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Comment by catmanjan | Hacker News Reader

From the article "Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour"

In Australia that's a lot, but my understanding is that it's common for American developers to be on way more than this...

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I used to charge $90/hour in Australia to set up wordpress brochure websites (and poorly at that).

Anyone who thinks that's a lot in the contracting world is undervaluing themselves terribly.

So $100 isn't a lot?

I thought since that was the point they were trying to make that this example was an employee rather than a contractor...

When I was doing freelance work, I undersold myself at $75/hr and after six months or so realized that I was on track to make about $30,000 that year. I stopped freelancing and took a salaried position for almost 4x that amount. The problem is, you're doing very well if you can bill 20 hours per week consistently. I had long periods of down time, and I really shouldn't have been charging less than $150/hr if I wanted to make a viable living. I decided I would rather be butt-in-chair five days per week (I still get to work at home) than have several months off per year, but with no money to pay the bills. :)

Edit: if the recipient of $100/hr in TFA is a full time employee, that is indeed a comfortable amount of money to be taking home.

Edit 2: After reading the relevant section, anyone doing this work would be foolish to charge less than $200-300/hr. Given the cost of a rewrite, if you could keep the old systems running for $1M/year, you would be saving the banks buckets of money.

Maybe for full-timers, but contractors in Australia will routinely rack up $900/day or more. Thoughtworks charges out their mid-level web developers for $1500/day. (All AUD)

You can charge that much to hack on Wordpress in the US

I'm curious what your experience in Australia has been for you to think that. In my experience that's not what I'd call a lot in Australia, most commonly your average basic IT contactor will charge $80-120/hr, let alone any sort of speciality.

What's a basic IT contractor? $100 seems to start getting to the upper end of what I'd call a basic IT contractor. > $100 seems to be for more management/architect type roles according to http://au.hudson.com/portals/au/documents/salary%20guides/20... and http://www.greythorn.com.au/media/greythorn/greythorn%20mark....

Don't most contractors use recruiting companies when they start out, then rely on word of mouth/networks? Might be why the hudson/greythorn rates seem low.

Hm, yeah that could be true. I think the big organisations like the banks, insurance companies, super companies, Telstra, NBN etc don't often take on contractors directly either.

I've always been in a startup or just a full-time employee - my point still stands though, if that's an average rate then why did the article point it out?

Someone above suggested because the journalist is lazy and the number sounds big enough to the general public. Of course professionals with these skills would demanding "more than" quite regularly.

Is that a contractor doing 40+ hours a week, 45+ weeks a year for the same company? Or are you talking people doing shorter more targeted projects?

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