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Comment by hkon | Hacker News Reader

work as an independent consultant. same jobs, 5x the pay.

I find this hard to believe. If you were a developer making 100k before that would mean you&re developer making 500k now. Impossible? No. Improbable? Yes.

Maybe twice the pay, Id believe that.

I've had a similar experience to this guy. It depends on the number of days but I reckon 5x is average. It only takes a couple of days of the first week in a month to cross the threshold of 1x.

Also there can be a secondary multiplier if you have 2 gigs at once. So 5x becomes 10x if you have two.

I don't think most people who do this are interested in going at it this way 252 days a year though but yeah if one's keen to 500k is possible.

How high can you go? Senior devs at google can pull 300k+ with stock at the L5 level, does contracting scale in the same way or is 500k atypical?

Well it depends, people turn it into whole businesses and get additional staff to arbitrage the hourly rates. I've seen a couple get 4m+

I tried that. Maybe it works for some people, but as a salesman, I make a good technician. As a PR person, I make a good technician. As an accountant or billing person, I make a good technician. As a business development person, I make a good technician. Ad nauseum.

I found there are so many parts to running your own business that I am well and truly horrible at, well I went back to working for consulting companies.

I did consulting for awhile. I spent a lot of time selling myself - something I don't enjoy.

How do you get your gigs and how do you set your rates? I've been thinking of starting this coming year and slowly moving to it 100%. I've done a few gigs but their mainly friends or friends of friends but nothing steady.

LinkedIn is very useful for getting gigs. Rates are pretty much market value.

How exactly do you find gigs on linked in?

Thanks for the tip! I never would have thought of it.

What do you do? What was the pay then? What is the pay now?

How did you get into this?

I worked as an employee for a consulting company. Then I quit and started my own consulting company. It took me a while to take the leap, but I did and have not looked back since. Good times these days.

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