If you want to make $200/h+ and your a decent hacker, my advice would be to perfect selling yourself. Like any other sales, learn you anchor it on the value they get not your cost. Use the fear of them not meeting deadlines because they got an 'inferior' cheaper dev. Most recruiting managers are not spending their own money and have budget, but THEY will be the one the line if their project f's up.

The value to them is important. They don't pay you to be a great programmer, they pay you because they have a problem which needs code to fix. This explains why Excel VBA devs with some domain knowledge can charge $1000/day at investment banks for being a 'tactical problem solver' ie quickly hacking up neat spreadsheets for traders/analysts.

The big consultancies entire business is sending out £2000/day 'experts' who are just fresh out of college CS grads. It's absolutely insane how much big enterprise/ government are paying for substandard tech contractors.

If your specialised and that speciality is in vogue, then double up twice. Kdb specialists were being paid $10k a day by several investment banks. Many algo trading devs can charge that high, especially if they have low level (FPGA/GPU) experience.

so... my understanding? your first line explains why this selling is so hard:

>Often it may go through several different agencies because one isn't on the preferred list and get marked up at every stage.

The thing is? if you are on that 'preferred list' you essentially have a licence to print money, because it's goddamn difficult to get on those lists. I've seen consulting companies that are run out of some guy's house with no assets sell for substantial money because they had somehow gotten on to a preferred vendor list at a large company. As you point out, at that point you get to act as a gatekeeper, and impose significant markup on all labour.

Most companies have a preferred list of agencies/consultancies, but they are not obliged to use them. If they find the perfect person, they can hire them.

As a career contractor you need a really good agent, or ideally master the skills of a really good agent (ie sales). You need to build and maintain a network of previous managers who know how good you are, and actually call you for work. It takes time, but is by no means impossible for the average HN user.

I get managers I've contracted for in the past calling me, but they always make me go through a third party agency for the pay, so I think these preferred lists are more important than you think. (I have a corporation with 4 employees, 3 fullish-time, counting me, and the total revenue would make what I'm getting paid as a consultant look small, so I believe I'd be on the correct side of Section 1706.)

I have not heard of contractors in my industry having "agents" - I mean, sure, there are body shops that I can call or that will call me; is that what you mean? The body shops work for the clients, though, not the consultants.

By agents I mean 'recruitment consultants', that's what they are called in London (along with pimps). Most people hate dealing with them, but they are a necessary evil.

The employer pays the agency, usually around 30% more than the agency pays me. You could say that the employer is paying that fee, sure, but that's like saying the employer is paying the 7.5% payroll tax that the employer has to pay if you are an employee and not a contractor. That's coming out of the pool of money the employer is willing to spend to get my labor, even though it's not going to me.

>By agents I mean 'recruitment consultants', that's what they are called in London (along with pimps). Most people hate dealing with them, but they are a necessary evil.

Someone who works for the consultant? I don't know of anything like that in America. As far as I can tell, in this industry and location, all of the middlemen are paid by the clients.

I'd vote for specialization. Let someone else worry about networking and selling you; you worry about being marketable.

Letting someone else worry about selling you, is how a developer worth $2000/day only makes $600. The person 'selling you', is also 'closing you' at the lowest they can get away with.

Being 'marketable' is basically a sales task as well. You may well be a specialist in some domain, but so are another 100 people claiming to be so. In big enterprises especially, the job most often goes to the person with the best 'story', not the most qualified.

This is a good intro http://www.contractorcalculator.co.uk/negotiating_rates_agen...

But it's also important to remember where your focus really is, and to not go too far down the marketing rabbit hole; at least in my experience, the ROI on effort in that direction drops pretty fast once you get past that initial low-hanging fruit, just due to my lack of innate ability, and at least for me, it quickly starts looking like deception. Really, much of sales looks like fraud to me, so I go out of my way to avoid those parts of sales. No sense in playing close to the line when I can't see the line. But, one can aggressive while still being transparent and honest, and while it does bother me that being aggressive gets me more money, it's something I can live with for more money.

