[SATLUG] job opportunity in NYC

[Brad Knowles]

On 9/26/07, Don Wright wrote:

>  $70/hour
>  x  8 hours
>  x 22 working days per month
>  x 12 months
>  -----------
>  $147,800 per year

That's still really low.  When I was working at Collective 
Technologies (back in '97), they billed me at $100/hour for 
general-purpose Unix system administration work, and $125/hour if I 
was working in one of my specialties.  And that was the standard 
nation-wide rate, not adjusted for higher-cost areas like NYC. 
They'd probably add 50% or more to that rate for the more expensive 
places.


I've been looking very closely at setting up my own consulting 
business.  From talking to a variety of people who've done this, and 
all the books and everything else I can find, it looks like you lose 
about 50% of your billing rate due to overhead for things like 
personal and professional insurance, and various other things that 
employers have to deal with that employees don't ever hear about or 
see on their pay stub, and then you lose another 50% of the remainder 
due to taxes and other things that typical employees would see on 
their pay stub.

And that's assuming you have full-time employment for the entire 
period, which is usually not a valid assumption for most 
contractor/consultants.


When calculating what I would expect to have to charge as an hourly 
billing rate based on how much I want to take home per year and how 
much I anticipate that I'll be able to work, I figured I'd have to 
charge anywhere from $150-250/hour, depending on the nature of the 
work and the customer's willingness and ability to pay -- a 
longer-term contract would get a lower rate, due to the higher 
guarantee of percentage of employment over the period.

And that's for a less expensive place like Austin, not one of the 
most expensive locations in the world like NYC.


So, at the very least you have to chop any number you calculate in 
this manner in half, just to account for all the things that an 
employer would have to deal with that regular employees would never 
see.  Ironically, that would make the annual salary equivalent about 
$70k, and as SCS said this is a very, very low pay rate for the NYC 
area.

Salary.com has estimates you can use, as do most of the various job 
hunting websites (dice.com, monster.com, etc...).

Just make sure that when you compare salary rates for a given type of 
position for a given region, that you take into account all the extra 
costs that a contractor/consultant would have to pay, and effectively 
double (or triple, or quadruple) the base salary rate in order to 
work out what you'd need to bill as a contractor/consultant in order 
to actually take home the same amount of money.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>