Philip Mak wrote, asking about whether he's chargin the right hourly rate. He describes his background as: > > I've had about two years of experience with perl, and one year of > experience with mod_perl and MySQL.
Business was so-so for me last month; everybody froze up. I feel for you if you're consulting. So let me offer you some advice. Take it for what it's worth ;-). The formula is this: Figure out what you want to make - something appropriate given your experience and ability, and the region in which you typically operate. Let's start with a nice round figure of $40,000 US dollars. Take the number of working hours in a year and divide them in half (40 hours a week * 50 working weeks a year) / 2 = 1000 hours. (The idea is that you shouldn't be billing more than half your working hours; if you are, then you aren't doing other things you need to do in order to sustain a business.) Now take the amount you want to make and divide it by the number of hours you came up with above ($40,000 / 1,000). You get $40. That's your target hourly rate. And despite what they high-flying .com weanies were saying a year ago, that's going to be a nice living for a young guy unless you're smack in the middle of a high-cost area and can't bother to cook your own meals. Money doesn't make you happy. (I lived like a church mouse as a grad student with my wife and son, and really those were the best days of my life!) After you've been working for 5+ years and have a lot of refer- ences and repeat business, you'll be able to charge considerably more because you'll just be faster at what you do and capable of writing better, more reliable systems and code. (I am a much, much better Perl coder than I was seven years ago when I first started using it. I rarely have any problems with those silly tests some employers dump on you when you first negotiate a con- tract; usually I end up correcting a few mistakes on the part of the testers. And I'm a decent mentor to junior programmers. As a result I charge a lot more. And I'm able to compete favorably against big shops who hire programmers out for $120-300 per hour, especially in major urban areas.) About the billable hours thing: You really have to be careful not to overbill. If you do some code that's usable by more than one current client, don't charge them both. And make sure to give them good reports on what you're doing. Clients like to know what they're paying for. If you're not sure how long a job will take, negotiate a stepped contract in which you spend, say, a week working on a problem then report on your progress at the end of the week so you and your employer can decide whether it's worth going on to the next step. There's an old joke about a consultant who dies at age 42 of a heart attack. You have to be a Christian of some stripe to find this funny, so my apologies to Muslims, Hindus, etc. Anyway, he ascends to the pearly gates and, upon meeting Saint Peter, accosts him saying, "Why was I taken so young? I was only forty-two!" Saint Peter fumbles with his books a moment and responds, "That's funny, but according to your billing records you're seventy three." -- Richard Goerwitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel: 401 438 8978
