Do You Make $60/hr for Programming? 181
azzkicker asks: "I was reading some AP articles on offshoring. It talks about the struggles of out-of-work programmers and the shifting of jobs overseas [in the US]. Part way through one article it says: 'The average programmer commands $60 an hour in the United States, six times the rate in India.' I don't disagree with the Indian rate (USD $80/day, $400/week, $20,800/year gross), but what is with the US rate (USD $480/day, $2400/week, $124,000/year gross)? I know that programmers are billed out at high rates, but most of my programmer friends in Midwest, USA (years of experience and CS degrees) don't even see $50K/year. What is the actual rate most programmers see? Do you see $60/hr? Is the US rate misleading corporations into outsourcing?" Does offshoring really save corporations that much money?
$54k (Score:1, Informative)
$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty amazing. I work in tech support, which is a MUCH lower competency line of work than programming and I make just a bit over $60 a year, $72 with full dental/medical. Of course that is in New York City, where $60k a year is *NOT* considered a wad of cash!
My girlfriend makes $150k a year as corporate trainer, and (since she owns her own company) only works on average 2-3 days per week. And she has friends in her line of work who actually have the temerity to ask her "How can you work for so little income?". So, naturally, she thinks my paycheck is peanuts. I actually had a therapist tell me one time "Of course you have trouble making ends meet! You hardly make any money!" (naturally, I fired her not long after that conversation!)
I program for enjoyment and because I like to learn. But even though it seems like a far more intellectually stimulating line of work, I don't think I'll ever persue it as a career. ESPECIALLY if it would mean having to take a cut in salary!
Re:$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:5, Funny)
Does she throw them treats when they properly use buzzwords, and sniff the ass of their superiors?
Re:$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:2)
Re:$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:2)
What she should have said was. "Of course you have trouble making ends meet! You employ a therapist!"
Re:$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:2)
Try $12K a year in Mexico (Score:2)
Re:Try $12K a year in Mexico (Score:2)
That stinks.
Completely off-topic, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a dead-tree copy of overcaffeinated to date and sell that. Unfortunately, that's quite a bit of investment up front, so maybe that's not too practical.
Just a thought.
Re:Try $12K a year in Mexico (Score:2)
Re:$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:2)
Seriouly.. if they made that much money, how is it that there isn't a billion and one "techschools" teaching people to be "corporate trainers"?? i don't see late nite earn your degree in legal assistant, nurse, GED, A/C Repair, Computer programming... including the 'corporate trainer'. That's how a friend of mine classifies that computer tech work is in the dumper when you see ads for those sorts of schools.. be a computer programme
Re:$60k in NYC is not much money! (Score:2)
And she should feel horrible. She's in a stupid, anyone-with-a-peanut-could-do-it job getting grosely overpaid...
I blame people like her for the shitty economy.
Re:$54k (Score:1)
Re:$54k (Score:2)
Re:$54k (Score:2)
I work an average of 60 hours per week, minimum 30, sometimes 80, but 80% of the time it's between 55 and 60. We get "comp" time, no monetary compensation for overtime, but I've never seen half as much comp time a
Re:$54k (Score:2)
i asked for a small raise and got turned down, and the CFO made clear it's not because i'm not worth at least that, but that there's just "not enough money" right now. there's a lot of dead weight around here though, a lot of people pulling down double what i get and putting in 1/3 the hours. oh well.
Re:$54k (Score:2)
Re:$54k (Score:2)
What's the immigration policy like? I took a little french in highschool, and while I never got very good at it, I'm pretty sure I could learn to speak it fairly well if I really wanted/needed to.
Re:$54k (Score:2)
Re:$54k (Score:2)
I used to make just over $100K salary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I used to make just over $100K salary (Score:2)
I dont have a college degree.
I work at a manufacturing company of about 100 people, 8 servers including one linux, one openbsd and one sco servers. Beside the workstations, cabling, PDAs, Internet connection, antispam and Domino, I take care of the ERP system, develop reports, program apps that access the database, tune the database, train everyone even work with non-IT procedures in the company.
Of course I document everything.
And I get $12 per hour in c
OT: Free? (Score:2)
Free? No. It's just paid for by other people.
Re:I used to make just over $100K salary (Score:2)
And always keep in mind how much the job is worth to you vs. how much you are worth the company.
I once fought for the same raise numbers (same exact numbers) and felt that I was worth every penny of that raise. I got the raise because the company saw my utilization rate, the quality of my deliverables, and my repoire w/ client contacts.
