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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing you mean freelancing; why don't you give a little more detail on exactly what you can do? I suspect generalized advice will be less useful to you than specific advice.

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I'm graduating in CS so I've had a bit of experience across the board. I particularly want to do web development with Angular and Node. I've done internships and projects but I'd still need to do a fair bit of learning on the job.

If you're new to the market I'd advise working for an agency for a bit first so you get to know your way around.

I wouldn't suggest diving into contracting straight away then, if you can find a good perm job with a great team to learn from and mentor you would reap dividends in your future career. Then with a couple of years under your belt you'll be able to pick and work with much better clients and command better rates.

It's tempting to see the contracting rates and just think of the $$ but a lot of the time it'll be cleaning up awful codebases.

I'm starting a job in September (in SF!), this is just so that I have a bit of money to do a cool tech project with my mini-moto. Thanks though!

Any idea what rate I can charge as a masters graduate?

Rates will vary depending on the technical abilities needed for the project, the client's budget as well as the contractor's experience, location, etc. In SF, going rates will be higher than the rates of someone in Iowa, however, I certainly wouldn't set a rate lower than $75 anywhere in the US, no matter how trivial the job is.

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