(b) Based purely on statistical intuition a lot of you people are undercharging.

(c) Don't charge hourly.

I'm not disparaging, I'm really just curious. Thanks.

There's a cottage industry of firms specializing in conversion rate optimization for X. (My consulting practice was in no small bit doing this for B2B software firms. "Conversion optimization for e-commerce", "conversion optimization for insurance industry", etc etc are also common specialties.)

If you were hypothetically a client desiring top-tier talent, and you asked what $400 an hour would buy you, I'd say "One journeyman at a boutique firm... if you can find anybody with availability at that price." I was priced rather north of that for some of my consulting career. There were likely folks priced at a substantial premium to me.

There are substantial programming/design skills implicated in this, obviously. (At some firms there is specialization of labor but at boutique firms typically all consultants do everything required to ship.)

Edit to add: You asked who is buying this sort of thing. In my case, largely B2B software companies with revenues in the $10 to $X0 million range. In broader terms, almost every company which either does direct transactions or collects leads with value over $1 million per year should probably be buying this sort of consulting, and many of them do. What's your guesstimate on how many insurance companies there are which sell direct-to-consumer products in the US, for example? All of them are potential customers are this.

(b) Your lawyer is also cheap. Sell a company and see what they charge.

(c) I'm not saying it's wrong not to be charging $400/hr; I'm saying, if you want a representative sample of the spectrum of hourly rates consultant, $150 is much too low. There are technical subspecialties --- not business or vertical-focused --- that routinely beat $150.

patio11's post in this thread is a good example (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5769870), increasing conversion rates for X will directly effect the bottom line by Y. As long as the price you charge is lower than Y, you should be able to sell it.

Other than that, specialized knowledge is always handy of course. I know of consultants doing compliance/IT systems for banks, highly profitable since the banks only change IT systems every 10 years or so and therefore it makes no sense to keep the cutting edge expertise in house but there are enough banks so they always have work.

It does vary depending on where you live though, I don't know of many charging $400/hr (or equivalent) in Sweden. Same rings true for the limited experience I have in The Netherlands.

Edit: Edited for clarity.

Edit2: Looking at your HN profile: why not consulting in Big data or such? Big data is all the rage at the moment and it is a new niche that everyone wants in on.

This post brings up 2 ideas:

1. Look into marketing or other areas where applied Machine Learning would make a direct impact to the bottom line. I'm guessing it's a lot easier to charge more if your value proposition is "increase sales/revenue by $X" vs. "increase the lift of this random model by Y%".

2.It might be worth looking into banks/hedge funds. They presumably are much more willing to throw large amounts of money at the right problems.

It is still up and coming so I think there are large opportunities for those with enough knowledge how to handle Big Data. If you can visualize the data in a clear and coherent manner you should be able to make some big money :)

Best of luck!

Admittedly, my lawyer is general practice, so, yes, what they charge is based on that. But, still, $400/hr for a long term contract for a programmer/developer is very high for the majority of the US market from what I have seen unless you are working on Wall St. as a specialized Quant or something.

Thanks.

In my experience, dealing with US companies from abroad, it is difficult to sell at very high prices. It happens but my company cannot loose prospective customers if the price is lower but convenient.

(he enquires curiously)

HNOfficeHours Designed to allow people to offer advice/expertise, or seek people offering advice for a given problem/specialty. Includes scheduling and search. Fun weekend hack from 2.5 years ago. Now deprecated in favor of better alternatives.

Just as with developers, if you're getting $400/hour you're not an ordinary lawyer working with ordinary people. You can get that if you've experience and knowledge in a particular domain.

Eg, penetration testing. Software project management advice. Audits of IT processes. Requirements gathering workshops. Etc etc.

Also, $400/hr would be high for a general suburban lawyer / solicitor. It's low to mid for a specialist. And suspiciously cheap for a barrister / trial lawyer (multiply by ten).