Do the same analysis of your own work. If you feel you are worth every penny to them and that if they got rid of you they'd b
Re:I used to make just over $100K salary (Score:2)
The other thing is that you may be setting your expectations for a 30% raise a little hig
Re:I used to make just over $100K salary (Score:2)
Back in the good old boom days, I got a raise from 60k to 85k after a few months at a job, without even a review, just because I was doing work that was comparable to more senior people who made that much more. A
Seems low (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, I only see ~1/5 of that as my hourly wage, they get the rest of it for overhead/insurance/profit/etc.
Re:Seems low (Score:2)
Re:Seems low (Score:1)
When you have an employee, there's all sors of costs above and beyond his wage. You'll be paying insurance, possibly benefits, taxes, unemployment, ect. Plus you'll probably need a physical place for him to work, which means office space (rent is typically by the square foot) and equipment (outlay costs, maintenance, etc).
When you outsource, all you get is a bill. The company you get your labor from probably operates cheaper overall (India?) and so the net cost to you is p
Re:Seems low (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seems low (Score:2)
Re:Seems low (Score:2)
Re:Seems low (Score:2)
$10 / hour (Score:2, Funny)
Re:$10 / hour (Score:1)
Re:$10 / hour (Score:2, Funny)
Re:$10 / hour (Score:2)
There's no way most of the kids who are interns would get the job they would with their lack of experience. Also, interning allows you to NETWORK. Maybe you might not get hired after the internship, but the manager you worked under might suggest
rule of thumb (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:rule of thumb (Score:2)
Re:rule of thumb (Score:2)
Re:rule of thumb (Score:4, Insightful)
so, $60/hr + 30% = ~$78/hr cost to the company.
Re:rule of thumb (Score:3, Informative)
Re:rule of thumb (Score:2)
60/hr * 0.7 = 42/hr
Re:rule of thumb (Score:2)
Take all the office expenses related to people except actual salary : Building expenses, insurance, 401(k) matching, the $4.3M bonus paid to each corporate officer, the stretch limo and corporate jet expenses, etc... Get a dollar figure $burden.
Take just base salary of the company. Get a dollar figure $baseSalary.
Lets pretend that the entire company spends $100M a year on $base
Re:rule of thumb (Score:2)
I make WAY MORE than $60/hr for actual programming. Of course I don't get paid at all for sitting at my desk reading Slashdot... it all balances out
Just my 2 cents. (Score:5, Interesting)
Down here in Florida senior programmers are lucky to see 1/2 that at best.
Big numbers make for big headlines. No one ever puts 2 and 2 together.
My friend, could program a circle around 10 of the best offshore programmers you could throw at him. The problem is, they(management) only sees dollar signs, not quality, not the fact you are here on the spot, and not the kind of job your doing....so what if 6 programmers offshore can't do his job, they like the way the numbers work and are not bright enough to understand that they are actually hurting the company.
Again, what do I know. I am just your average government worker now, but I can zap you from space!
---typed for speed, did not check spelling or grammer. In fact I did not even read over it.
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, the CS/IT world is going through a much-needed purging of some talentless dweebs from the workforce. Competition with overseas workers is simply part of that. I'm not saying that outsourcing programming jobs to India is always a good thing, just that it's not always a bad thing.
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
The problem is that it leaves many of the extremely talented hackers out of the work force, as well. I am an extremely talented programmer, and yet I have had little to no luck finding a "real" job since May, 2003, when I received a CS degree summa cum laude, blah blah blah. It's a damn good thing I earned enough scholarship money to receive excess checks instead of loan statements. I've been program
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Anyways, good luck in law school. :)
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh - did I mention that I'm running an India based project? It seems to be going quite well. The real issues are a matter of finding e
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:3, Interesting)
5 years from now this won't likely be a problem.
5 years from now, your employer may not need a domestic "outsourcing manager" either. You might try being afraid for yourself.
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
20 years from now the only computing experts in USA will be hobbyists. All the professionals will be overseas. No more mentoring. No more masters handing down their knowledge to the starry-eyed pupils. No more in-house talent. You'll have outsourced it all.
Then the prices will go up.
It's a simple fact about outsourcing. It's a short-term win and a long-term loss. This is tr
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Try $1000 a month, easy. Mixed drinks, easily not more than $5 if you go to real pubs. It's also common for a programmer to work between 40 and 60 hours a week depending
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
1000 a month for what? Where? Could I stick you stick a 4 people in that place? He has kids and a wife.
