Todd,
No, $50/hr is not a lot. If you figure there are 2080 paid hours
in a US standard work year, minus the standard 2 weeks vacation, some sick
days, and the training you may give yourself that the customer will not be
paying for. Then take the benefits they are not paying for, and the portion
of the Social Security tax your W2 employer pays for you.... you aren't
making any more than an experienced SysAdmin. Also, take into account you
will not be working full-time for this guy, so you will need to spend time
driving from one gig to another gig, and spend time finding other gigs to
make a full-time wage. Then the time keeping and billing, and the extra
expense of a more involved tax return (even though you get to write more
stuff off), and perhaps the need for a book keeper to keep track of your
multiple jobs.
No, $50 is not much. I won't quote my rate in this public forum,
but $100/hr is pretty much the starting range for most professional,
experienced SA's for gig's that are not full-time multi-month engagements,
as this one seems to be. I have seen rates as high as $225/hr for
specialists (DBA's, Security, Network Architect, etc), although most are
not that high.
At professional rates (as I describe above) you should not be
taking phone calls from buddies, and be very focused on the job at hand.
OSHA rules on hours and breaks and such don't really apply. You are there
to solve a problem, and they are paying you well for it. Do them right and
charge them ethically. if you had to spend some extra time cuz you had no
idea what you were doing, then take that in to account. You might spend
some time researching ahead of time for a gig, usually that's not billed if
you were hired as an expert in the field and you're boning up for the gig.
I always offer a very detailed time record. If there is a
Statement Of Work then I usually include what Task or Deliverable that the
time is for, especially if it was Out of Scope.... don't get stuck not
completing a gig on schedule because of incidental stuff that came up along
the way. Your time card should show all the time you spend on out of scope
stuff assigned by whom.
Sorry I went on a tangent there
Mike
At 08:06 PM 7/13/2005 -0700, you wrote:
I saw this craiglist posting for an Asterisk admin. I wish I could
admin Asterisk; it sounds fun. I've never had per-hour consulting
wages. Isn't $50 an hour a lot? I would worry that, at $50 an hour,
the person would be pushing me to work quickly and I'd screw something
up or do a half-assed job of it.
http://sandiego.craigslist.com/cpg/82608032.html
-todd
--
KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
--
KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