I understand better why people settle all the time - who can afford to defend himself unless he is risking lifetime in jail ?

A really good corporate lawyer? Yep. 20-30k per day for the best of the best; plus various thousands of dollars for their assistants.

(Now you know why Gigaco Inc vs Humunco Inc cases can blow out to millions or even tens of millions of dollars).

Typical numbers if you're charged with a federal felony are that the statutory limit might be 50 years, if it goes to court and you lose it might be 5-7 years, if you declare guilty it might be 6 months, and the cost of defending (which could wind up with 0 or 5-7 years) is about 1.5 million.

Even if you're in the right, the cost of fighting frequently exceeds what you're capable of, and the risk of fighting may as well. Thus plenty of innocent people are likely to settle.

(Kafka would be proud. But that is reality today in "the land of the free".)

That innocent people currently find it relieving that they are able to settle (and to be clear, they currently do) is a symptom of an unhealthy justice system.

In a just system, the innocent are not afraid to stand up for themselves. With the system we currently have this is not so.

"Being able to settle is something only the guilty SHOULD find relieving."

That said, if you're in court, you're pretty much guilty. It doesn't matter that you've done nothing wrong (no "innocent" plea, remember?); you're in their court, and that means someone has charged you and is demanding payment. "Guilty" means "to pay", according to Black's/Bouvier's. that means that Not Guilty is somewhere you don't want to be (committing a commercial dishonor in their court == contempt).

Just pay the fine (you can pay with securities/commercial paper if you don't want to use cash/cheques), and be done with the matter. Once you've settled, file a motion to expunge with a higher court in order to clear your record.

As the guilty, I guess I find being able to settle pretty relieving. :)

While 100% exploitable by criminals, provisions like Section 11 are there to mitigate actual miscarriages of justice while keeping all parties in honor.

I see senior PM jobs quoted in thousands per day.

A routine contract review is $700/hour.

So does your points still apply on those? Which, for instance, includes regular employees at Matasano as well.

However, I'd like to see more discussion of contracting because it's still a good step away from being an employee. For me, contracting has meant:

1) Doubling of my take-home pay compared to working as an employee

2) I have my own limited-liability company now, through which I am paid. You don't always need this as a contractor, but it's a good way to learn the essentials of setting up a company, paying tax, etc.

3) If you save a good portion of your income within a company, you can fairly easily build up a fund which would enable you to work solidly for 6 months on a startup without external funding (though some paying customers would be good!). I've got about $50,000 saved from a few years of contracting, and that really hasn't been difficult.

Sadly, information about contractor rates is hard to find. In my (albeit limited) experience, the best rates can often be in doing un-sexy "enterprise" stuff, not Rails or Node or anything likely to make the front page on HN. Most PHP devs I know make more money than Ruby devs (the trick is to be a "Drupal" or "Magento" developer rather than a "PHP" developer). This doesn't really match up at all with what gets the most buzz in the startup world.

"$71 - $90" range is the most popular in this poll. Let's use $80/hour number.

$80/hour * 165 hour = $13200/month which translates into $158,400/year

I actually think the $150 point is a sufficient number standard deviations from the the mean to warrant a cutoff point. Sure some developers are making much more, but not enough to be interesting.

What measurements or rough guesses can you use to say "this engineer is worth x $/h"?

Draw your poll answers on a graph, and you will notice that the top number at 150 is not all that much below the peak.

In the northeast US, a mid to senior level programmer/engineer could fairly easily charge between $90/hr and $120/hr (or much more in some cases, such as if you have a specialized skillset) for a fully loaded hourly rate. Don't forget (I'm sure you know this, but it bears repeating), about 25% to 35% of whatever you charge is overhead and will go towards administrative costs, not profit/salary.

The GSA (General Services Administration) publishes the average hourly rates that companies charge the US government for all kinds of services. You can probably expect about a 20% variance in these depending on your level of skill, reputation, and the geographic location and size of the client, but it is a pretty accurate and informative starting point.