5 bucks for a crown and coke? Hell I can't hardly find a crown and coke in Florida for 5 dollars.
You must be living in a 700sq box, drinking sparkling water called beer.
Not trying to rag ya, but I don't want to live that way and I am sure he does not either.
Find me a 1500sq apartment in south of the GWB for 1000 buck that I don't have to worry about someone cutt
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Agreed. My mom and my ex-girlfriend both live in new york and both are paying more than this. The former lives in a decent apartment but is in brooklyn pretty far from the city. The latter is in manhattan, but it's a very small studio and is only so cheap because it's student housing (columbia law) that they provide cheaper than the market rate. And she's up by columbia, which isn't the greatest area.
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Oddly enough, 2 people out of the whole is NOT an example of the full set.
I took a sample from nytimes.com realestate. I found at least 6 appartments, two of them two bedrooms, for $1000 rent, searching in one area of brooklyn that is not even
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
Wow, that was hypocritical. "I'm not going to say you're wrong but.. " No, I don't live in a box and I certainly don't need 1k feet+ to live in by myself. I'm not doing gymnastics or anything outlandish. Unless you are a middle american who expects to have 2000feet plus and expects to drive everywhere in their large american suv with 2 ac
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
This sounds a bit like contempt, maybe not prejudice, but contempt. Theres some serious skillset out there in that 5.8 billions, and Ive seen too many smart unemployer russian programmers here in Toronto defeated only by their lack of papers and good english.
Now offshoring development will hurt business for other reasons, cultural differences which cannot be reconciled despite the number of MBAs on bot
Re:Just my 2 cents. (Score:2)
My problem is with not knowing what your getting.
That is pretty much it, plenty of very smart people everywhere. You just don't know what you getting when you outsource like you do when you have them in house.
Billing rate (Score:5, Insightful)
The programmers may be making $20-45/hr, depending on the city, but the customer still pays $$$.
The Indians bill low and pay their people low.
Tricky Question (Score:2)
$60/hr salary or bill rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know staffing agencies look to pay people 60% of their wage, estimate 20% for benefits and the meager 40% left to pay their sales staff, office staff, directors, and take a profit.
I would say that is the average bill rate of people that work for my staffing agency and have college degrees. I know of some that make 120k+ with and without degrees. But, they are usually project managers, not coders.
Loaded rates (Score:4, Insightful)
It can also reflect the quality of talent--a well run consultancy may also try to identify and retain people with higher levels talent so you'll get higher bang for your buck as opposed to a warm bodies in chairs type permatemp agency.
- Barrie
Benefits? (Score:2)
Data Sources (Score:2, Interesting)
Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions (Score:2)
A: No. Next question.
Seriously, though, I don't make anywhere near $60/hour (and never have). Of course, I've only been out of school three years and I currently work for the government. But my last job with a startup didn't pay much more than my current one.
Re:Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions (Score:2)
A: Yes. Next question?
Ok, this job is special - my previous job paid $80K, but I also got a $15K signing bonus and a $15K Christmas bonus.
But then again, I'm 45 years old and I've been doing this longer than most Slashdot readers have been alive.
Overhead (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider the amount of hardware, office space, insurance, matching social security, etc and you start to see the programmer's cost rise.
Where does everyone get this 1.5 times salary? (Score:2)
I pay 100% benefits for my employees and SS matching, and workman's comp (not to mention my companies liability, etc insurance). It doesn't run anywhere near 50%. It is around 10% per employee.
Re:Where does everyone get this 1.5 times salary? (Score:2)
Wow! (Score:1)
Billing rate != Pay rate (Score:1)
billing rates, not salaries (Score:2)
Jebus, $400 a week is AWESOME (Score:2)
You people should start outsourcing to Portugal. Looks like we're even cheaper than the Indians!
I work for $30-$100/hr, avg around $40 (Score:1, Informative)
I wouldn't have a problem charging $60/hr for certain jobs depending on how quickly it needs to get done.
I've cleaned up after many an offshore programmer (but some are pretty damn good).
Contractors do... (Score:3, Informative)
So, yes, contract programmers are making that much. Permanent employees are not.
$60/hr is cheap as shit (Score:2)
Now, how much of that did *I* see? A lot less than $100 an hour, that's for sure
Sounds right, for a senior level position (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that I live in the relatively cheap Midwest rather than on the coasts, I do pretty well.
