This thread appears to be mixing up 'contracting' and 'freelancing'.
Contracting - generally on site, fixed term contract, paid by the day, working alongside the team.
Freelancing - generally off site, project based, paid by the hour, working more autonomously.
You do find exceptions such as a work from home contract or a freelancer who bills by the day, but this distinction definetly hold true in the mind of companies and agencies.
Making the good rates in the poll is relatively easy as a contractor, but fiendishly difficult as a freelancer.
I suspect freelancing is more appealing to the HN crowd for the autonomy and location independence. I know I would swap £100+ hr of what I call 'contracting' for a consistent stream of £50 hr 'freelancing' in a heartbeat, but the work is difficult to source reliably.
(As an aside, I'm glad to see we have the same rate inflation on the London polls. At the time of writing approx 30% of respondents are on £100 + hr. There's no way the London market supports that at volume.)
There's no way the London market supports that at volume.
It's sort of a dangerous thing to assume that one's view of the market is the totality of it. Not to say that you're wrong, because I have never sold a gig in London, but I have heard the same about geographies/specialities with which I'm intimately familiar, and usually the claim comes from someone who has sort of fallen into a particular style of customer/acquisition channel/work and is not aware that large parts of the market exist in such a way that they'd never hear of them.
For example, rather frequently on HN we'll have people quote the going rate on Craiglist or RentACodeMonkey.com quoted as the maximum available for (without loss of generality) Rails programmers in Chicago, despite it being at an 80%+ discount to rates routinely charged by people whose clients wouldn't be caught dead on Craigslist.
There's only 27 people saying that. I only know the Java market and mostly outside of London at that, but £750/day for a reasonable Java developer doesn't seem outrageous in London to me.
Contracting - generally on site, fixed term contract, paid by the day, working alongside the team.
Freelancing - generally off site, project based, paid by the hour, working more autonomously.
You do find exceptions such as a work from home contract or a freelancer who bills by the day, but this distinction definetly hold true in the mind of companies and agencies.
Making the good rates in the poll is relatively easy as a contractor, but fiendishly difficult as a freelancer.
I suspect freelancing is more appealing to the HN crowd for the autonomy and location independence. I know I would swap £100+ hr of what I call 'contracting' for a consistent stream of £50 hr 'freelancing' in a heartbeat, but the work is difficult to source reliably.
(As an aside, I'm glad to see we have the same rate inflation on the London polls. At the time of writing approx 30% of respondents are on £100 + hr. There's no way the London market supports that at volume.)