Link: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/103877

Diplomacy and delicacy go a long way to improve job relations and demand, but these aren't usually taught unless you specifically seek out these lessons.

When you bill weekly - initially, a fixed 40 hr/week is assumed. But the client might push as much work as possible for that week...

Another option could be: Weekly (or monthly) billing + hourly for overtimes.

I do document parsing/data grooming so it's a lot of tweaking/fix as the client do the Q&A on the data.

Actually I overbook myself and offload some work to reliable part-time employees (the client is happy to known that not only me but other people are working on the project).

The overheads to doing a 10 minute fix are massive: they email/call you to make a request, you change work contexts, fix the issue, test and release it, notify them that you're done, keep track of the time you spent working, send an invoice at the end of the month, keep an eye out for payment, thank them for paying etc.

Rounding up to the hour mitigates this, but unless you're doing several maintenance requests per client per week, or are charging very high ($250+) hourly rates, your business is probably losing money by keeping this client on the books.

I think it's better to negotiate a monthly retainer that ensures making tiny updates is worth your while, and then just have a set-and-forget invoice that gets sent automatically every month for that amount. Even better if you can get paid by direct debit.

That being said, this question is more useful as an hourly rate since some people set their daily/weekly rate different because they work more or less than an 8 hour day / 40 hour week.

For companies that send you around the place internationally, I charge full days for international travel time - giving them the choice of sending you Business or Economy (and the corresponding amount of work that would be possible to undertake in flight).

EDIT: Re the last point - If they are paying by the hour/day/week, they are buying my time irrespective of whether I am able to work or not. Eg If they put me on economy, or put me through a day of meetings - they are going to be charged the day.

I charge a lump sum per project, never hourly.

So, $30K / (50 weeks per year * 40 hours per week) = $15/hour, wow, that's absurd.

10+ year web developer, front end, back end, I do absolutely everything short of whatever banner/color scheme an artist puts together.

What's worse is that I've been on the JVM for 3 years, developing in Scala, loving it, and making nothing extra in return.

Clients are hosted on my purchased 2X Dell R610 (not cheap) ESXi virtualization servers living in colo, getting crazy performance for $30/month.

Pretty clear I'm horrible at selling myself and/or looking for work. Every client I've had has been via word of mouth (probably something like, hey, this guy is a GREAT deal).

Kudos to those raking it in, impressive to make $150+/hour. Working remotely doing web development I would assume is on the low end of the spectrum re: what one can charge given Wordpress and/or outsourcing options (e.g. India $5/hour).

Has been over ten years since I worked a 9 to 5 (where yes, I made more $$), all remote freelance work since I departed the cube.

In the end I enjoy coding and creating to the exclusion of all else -- need to work on the business front, marketing, putting myself out there, etc.

I shouldn't have clicked on this link. Now, not only I feel underpaid, but I also feel incredibly confused. How will I find people willing to pay me $400 an hour, for more than six months? I mean, mm I really reading about 800k per year? I had no idea I could one day bill that much. I honestly thought this type of annual income was reserved to large corp CEOs, hedge funds people, lawyers, and the like. Turns out I was wrong.

Time to switch from distributed systems and databases to finance and SEO, and cryptography (& crypto sound very interesting!) fast!

Rate between 125 and 195 depending on various terms.

Also more interesting, I have been able to convert nearly all my projects to a retainer based - pay ahead - model. Usually in 100 hour blocks.

In Louisville KY and most of my clients are elsewhere. 5-7 years ago the expectation was largely on-site. Now 100% remote save the occasional meeting.

And I greatly dislike it. For some reason I don't understand, I am bugged by having to work down hours rather than simply work hours.

I also learned that the net payment terms on my contracts with clients were as meaningful as toilet paper. Getting paid in 30 days was surprising, 60-90 was more the norm.