However - I have been doing this for over 16 years. I've been with my current company 13 years. I am one of the lead software architects here. I do everything from signal processing to OS design to systems to UI to test, and I do it damn well.
Sure, if you are fresh out of school, fuggetaboutit. Pay your dues, know your stuff, and be somebody your company can count upon to get the job done and you MAY be able to rise to my level.
Well damn. (Score:3, Insightful)
What is the real point? (Score:1)
no I don't (Score:1, Insightful)
Very interesting (Score:2)
Who really benefits from outsourcing [mises.org]
Another thing which most of us miss out when looking at cheaper cost of programmers in foreign lands is the currency exchange rate. Those programmers are actually very very expensive compared to other labor (look at their national per capita income) in their locale. It i
Re:Very interesting (Score:2)
$60 an hour (Score:2)
During consulting (Score:2)
Yes, I do, thank you. (Score:2)
for a long-term gig on W-2, I settle for
45-60. I live in rural Minnesota and I've
never sat in a cubicle. Cubicles are fatal
to your AGI.
good rule of thumb (Score:2)
My numbers (Score:2)
This as one of those buzzword-compliant web developers for a medium-size company. At the same time, the company was going to other firms for the design work and some applications because they didn't beli
Benefits in India (Score:3, Informative)
Here's what GE Global Research [ge.com] offers in benefit packages to American [ge.com] , Indian [ge.com] and Chinese [ge.com] employees. Again, you can see that there are significant savings in benefit costs.
Salaries. (Score:2, Interesting)
2nd senior programmer: $47k
3rd senior programmer: $60k
4th senior programmer: $50k
Senior Network Admin: $55k
2nd Junior Admin: $45k
3rd Junior Admin: $42k
4th Junior Admin: $38k
Contrast:
Common Data Entry: $28k
Data Verifier: $35k
Office Manager: $75k
Regional Manager: $100k
Executive: $115k to $140k (they GET bonuses, sometimes in the way of $250k a quarter)
That's gross salary, not net. We have a decent 401k that averages t
Here's a great article on 2003 billing rates (Score:2)
http://www.talenteconomymag.com/include/article2. p hp?articleID=132 [talenteconomymag.com]
Read the article for context but here's the quick quote.
"The worst-paid jobs are Webmaster, tech writer and support engineer, whose billing rates ranged in the low $30s per hour. That's not surprising, given the increasingly simple tools available to design and maintain Websites, and the weak demand for writers and general engineering support.
The best-paid jobs were database developers and administrators. Depending on experience they c
bah? $60. bah! bah! (Score:2)
Of course, as an indentured servant for the University of Texas, so it is to be expected...
I get about $126/hr to program. (Score:2)
I just did the math. I get paid about $126/hr to program, $53/hr for managing my staff, $11/hr for humouring my boss (see, I did mention you!), $2/hr for listening to users explain how they think a computer works, and I have to pay the company $5/hr for reading
Hmmm. Maybe I should use these figures to re-prioritize my work day...
Naaaa...
-- MarkusQ (chaneling Wally)
Extrapolating my salary increases... (Score:2)
I don't doubt that there are a lot of programmers out there raking in over $100,000, even in my area. They are certainly worth it.
$150/hour... (Score:3, Interesting)
My contact with Indian outsourcing (Score:2)
>
> I am currently seeking a full time programmer to perform general
> maintenance and feature enhancements on my C++ code base. The software is
> an open source decompiler that is used by our engineers for the recovery
> of lost source code. The entire code base is over 216 thousand lines of
> code and over 6 years old. I am hoping to hire this full time developer
> towards the end of the first quarter of 2004. This would be a long term
> appointment, hopefully with the a
Useless figure by itself (Score:2)
no benefits, few obligations, instant downsizing, no training costs, no retraining costs.
Expectation that all time is applied and on target.
Employee 60/hr
Might not include benifits
doesn't include burden of office, management, training and retraining.
The biggest expense in all this is the opportunity cost which is small for the contractor since s\he is only there if there is an opportunity.
The employee, unless they are hired specifically for the task (like a contractor), is an ongoi
Re:$35/hr for C++ contract in Portland, OR (Score:3, Informative)
That's what I'm seeing here too... $35/hr for C++ contract work. No benefits. Who would've believed it 3 or 4 years ago?
Hey, who moved my paneer?
Re:30/hr for internship (Score:2)
I find this difficult to believe since they could find experienced people willing to work for very close to that. What kind of company and what kind of degree are you working on?
I would expect that to increase as my education progresses.
Don't borrow money based on that assumption.