environmental policy freelancing in the 00's. She would land a contract for 40k for two months of work, then spend the next 4 months looking for more work.
Being a subject matter expert means that you can be paid well for your work, but the numbers of jobs that require expertise in the Kura-Aras river basin can be few are far between.
many things are more expensive when you don't work at a company - for example the health care for a marginal employee at GE is a lot cheaper than you'll get for yourself.
I always used 2x, but probably 2.5x is a sensible way to think about it in a patio11 "charge more than you think you should" mold.
> many things are more expensive when you don't work at a company - for example the health care for a marginal employee at GE is a lot cheaper than you'll get for yourself.
This is less true following the Affordable Care Act than it used to be. The unsubsidised marketplace rate for my Kaiser health insurance seems fairly close to what I pay for COBRA from my former big tech employer.
Most? I can't think of a gig beyond maybe a couple of folks in a coworking space where I wouldn't be laughed out of the room with "just make it 150% of salary and we'll figure out the real number whenever". Virtually every company I've ever worked with budget the actual number, because they know how much the overhead cost is. There's a huge difference between "a number I use when asked 'ballpark how much a new hire is gonna run us'" and "what is the amount of money I'm asking the CEO to allocate me in next years budget".
Depends on the kind of work you do and the competition. A former employer was really desperate for pretty journeyman-level Django Dev help a few years ago and for some reason it was just super tight. Ended up paying more like 350% after looking a few weeks. We obviously weren't going to hire someone at that rate for a 6 month contract but for short term help? Sure.
Well, sure...there's always a one-off where you have to throw out the rulebook on salary. But any HR team worthy of the name can still compute the actual overhead on that base pretty much to the dollar.
That sounds about right. On the other hand it does mean that you are producing this kind of work for big FAANG companies you should expect to earn $80/hour. This is around the low end of a senior software engineer or the higher end of a junior software engineer.
I have heard of a database "engineer" paid $250 an hour to spend weeks creating what is basically a connection string to a database in a corporate virtual lan. The people paying him were never concerned about the cost, just how long it was taking. This was in Nebraska.
In the right locations, developers can benefit from a profound lack of competition, especially if they have some enterprise software bullshit on their resume and some less savvy company nearby refuses to hire someone to do it remotely.
2088 potential work hours in a year
Less 88 hours holiday
Less 80 hours vacation
Less 56 hours sick
=1864 hours (these are federal guidelines under the Service Contract Act regs)
232/1864 is a base increase of 12.5% for PTO
Payroll taxes, Medical, workers comp, etc add about 30% - though medical is flat so at higher wages like discussed here the % increase it represents goes down further
I did not have to factor in increasing skill on the job or time between jobs - but I did have to account for overhead and g&a which would be similar to time between jobs since those would be for bills
Big companies would have a lot of markup on OH/g&a/fee, but a software dev working remote for themselves on contract could competitively go down to 5-10% or less here to simply cover the minor added burden to bills.
That totals up to about a 50% increase on the salary rate. You can't outright bill someone for time you spend looking for a new job or improving your skills. You may charge a premium that you use to do such things but that would have to go under fee which tends to top out at 15% with the government, not something that can be expected to be accounted for. In my experience at least.
Again though, this was for service contracts - particularly with the US government, subject to certified cost and pricing data disclosures.
I was genuinely curious about the 2.5 number though, as i have spent a lot of time dealing with market rates in various conditions I was interested to know the context. I could see a few ways that could happen, but I wouldn't want to speculate too much
I think the number is pretty dependent on the flow of jobs. If you work in some kind of incident response, for example, it's going cost more than if you've got downtime between 6 month contracts.
Depends on the geography and/or whether the knowledge is highly specific.
As a datapoint, the average Dutch contracting rates I see for IT development (think: Java, Swift, Kotlin) range somewhere from €75 - €150/h. Higher is possible, but then you're talking very specific expertise and typically shorter projects.
I'm on the hiring side, this is a figure across some 20 external devs. I think it's representative of the middle of the market.
A freelance developer can easily ask $250/hour, similar for a contract agency, and that is kind of a low amount. It sounds like a lot for a single developer but if one considers all of the non-billed time of chasing leads and bills it's maybe a different picture.
Adding this for data. I charge $500 an hour for contracting. It's gotta be at least that as it's costing time I would otherwise spend with my family. Family time / time away from my core job is incredibly valuable.
For said data... does anyone actually pay that? I mean if you don't get hired for that amount you've got tons of family time so I guess it works?
What I'm trying to say, I don't see the correlation between having a huge hourly rate vs family time. 40 hours a week of work is still 40 hours regardless of how much you're paid.
