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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada.

I don't see how you added anything to the conversation.

Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs.

For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a standard salary at less than £300 p/d and that money had to pay for salespeople, pre-contract technical support, offices, secretaries, etc. and all the effort on lost jobs as well as the actual work.

As a freelancer you don't have all those costs.

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No reason to be patronizing or get personal, Matt. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to those who earn even a third of that rate.

My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context.

- Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. Unusual in fact.

- Employee working 40 hours a week: very good rate.

- Contractor assigned to several projects throughout the year, with different companies, but essentially full-time for weeks at end: still good rate.

- Your typical consultant who has to promote themselves to get new clients, go on client's site (possibly with travel involved), etc, will normally book far less than 40 hours a week, even if they end up working 40+ hours to run their consulting business. In such a case £37.50 often ends up being peanuts. Common rates I see around here are about $100-150/hr for expert developers, exactly because of all the overhead of consulting.

That's why in my, admittedly very short, initial message I said "consultant" and not the generic term freelancer or contractor. I understand that you may have an issue with the term I used and the distinction from freelancer, but that's how I meant it.

I didn't mean it personally either, it's more that I felt you didn't add anything to the conversation and seemingly ridiculed other people's rates.

My point was you're not talking about the UK, you're working for BIG CORP that hires out consultants in a scenario I outlined above, so why start declaring people's rate peanuts?

For the record I'm actually a UK Freelancer and these rates are exactly what I see.

For some reason the UK pays less than the US for programmers. I don't know if it's because we've got more or it's something cultural, but that's the way it seems to be.

EDIT: These are also similar to the rates I know others in the East Midlands region charge too. One peculiar example is a small embedded systems company I know of about 6 people that charges all their staff out at £250 p/d. The owner claims that's the market rate, but that seems low to me for fairly specialised work.

Just to clarify: I have lived in GB before, and I wasn't expressing my opinion based on my experience with IBM. I do not work as a consultant in IBM, nor do I know particularly well how they do business (or their rates) in that department.

It does seem that embedded stuff pays badly across Europe. Maybe it's because it's close to the world of electronics development/industrial automation, which is seen (and sees itself) as a bunch of nerds soldering resistors together, and who are hired by guys buildings machines for which they themselves are afraid to ask real money for. As a consequence, the whole sector remains badly paid, working from poorly lid labs with cracked linoleum floors.

(Tangent: I was offered a job once to come work at a developer of medical systems. They gave me a tour of the facility and they showed me the 'desk' I'd be working from. It was literally a back corner of an electronics lab workbench, with a chair that didn't even swivel, right next to a dead plant and with a floor covered with previously-mentioned cracked linoleum that must've been 40 years old. C'mon bro, you serious? The hiring manager looked at me as if I was some sort of prima donna for wanting to work in an environment where I wouldn't feel like a necessary evil type of employee, just above or at about the same level of the guy working the loading dock. I declined the offer (one for which I was a perfect match, profile- and experience-wise, and one that had been open for 9 months because they couldn't find anybody even remotely filfulling the requirements) and then the CEO called me at home asking me why I had declined it, how could that be, such a great offer? He even 'upped' the pay - a whole 1000 euros/year or something like that, completely ridiculous, still below what I was making at the company I already had a job at at the time (I had told them how much I made and they didn't believe me). I told him a variation of 'pay peanuts, get monkeys' and brushed him off - he seemed to be not accustomed to that, weirdly enough.

Anyway, last year I was at a hospital when my wife was pregnant, and I saw that they used the equipment developed at that exact lab. I have to say that I felt quite queasy knowing that important things were decided based on results from machines build by people who would accept jobs under the circumstances there.)

Quoting http://stackoverflow.com/a/746854/22088:

Contractor is a temporary resource brought in from outside of organisation. Contractors' job is done when they finish delivering products or services specified in their contract.

Consultant is a specific kind of contractor. Their primary job is not just scaling up the existing team, but delivery of knowledge transfer. Consultants invest time into learning a specific topic or coming up with a new way of doing things, then they come to an organisation and transfer that knowledge to the locals, so that the team can carry on doing the job without need for the consultant to stay with the organisation.

There's a much more important (though somewhat cynical) distinction between the two though. A contractor is a guy working for your company on the equivalent of a 1099, who behaves much like an employee. A consultant is an outside entity who comes in to do a specific piece of work, and tends to be treated as something of a specialist who you should listen to. Given that the actual work being done is usually indistinguishable, guess which one you should call yourself if you want to make more money?

There's a 3rd term for this same position, "Freelancer", that you can use if you want to make significantly less than either of the above.

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