Ultimately I just started changing the terms with new clients - telling them that we could work on a typical net 30 arrangement at a top tier rate or I would give them a discount to buy hours ahead of time in 100 hour blocks and I would burn down against this. Most heard 'discount' and nothing else mattered. It is difficult to change a client to this model but if you can start a relationship from this perspective things get much easier.

I've seen this before on HN. It's frustrating that it still happens. Obviously, if they can delay paying you to 60 or 90 days (but still get paid themselves at 30 days) they make money, but it's sleazy. Perhaps people should start naming and shaming companies who do that?

Luckily, the EU has law about this.

(http://www.wragge.com/analysis_7177.asp#.UaFeT9LryDE)

For small businesses, putting off payments to suppliers can be the difference between making payroll and going bankrupt. You can hardly blame them.

I make a point to pay as soon as possible, on the theory that this will improve the service I'm getting from other professionals ("Let's do Jacques's file first, he always pays promptly and we need the cash").

Also, the 60 to 90 day payments are typical for companies that like to keep things "lean" ... they want to generate revenue before they pay. Dell was known for this with their hardware purchasing - they would maintain a negative cash conversion cycle because they could sell a computer before its components were even paid for.

You just missed it this month (it was this last Tuesday), but maybe you'll consider coming next month? I hope so!

http://louisville.buildguild.org

Breaking open 150+ might be useful in some countries.

Where I am, basic consulting would get someone $500-$750/day. With 5+ years experience in a language/library that would be $750-$1250. 5+ years experience with languages + specific domain knowledge would be $1500-$3000+. eg. Codec implementation in assembler or VHDL/Verilog.

Actually, that's a widespread misconception. See here, for example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...

(edit: tl;dr: "less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great", i.e. since before English existed)

That's a linguist's take on it - you can find many more by googling [fewer less languagelog] or similar.

Can you elaborate on your theory to the contrary, Stavros?

> However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.

(emphasis mine)

This means that, as the article goes on to detail, you say "we have fewer choices" but "we have less than 5 choices". In the article's tables, it compares "less <choices> than N" to "fewer <choices> than N", not just "less/fewer <choices>".

It's not saying that fewer is correct anywhere. It's saying that "5 items or fewer" sounds stilted. Therefore, the OP's "less choices" is wrong by any standard.

I would say less choice, but fewer choices

Its hard to build a case for differentiating the value of one JS/Ruby/Python programmers hours against another as the barrier to entry is low without a context.

Where as you can differentiate with a Portfolio of completed projects and indicative prices.

The other thing to look at, is can you convincingly argue 5+ years experience, or is that 5x 1 years experience? (ie doing the same thing for 5 years, versus really having moved up the expert scale).

The question to consider when you sell yourself, what is the lowest realistic substitute the person hiring you could use? How do you contextualize and stratify that decision tree?

I agree. One reason I want to move away from this area is this, since the people hiring generally look at technology (Python expertise), not experience as a whole (how many complete products you have under your name). In this regard I have to compete with fresh-from-college kids since anyone can claim doing what I do.

Just bill at least $625/day (cheap!) and take multiple projects. Working in django, it is fairly easy to deliver sufficient value to two clients per week at this rate. Very often they need the same things anyway.

However most people here seem to be working for $5/hour. The vast majority (80%) are terrible at what they do, and speak very poor English. However there's the rare talentd few that still work at $5 or less per hour.

I feel bad for them. Is there any way to help these guys out?

And more importantly, HNers: What are your thoughts on these (rather unlucky) lowly-paid programmers? I kid you not, you can find a bajillion of them in poor countries.

EDIT: been living in the US for the past several years. This is just a temporary sojourn while I get visa issues sorted out.

Not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate?

The quality of software is absolutely terrible. I'm flabbergasted at what they're doing here. For instance, 50% of the commits in their VCS cannot be compiled. People are actually checking in code that doesn't compile, constantly.