I imagine someone who has this skill has a shot at being L4 or L5 at Google. levels.fyi estimates a year salary of an L5 engineer at Google to be 362,248. If we naively divide that by 50 (weeks in a year) * 40 (hours of work a week), we'd get $181.12 an hour. Googlers also get health insurance, free food, other perks that may push the effective hourly compensation even closer to $200. Googlers also get equipment to do the coding, whereas this competition does not provide a workstation, so another possible line item to consider.
It's not a perfect comparison/analogy, so I'd rather not get nitpicked, as the overall thrust of my argument is that $200/hr is not outlandish imho.
I came here to say that $200/hour is only "extremely conservative" in very few and small geographic parts of the world. Where I'm from (in a large city in the US) this number would be described as extravagant. I've charged $200 or more on only one occasion myself, and it was a very short-term arrangement.
I'm from a large city (but not the largest) in Canada and $200/hour or higher is common for high end devs, architects, and project managers. I charged $200/hour twenty years ago. These days I'd charge $250-300/hour if I was a contractor. It is not extravagant in most of North America, but again, it is a rate for higher end talent. I have not charged less than $150/hour since the 90s.
I once had some contractors in my team that were paid $500/hour due to vendor markup. I consider that extravagant.
I’ll second this that even in Canada, which has quite low tech pay, the lower end of quality dev work is $180/hr. Most of us managing contractors wouldn’t blink twice at $200/hr. Many of the bills are much higher.
every time rates come up on this website, people come out of the woodwork claiming "most" developers in every north american country make half a million or more a year. it's hard to not feel like this is just a few people using this as an opportunity to brag about their rates in niche industries (or people are just lying)
i have been a contract developer, and have worked at technical companies in canada, and have never seen rates that are even close (and im not a jr / have never used java for work outside of small amounts for mobile.) there's no way these rates are as common as you are all making them out to be, unless it's some niche, or you're talking about extremely short contracts, or there's some other missing piece of context
Well if you've never used Java (or c#), that might be your main problem. I'm telling you my experiences hiring as a manager over 10 years ago - all the senior Java devs on the program (about 8) were $90-120/hour. Architects were $150. PMs were $150. All independents through an agency with minimal markup ($3-4 per hour). I'm also speaking as an IC at times that's charged $150-250 an hour for over 20 years depending on the role. Rates these days are even higher.
These rates are at financial services , banks, transportation / logistics, manufacturing, telecom, etc. in Canada, US, and Japan.
> very few and small geographic parts of the world
There's reasonably good data about this that contradicts this?
$1000 as a day rate isn't unusual or unreasonable for a specialist IT contractor; and I don't say that idly; I say it from both experience and you know; aggregated data:
Yes, if you want someone to slap a php website together (or javascript, or many other entry level frameworks), you can pay less.
...but that's not what they were asking; they were asking for a technically sophisticated analysis of an existing project and a performant re-implementation in rust.
The problem is that many individual freelancers look at their work from an employee perspective, not from a business perspective. From an employee perspective $200/hour may seem extravagant, but from business perspective it is nothing.
So if you hire an agency to perform a contract, they'll bill you $2000 per day and send you their employee who makes $100 an hour. Agency pockets the $1200 (it's a simplification, but should paint the picture).
Freelancer and agency both run the same business model. If you think like employee and charge extravagantly less, you will never grow.
You should typically charge enough, so that for any given project you could hire an employee to do the work, while you look for new leads or you can keep the money in the company and do the work yourself until you amass enough capital to move up the business ladder.
There are three reasons, I think:
1. Writing a rust compiler is separate from prettier project because of its nature. Prettier is not written in Rust, and Rust has proven to be a robust option to write a formatter, so the goal really is to write a formatter in Rust itself, and it can't be replaced with improving prettier within its current codebase
2. Asking someone to write a Prettier-branded and owned Rust compiler for $20k is not enticing enough. It is essentially equivalent to contracting someone to write some code for Prettier, with an open bid. It would cost a lot more to hire someone to write these code. Great programmer who has the skill to answer this bounty get paid at least $200 an hour (extremely conservative estimate), $20k is enough for 100 hours of work for one person, not enough to finish the project. But getting rewarded for $20k for stuff you write and will own is enticing!
3. Good ecosystem going forward. If prettier owns the winner project, prettier is responsible to maintaining and improving it. The good that the bounty did ends when the project is handed over. Prettier team get burdened with a project that they didn't write themselves, and the original team (the best people for the job) is not incentivized to keep maintaining it. There is no ongoing competition to keep this field active.