Comment by needaremotegig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by needaremotegig | Hacker News Reader

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I understand where you're coming from.

I've been working with my current client for the last 3 months. He brought me on at $150 per hour after he had to fire his previous contractors, and I've been cleaning up their mess ever since. I've heard of quite a few situations like this, but I'm sure that there are cheaper developers out there who are doing great work.

Demand for part-time + remote jobs seems to be pretty low in general, but I don't think my rate is the issue.

I am able to charge this much because of my experience with startups, and my open source contributions. I was an early engineer at a startup which is now worth over $500 million, and I'm currently the CTO at my own startup.

Obviously networking is one of my major weaknesses, and I need to work on that.

As someone hiring some people* remote, your rate is at the way way top end of the scale. Even for people with core experience in Node (where I'm hiring).

I get what you're saying, but as an employer, the "non negotiable" and inflexible attitude is a point-blank no for me. Your OS contributions (caveat: spent 2 minutes looking) are hardly much (lists on github are not 'valuable programming', to me it's just content marketing that may as well be on a blog) compared to people asking for 1/2 to 2/3 of your proposed salary, who have core contribs, manage production-deployed packages/code that are in frequent use etc.

Your mileage may vary, so best of luck. But that's my perspective, as an employer, looking for remote devs. The competition is actually pretty high, and you can get awesome candidates that might earn $120-160k a year when working in the valley for $80-120k due to the lower costs they can incur ('valley tax') and the flexibility you offer as a remote employer.

Don't get me wrong, I know the value of a high-priced consultant (am/was one) to fix an emergency. But you're not asking people to deliver you an emergency, you're asking for a job. And to deliver in an emergency, you need a hell of a lot more credibility and slickness, which your post suggest you don't have.

* might be one, might be more. Depends on who applies and what it looks like.

Thanks for your feedback! For what it's worth, that's not my GitHub account. I just posted that list of remote working resources.

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