Another thing is, I think the project is truly over-staffed -- the mythical man-moth problem can be seen in all its horrifying glory. To make what's already worse, even worse -- the version control situation is a total mess. No one really understands how to use it. There's no concept of personal branches (as in git) -- instead if you were working on commit X, and an hour later, you want to merge it; and there 5 new commits, this is what (the smart) people do: Create a backup of all the files you changes. Pull the latest code. Merge it using Beyond Compare of some similar tool.

I think the right to do would be that each engineer has a personal branch that they work on, and there should be a person called the maintainer whose sole responsibility is to merge these personal branches to the main branch. A git-style rebase could be done at the end of the day, instead of every time you want to commit, as is the norm here.

I should say the non-Indian parent company, is a extremely successful company (ie. billions of dollars in revenue), despite the terribly-produced software. It is primarily a hardware company though -- owned and operated by a conglomerate.

On top of everything, the people here seem really unhappy. No one seems to be doing programming out of passion -- it's just a job for them, that helps them feed themselves & support their family. I know there's nothing wrong in that. This particular company (hiring) them, also makes sure that their life is hell -- with absurd deadlines, policies, etc. People complain frequently about how terrible things are (people who've been working there for 5 or more years), yet no one seems to do anything about it. Remember, the average wage of an engineer here is around $900/month -- which, I honestly find unbelievable. And I've met a few people working at this wage rate, who are actually skilled.

Yet they pay me $650/month. I am so sad :(

Edit: I am a 1 year exp developer working for a consultancy focused on obtaining business through a major SAAS. We develop applications on said SAAS platform, and I am paid to integrate and use scripting with the API for this companies clients. I am moving towards an independent, freelance compensation model as I feel I would be underpaid otherwise and have no time to pick up my own clients if I don't.

Is <$40/hr too low? This is what I've been offered.

On the other hand, I've also taken work at near $40 and even less some non-metro areas (even with 10+ years of experience at the time), just because I was available and that seemed pretty closely dialed in to both the general market and/or what the client could pay.

In my mind, the biggest thing to work out is:

1) Can you work a reasonable amount of time at the current rate without having to worry about money? Some places you can rent a decent 2 bedroom apartment for less than $700/month, and $30-$40/hr will be fine.

2) Are you sending the right signal about your value? And are they sending signals about how they're likely to treat you?

Once I made the mistake of pricing myself at $45/hr in a middlin'-sized California town. I later learned that other contractors were being paid in the neighborhood of $60-$75. I wasn't terribly dismayed by this fact alone (though it's always disappointing to know you left potential income on the table), but my perception was that my contributions and opinions ended up being less valued than some of the other more highly paid contractors, none of which seemed to be demonstrably more productive or skilled (and some less).

A year or two later I had another contract gig come up in the same area, and the presented an absolute ceiling of $40/hr (if they were perfectly happy with me). I already knew that was on the low side for the area, so I said no. I later found out an acquaintance had done some time there and said it was a very high pressure situation without much respect for either work-life balance or the professional opinions of contractors.

I've heard it said that you make money as much on the business you don't do as the business you pick up. Try to find out as much about market value for your location as possible. If it seems low -- if you're not sure you'll have enough money or that your contributions will be respected -- keep looking, unless you absolutely need a bird in hand.

Eg. work on web projects with a finance component. Work for companies in the finance industry. And so on. Pitch your expertise in the problem domain to bump your rate way up and keep walking it up on each new engagement.

While I could probably juggle other things on the side, I take the extra time to spend with my kids. But as they will both be in school next year I'm thinking of upping my game a little.

Basically I specialize, networking monitoring type apps.. When things on the wire needed to be decoded and made sense of. I've always wondered if there is much out there contracting for that (protocol analysis, etc).

That rate lets me take 45 days off to travel and work on my own projects for every month of work I do for someone else. Since the marginal tax rate is around 60% in Sweden it makes more sense to exchange higher income for more free time.

Since I am a lousy negotiator I almost always work as a subcontractor though agencies. They suggest assignments and I choose which ones to accept.

