Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)
cole007.net
cole007.net
It's part of the reason I moved here.
Switching to salary-paid positions for a moment (as they might be easier to compare to your own compensation), £28k (~US$44k) seems to be a going rate for a mid-level developer and £40k (~US$62.5k) for a senior developer in London right now. Ignore financial services-based engineering positions, although there are a lot less of those today.
Current equivalent in SF right now could be $75-$90k for a mid-level developer and $100-$150k for a senior developer (or more).
Keep in mind London is a more expensive city to live in than even SF, taxes are higher (yes even compared to CA+Fed), health insurance isn't included (ok, we have socialized medicine but my point is that's part of your comp here in US), sales tax in UK is 20%, and unlike the US you have to pay property tax (council tax) on the property you live in regardless of whether you rent or own it.
Living in the UK, especially London, is incredibly expensive and I sometimes wonder how I managed frankly :P
EDIT: Oh and the reason I think wages and rates are low is because software engineering isn't a primary industry in London and a great deal of developers end up working for marketing agencies etc where they are simply "code monkeys". The BBC is another big employer (my former employer) but they only pay non-commercial wages as they are a public-service and it (used to be) seen as prestigious to work there.
The first proper result for "graduate software engineer" is Red Gate, who obviously only recruit the top graduates, but still: http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/careers/current-opportun...
I also know people who 10 years after graduating are still not making £35k, although that's not specifically in the field of computer science.
It's rough back home right now :/
Even with these rates it's pretty damn hard to find decent Python/PHP/Ruby or front-end devs. Designers (and Flash devs) are a bit easier to find as we are not lacking design/art schools.
Could it be there are simply more technically schooled people in the UK driving down prices?
They do contract reviews and they have some kind of deal on health benefits. They're also a local of the much larger Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union which has something like 150,000 members in it.
Yes there's a market for low-cost work, but don't sell yourself short as others in the comments are saying. Let's get that minimum rate a little higher ;)
>> mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time
There seems quite a difference between hourly and daily rate.
So basically, he threw away all the data from people quoting high hourly rates, and now we're seeing a bunch of discussion here that can be summed up as "Gee, that seems a bit low, doesn't it?"
And realistically, is there anybody here in the UK who is not a builder's apprentice and charges less than £100 per day? Think there are any computer programmers billing out at £12/hr here?
I don't think the data was in any way ambiguous. And since he threw it out, he pretty much invalidated his survey.
(see http://www.logeek.fr/ if you're curious about the kind of work I do)
My opinion is that it's not a matter of money, but rather a matter of finding companies that work remotely and do it well.
The terms have a massive grey area between them.
I don't see how you added anything to the conversation.
Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs.
For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a standard salary at less than £300 p/d and that money had to pay for salespeople, pre-contract technical support, offices, secretaries, etc. and all the effort on lost jobs as well as the actual work.
As a freelancer you don't have all those costs.
My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context.
- Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. Unusual in fact.
- Employee working 40 hours a week: very good rate.
- Contractor assigned to several projects throughout the year, with different companies, but essentially full-time for weeks at end: still good rate.
- Your typical consultant who has to promote themselves to get new clients, go on client's site (possibly with travel involved), etc, will normally book far less than 40 hours a week, even if they end up working 40+ hours to run their consulting business. In such a case £37.50 often ends up being peanuts. Common rates I see around here are about $100-150/hr for expert developers, exactly because of all the overhead of consulting.
That's why in my, admittedly very short, initial message I said "consultant" and not the generic term freelancer or contractor. I understand that you may have an issue with the term I used and the distinction from freelancer, but that's how I meant it.
My point was you're not talking about the UK, you're working for BIG CORP that hires out consultants in a scenario I outlined above, so why start declaring people's rate peanuts?
For the record I'm actually a UK Freelancer and these rates are exactly what I see.
For some reason the UK pays less than the US for programmers. I don't know if it's because we've got more or it's something cultural, but that's the way it seems to be.
EDIT: These are also similar to the rates I know others in the East Midlands region charge too. One peculiar example is a small embedded systems company I know of about 6 people that charges all their staff out at £250 p/d. The owner claims that's the market rate, but that seems low to me for fairly specialised work.
(Tangent: I was offered a job once to come work at a developer of medical systems. They gave me a tour of the facility and they showed me the 'desk' I'd be working from. It was literally a back corner of an electronics lab workbench, with a chair that didn't even swivel, right next to a dead plant and with a floor covered with previously-mentioned cracked linoleum that must've been 40 years old. C'mon bro, you serious? The hiring manager looked at me as if I was some sort of prima donna for wanting to work in an environment where I wouldn't feel like a necessary evil type of employee, just above or at about the same level of the guy working the loading dock. I declined the offer (one for which I was a perfect match, profile- and experience-wise, and one that had been open for 9 months because they couldn't find anybody even remotely filfulling the requirements) and then the CEO called me at home asking me why I had declined it, how could that be, such a great offer? He even 'upped' the pay - a whole 1000 euros/year or something like that, completely ridiculous, still below what I was making at the company I already had a job at at the time (I had told them how much I made and they didn't believe me). I told him a variation of 'pay peanuts, get monkeys' and brushed him off - he seemed to be not accustomed to that, weirdly enough.
Anyway, last year I was at a hospital when my wife was pregnant, and I saw that they used the equipment developed at that exact lab. I have to say that I felt quite queasy knowing that important things were decided based on results from machines build by people who would accept jobs under the circumstances there.)
Contractor is a temporary resource brought in from outside of organisation. Contractors' job is done when they finish delivering products or services specified in their contract.
Consultant is a specific kind of contractor. Their primary job is not just scaling up the existing team, but delivery of knowledge transfer. Consultants invest time into learning a specific topic or coming up with a new way of doing things, then they come to an organisation and transfer that knowledge to the locals, so that the team can carry on doing the job without need for the consultant to stay with the organisation.
There's a 3rd term for this same position, "Freelancer", that you can use if you want to make significantly less than either of the above.