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Comment by _2d30 | Hacker News Reader

Are you willing to provide any additional clarity on "very competitive rates as contractors"? I understand if not but would be useful to help some of us externally think about this model.

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I’m making $10K/mo for a quarter-time PM role at Gumroad (so about $250/hr).

Is Gumroad your only gig?

No, I own a SaaS business and also sell my own products on Gumroad itself. In fact, the latter was my biggest income source in 2020 — $282K sales last year: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274

And you are not even 26? Congrats man, you made it :) That's more than I ever made in my life (close to 40).

That is OP , not the person you are answering to

The person who is under 26 is not the same person who posted their rates.

I think the parent OP is different than Daniel. Daniel worked at Amazon / AWS for 8 years

https://dvassallo.medium.com/only-intrinsic-motivation-lasts...

Money is not how you count if you made it. I made as much as OP at that age (and am now a few years older) and I'm very far from making it. Millions don't go as far as they used to when everyone around you is even richer.

With all due respect, your comment suggests that you were spending beyond your means, or keeping up with the Joneses. Millions go very far if invested properly and drawn down properly so that the principal is never touched. If you're spending the millions instead, then yeah, that's definitely not gonna go far.

There's a huge trough in what you can do with what you can buy when you earn between $80k a year and ~$8m.

It's the same shit just better.

Your shitty commuter house 3 hours out of town is now a mansion 20 min outside of town. Your shitty 1990 ford fiesta is a very nice 2020 BMW. Your shitty healthcare plan is a great healthcare plan, but the main difference is how nice the plants at the doctors office are. If you want to get a divorce your new partner looks a lot better than your old one. Your furniture isn't chipboard from Ikea, it's hand made ethically sourced mahogany. Your flights aren't economy class, they are business+/first class. You don't have to run your washing machine, you pay someone to do it.

If you want anything interesting, like say a nuclear reactor in your basement, or a jet two seater Canard, you can't afford it because no one makes it. Unless you have the connections to start a company to make them, or have literal billions lying around, you don't have the resources to do anything but live middle class+.

“Everything is better but I don’t get a nuclear warhead”.

I don't want everything to be better. I want nuclear warheads.

Nuclear reactors really, you can't imagine what you can do with a piece of derelict land when you throw enough power at it.

Sure if you try to go up in quality you hit diminishing returns. Not quantity though. $80k and you're working for the rest of your life. $8m and you retire at the end of the year.

You can retire on $80k too, it just happens to be in Afghanistan.

I wish :) I’m 37, with 2 kids (6 and 3).

Respectfully - and I'm sure i'm just missing something - but I still don't actually understand what you do. The only thing I can see that makes you money is a subscription service to help people how make money on the Internet.

There’s a list of products on dvassallo.com. Lifetime revenue:

- $190K - Everyone can Build a Twitter Audience

- $125K - The Good Parts of AWS

- $15K - Profit and Loss

- $5K - Userbase

I also made $50K freelancing, $40K of those from Gumroad.

All started after Dec 2019.

Books, courses, info products mainly.

Thank you for sharing!

Interesting is the Product Management market pretty active? What's kind of roles are on offer?

Not sure what end of the scale of PM OP is on.

It goes from "I make PowerPoints" to "I write unit tests and debug code before I start the deployment."

$250 an hour is great for the bottom 75% of the market though and better than average for anyone not in facebook/google.

I'm a contractor too and the tax breaks you get are essentially another 20% raise.

$250/hr is equivalent to half a million dollar per year. Most PMs at FAANG do not make that much.

If that’s the bottom 75% of the market, what does the top 10% look like?

Honestly that's very nice money and more than I make full time. I'd happy take a role like that and work (10 hours per week?). Even if I wasn't that keen on the role (that's 30 hours per week to do what I want!)

I'm not sure where the company nor the employees are based, but it does seem ridiculously high and probably more than what 90% of the people in this world earns while working full-time. With that high salary and low amount of hours, I would personally feel bad, as the contrast against my peers and people around me would be too high.

But then you’d also be able to afford spending it helping your community and giving some to local or non-local charities

Heck; I’ve always thought that the first thing I’d do after winning the lottery would be paying off my parents’ mortgage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (disclaimer: haven’t won yet)

Indeed I could, but I much rather hire two co-workers and cut my salary is three pieces and give them one piece each, if it would come to that. Life's more than money and people jump on the chance to do something they find is meaningful.

You might feel that way but remember how much profit tech companies make. I know of small companies that make millions in profit and don't pay their staff even competitive rates. Diverting a bit more of that profit into someones salary seems fine to me. The example here is Gumroad which is very profitable.

That’s also an option. However it usually isn’t up to the employees

I won't discuss other people's rates but I personally earn ten thousand USD per month.

Thanks for the number. Are you willing to add how many hours you're putting in?

It really depends and I don't track my time all that well, though one of my 2021 things I'm doing is trying a bit of time tracking, just for my own sake / more visibility on how I spend my day.

What are you using to do time tracking, if I may ask?

their official deal is well known - it's a quarter time role so formally about 10 hours a week. of course, the time they end up actually putting in is up to them.

Thank you for sharing!

People don't realize that as a contractor, you can write off the room you're using for your office. As a remote employee you cannot. For people living in high rent areas, that's significant.

Where I live that office has to be a "proper office" in a sense, where you could have clients stopping by. Not just working from a room next to your exercise bike and laundry. Here the tax law is mostly written with hair stylists and others in mind, using a room for customers with its own entrance.

Where is that?

Countries like the Netherlands expect you to have a separate entrance and bathroom before you can claim it. Others allow you to claim a percentage of your living space and utilities. It varies around the world.

Not always. Highly dependent on country/state and actual usage of space (dedicated office space vs a desk/chair in the corner of the bedroom). Hire a CPA if you are unsure.

You can in Australia. I am and have done so for many years. This was also the case prior to Covid. The tax office did make some changes last year to make it easier for people to write off certain expenses when working from home. [1]

These changes did not impact me though however, as the new "quick and efficent" method still provided me with a much smaller tax return than documenting all of my own costs. [2]

[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Income-and-deductions/Ded...

[3] https://www.ato.gov.au/General/COVID-19/Support-for-individu...

People don't realise that on the internet you need to mention a jurisdiction when you talk about things like law and tax.

Sites like HN, reddit, Twitter etc are de facto US based, assume if no country or jurisdiction is specified that it's the US. Now, which state it is in the US is a different matter.

Fyi I downvoted you because I'm based outside of the US.

That's fine, some people are of course. But when you look at what people mean when they provide no jurisdiction, it always seems to mean the US. That's all I meant by de facto US based, because if it weren't, wouldn't people state the jurisdiction as "US"? They don't, so it must mean that the US is what is assumed.

> But when you look at what people mean when they provide no jurisdiction, it always seems to mean the US.

Indeed this seems to be the case. Being based outside the US, I find that somewhat annoying :)

From the article:

> In practice, we pay everyone hourly based on their role. The range varies from $50 (customer support) to $250 (Head of Product) an hour.

> Recently I standardized our rates world-wide

> We also have an “anti-overtime” rate: past twenty hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This allows us to have a high hourly rate for the highest leverage work and also allows people to work more per week if they wish.

I'm curious how this plays out for the least-well-paid listed, customer support.

Sounds like it's $50/hr up to 20hr/wk, $25/hr thereafter. For 40hr/wk, that's $1500/wk or $6000/mo or $75k/yr (assuming 2wk unpaid vacation).

Not bad honestly.

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