My problem is that their chosen technology is not mainstream. I'm currently at a dangerous local maxima: they pay me very well for what I'm doing, but it's not very transferrable.

1. Professional Indemnity

2. Public & Product Liability

As I understand it, one of them gives my clients assurance that they can collect from me if I mess up; the other protects them from lawsuits arising from stuff I wrote. And I'm buggered if I know which is which -- just that I needed both.

Where would I find an agent, or does anyone have any agent recommendations, since I see a few comments mentioning them.

Be interesting to group by country to get the median for that country, not a silicon valley inflated amount.

    Where can I learn everything required to become a domain expert in "finance"?

And I'm still pretty underpaid, ranking in the low mids.

When I want to learn a topic, I literally buy a textbook and plow through it. Sometimes I'll buy a handbook or student's guide or pop. account of the subject to go alongside.

I took an accounting unit at university. One of the smartest decisions I've ever made. I even crack the book from time to time to refresh my memory about something.

Start with a financial accounting book intended for freshmen students in your country, and then management accounting (which is largely universal), and branch from there. A lot of accounting is actually about adjusting for imprecision; meanwhile, finance is about uncertainty.

There's even a software-focused management accounting / finance book: Return on Software by Steve Tockey[1]. It's good.

When you have the basics of this stuff, lots of business chatter becomes much more comprehensible. Your clients will appreciate that you speak their language and understand their pain points (cashflow is the biggest pain in any small business).

[1] http://www.construx.com/Thought_Leadership/Books/Return_on_S...

I have to ask if actually want to work in finance, or just want more money. If it's the latter, then all you may need to do is sell yourself better (see my other comment); the rates in finance are not what they used to be, and unless it's a highly specialised skill, pretty much most enterprises pay the same range for similar roles.

If you actually want to work in a deep speciality in finance (which also are the most interesting roles), then get a contact close to that target, and then hustle your way in. In both cases you still need to sell yourself.

Also, if your not in a major financial center, then move.

    What's the actual job title for the $400+/h job?

A quant is a Sofware-Engineer who knows a lot about "Finance". http://quantstart.com/articles/Self-Study-Plan-for-Becoming-...

I first heard it here on HN that one can earn $400+/h with a legal job!

And I'm deeply deeply impressed by that. I thought that only the dark-side (botnets/silkroad) allows one to reach or even top that amount.

You can bill $400. Large firms bill even more.

Lawyers have fat overheads, though. Nice office, staff, subscriptions to law publishing services, travel and so on.

Plus the big firms pound their fresh staff into the dirt. Bill, bill, bill or get fired. It's not a healthy profession.

1. If the end bucket has more responses than the next bucket, you're probably cutting it off too soon. In this case, on the low end, the "15 or less" bucket currently has 17 points, the "15-30" bucket has 57, so that's OK. On the high end, "121-150" has 86 points, "150+" has 130, making it the 3rd largest bucket. Normally, you want the highest and lowest buckets to hold only the outliers, and not a significant fraction of the responses.

Another way to look at it is that the median currently lies in the "71-90" bucket, so there are 4 buckets below the median, but only 3 above.

For that matter, the buckets should probably have all been the same width. The lower buckets are 15 to 20 dollars wide. The higher buckets are 30 dollars wide, and as a result contain more responses.

Of course, it's hard to know how the buckets should be distributed until you have some data!

Incidentally, buckets should be non-overlapping, so "15 or less" should have been "less than 15", and "150+" should have been "151+".

For example, my rate is between 90 and 110 dollars per hour for long term work. I would like to think I could charge more, but this is what the market will bear where I live. HOWEVER - there's almost always a vendor, and sometimes several vendors, between myself and the company. To the company I work for, my hourly rate looks about 10-40 dollars higher depending on the layers I go through. So for me to make 100/hr, it's likely the client is being charged 130/hr.

EDIT: read your contract with the vendor before you do that.