1) Contracting for the same company all the time (common with people outside the US contracting 40 hrs/week with a US company). These hourly rates will be much lower
2) Contracting for many different companies. These hourly rates are much higher because you need to budget for idle time, searching for your next contract, etc.
Until very recently Amazon's cash comp was capped at $160k. Startups lean very heavily on perks and paper stock that is worth nothing 95% of the time. Wider industry (banks, mom/pop shops, design firms, etc) will top out at high 100k/low 200k and usually don't have bonuses more than 3-5% of salary and almost never offer stock.
Is there any kind of "outlier" there with like... it's good for a senior developer but not a principal/architect level developer?
I'm just curious why the poll on this post has people saying they are making $150-$300/hr... Are they "lying" and it isn't steady 40 hour a week pay?
I don't think anybody is lying but if your first reaction is to compare consulting/contracting engagements with W2 FTE salaries you're just in for a bad time. They're just too different. $300/hr does not immediately correlate to $600k/yr (in fact it almost never does).
You’ll need to worry about finding new clients at most twice a year, and can easily find gigs through recruiters or agencies if you don’t wanna do your own marketing
Granted it doesn’t pay as well - low risk low reward
I subcontracted for about 6mos with a late stage startup at closer to the 100/hr rate, then negotiated up to closer to 150 for the next 6
I wasn’t doing anything special, literally just another dev on a given team just without benefits and without having to attend company events or having a boss
And this was my first ever contracting engagement too (was all fulltime before that)