Is $125/hr for 8 hours a day 5 days a week at a corporation (in lieu of salary) competitive?
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 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)
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