Need salary advice; First time looking for a Rails job after a failed startup | Hacker News Reader

Need salary advice; First time looking for a Rails job after a failed startup

12 pointsWhitespace14 comments

Hey all. I'm a self-taught, 28 year old in NYC, and I've been programming rails for 2 years now. I co-founded an education startup where I was the sole developer, but I can't keep eating hotdogs and ramen after 18 months and being essentially homeless (I sleep on a friend's couch).

So now I'm looking for a job, but I don't know what to ask for as far as salary is concerned. I feel awkward asking for even $25/hour (#rubyonrails flipped out when I said that).

I'm not having that many problems getting interviews, but the part about the salary mystifies me. One HR guy asked me what salary I was looking for and I wasn't ready for that question at all, so I mumbled, "Oh, fourty... two... ?" and he said "... sooo, 50?"

So, one part is me not knowing what the salary range for a programmer is, let alone a rails programmer in NYC. I guess the other part is me selling myself short.

Since I'm self-taught and always worked alone, I don't have another developer or shop that can say, "oh, hey, this guy is smart". I also don't have enough OSS contributions or a stupid blog so no one can see that I'm not a complete idiot, but I feel like one because I've never worked alongside a competent developer who can mentor me in the areas that I'm lacking in (BDD, a smarter git workflow). When Ryan Bates and Yehuda Katz are your only metric with which to compare yourself, you feel pretty small.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

$85/hr minimum for contract work. $100K salary.

NYC has more money than brains so don't sell yourself short.

$85/hr seems a decent contract rate, even affordable by many standards. Keep in mind that as a contractor your taxes are greater and there are no benefits. $25/hr is very, very low for a skilled developer (that's almost junior-year intern level).

You can also look at median salary data for a region at http://stats.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm

Edit: after looking at stats for the NY metro area, it looks like you should expect 90-110k/year on average. Make sure you're clear on your units ($/hr or k$/yr) when you negotiate.

Nitrogen, as a contractor your taxes should end up being much lower. Anyone doing freelance work should absolutely hire an accountant to figure out what's deductable (meals, office space, tech gear). All of those expenses come off the top and in my experience, you end up with ~30% more dollars at the end of the day relative to what you'd end up with if you were taking a standard salary.

Perhaps, but "higher taxes" and "no benefits" are a great way to justify a higher contracting rate ;).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics website says the mean hourly wage of computer programmers is $35.91

http://stats.bls.gov/oes/2009/may/oes151021.htm

Nationally, yes. $36/hr is ~$75000/yr, which is quite comfortable in many states (including Utah, which is the densest programming state listed on your link). Major metro stats are usually higher. That's after employer-provided benefits and employer-paid taxes. A $150 employee-paid group health plan could easily cost an employer $850 on top of that, and a contractor has to pay for his/her own facilities and equipment, so contracting rates necessarily should be higher than hourly wages.

Also keep in mind that national statistics, and mean statistics in general, are brought down by lower-cost states and below-market jobs writing VBA macros that got categorized as computer programmers.

A good programmer can get more than $85/hr. I know HTML/CSS people who charge $85/hr. He was suggesting $25/hr, which is what dog walkers charge. Beyond $85 you encounter people trying to haggle on price, unless you're doing something hairy for a hedge fund. $85 is a sweet spot where you can find work without too much of a headache. It's also a good litmus test. If a company tries to negotiate down from $85 it means they are going to suck to work with.

$25 per hour is pretty low for NYC I think. In another part of the country it would be fine. That's assuming a 40 hr / week job which helps offset some things like health insurance.

If you can't find a job then you could consider contract work. You will likely need to ask more than $25 / hour no matter where in the country you live.

$25/hour would be about $50k/year. 50 without benefits, so yes that is low.

I haven't had a regular rails job yet either, but have done some failed facebook apps, also coding alone. never quite got into BDD either. have a decade of web app experience before Ror.

just got a contract job in Silicon Valley for a very decent hourly rate, a bit more than 1.6 times what I was paid as a salaried startup employee. I pulled that rate out of my hat and can probably get more.

I'd do a lot of interviews if I were you for both contract and permanent and you'll be asked what salary you're looking for. State a figure and see if they continue the process. If they do, its in the ballpark. If that happens a lot, you've got good evidence. Raise the rate and see if they still go for it.

Everybody's comments are pretty much on point. If you're contracting, you should be asking for $75-150 / hour. Shops like Pivotal Labs bill out their developers at $175 / hour (the firm obviously keeps a chunk of that).

I think your options are to try and take on some small contract work so you can keep working on your own projects -or- go work for a well known Rails environment (Pivotal, Gilt Groupe, etc) and work with a team to beef up your skills.

Even if you get a very junior development position at a slightly larger company, you'll probably still be looking at a > $75k annual salary.

I work in NYC and get calls from recruiters about Rails positions constantly. Rails is "hot" now. The rates mentioned elsewhere are in the ballpark; I'd say $75/hour if you're halfway decent.

If you want to get plugged into the community and meet a few recruiters, then introduce yourself on the NYC Ruby (http://nycruby.org/wiki/) mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ruby-nyc/). A few recruiters lurk there; all of them have behaved well and seem very ethical.

Are there no job boards in NYC? If I wanted to know roughly what I was worth I'd look on JobSite, JobServe etc for jobs similar to mine.

how does one get in touch with you?

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