Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

This actually comes up quite often. Here's one recent instance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350

... and here's my explanation from that thread, on why it's a very bad idea to rely on the responses you'll get when you ask the question here:

This would probably work better as a poll or an offsite, anonymous survey. I don't think you'll get very accurate results from limiting yourself to the small fraction of developers who:

  - don't mind disclosing their salary in public

  - don't have any co-workers, employers, or clients who read this site

  - have a single fixed rate that they charge everybody

  - don't plan to change their rate in the future

  - make enough to not feel silly disclosing their rate in public

  - don't make so much that they'll feel like they're just bragging

I'd personally be happy to tick a box, but I'm not going to quote my rate here.

EDIT: Here's a recent poll, with numbers severely skewed because the author initially capped it at $200k/year, thus losing granularity from the roughly 50% of early responders who were earning north of that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725

I know but most people on this site use an anonymous handle, which solves most if not all those points: minding disclosing in public,co-workers, employers, or clients who read this site,plan to change their rate in the future, make enough /bragging, etc.

But it's true I wouldn't advise people disclosing their rate if their are not anonymous.

In general I believe most people are honest and if they reply it will be the truth. In my view there is a whole industry making a huge margin at our expense because we feel uncomfortable sharing this information, I have the impression we all have to gain by sharing this more often I believe. But of course we should take the content as a grain of salt and just an indicator.

That alone will skew the results downward.

Take a quick look through the "Top Commenters" list here, and you'll notice that nearly all of them use either their own name or a strong pseudonym tied to their real identity. Several of those guys are billing out at the kind of nice-to-have rates that a young dev with any sense aught to make his mission to replicate.

The guys responding below with silly pseudonyms, quoting two digit hourly bill rates, don't tell anybody anything interesting. Worse, they might just convince some poor soul that "you know, maybe $65/hour isn't so bad after all", and invite him into a lifetime of being underpaid when the reality is that he could 5X-10X that if he wanted to.

Just to understand, why do you believe using an anonymous handle skews the results downward? Most persons use anonymous handles online, except on places like facebook its a generalized practice. I personally don't see the correlation between those two things.

The name of the site is Hacker News, so I would expect a lot of people here to be security aware and in general use pseudonyms anyway.

I believe the argument is that most top commenters (which I suspect correlates quite well with high rates) are not pseudonymous, and thus unlikely to respond. See: patio11, tptacek, etc.

OK thanks, I see that that could have been what was meant.

But in my view there is no apparent co-relation between top commenters or rates. Most HN posters are likely anonymous independently of their rates, as in most programming forums.

FWIW: I bet you that there exist people with 0 < n < 100 HN karma who have weekly rates which beat Thomas' and my peak career rates, combined.

Oh, I don't doubt it. Outliers among outliers and all that.

I didn't mean to pick you two out as particularly high earners among the top HN users, FTR. You're just the two username/real name pairs I can come up with off the top of my head.

"Hacker" meaning a good programmer, not hacker as in someone who maliciously gains access to systems.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28term%29#Hacker_defini...

I agree, it also means at least somewhat security aware. Posting anonymously seems mostly common sense, almost everybody in the internet does it.

>Worse, they might just convince some poor soul that "you know, maybe $65/hour isn't so bad after all", and invite him into a lifetime of being underpaid when the reality is that he could 5X-10X that if he wanted to.

I'm interested in making 5X-10X of what I currently am. What should I do?

Charge more.

How do I know I'm worth what I'm charging?

By offering your services for a price and seeing if your clients agree.

You'll either get fired or people will keep paying you your new price.

Try calculating the value that you are providing to your clients. Even an estimate is better than nothing. Don't think in terms of your time, but in terms of the benefit your customers get from your work. If a script you put together in just an hour saves a company $50,000, they're still getting a bargain if you charge $1000 or $2000 an hour. Or more.

Try reading Breaking The Time Barrier from Freshbooks (free PDF): https://breakingthetimebarrier.freshbooks.com/

I've also heard good things about Brennan Dunn's "Double Your Freelancing Rate", though I've not yet read it myself and am generally reluctant to recommend 'courses': http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/

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