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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.

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