
Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack - tombrm
https://devquarterly.com/report/q2_2020
======
Etheryte
Given how wildly the framework usage [1] differs from the long-standing and
well known State of JS survey results [2], I'd be fairly wary of anything else
they claim. Not saying the results are wrong, probably just different samples,
more so that it seems the variance is way too high to get any useful insights.

[1]
[https://devquarterly.com/report/q2_2020/web#developers_worki...](https://devquarterly.com/report/q2_2020/web#developers_working_with_certain_frameworks_and_libraries)

[2] [https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-
frameworks/](https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/)

~~~
klohto
This is a report for agencies. They cover a completely different set of
customers and most of the time are called in to maintain. Maintaining leaves a
little space to introduce new technologies and processes, which leaves you
with older technologies. Also, these companies have no reason to switch to
other (newer/shinier) technologies since the software they deliver is tied
closely with the chosen language. Switching would mean finding new customers.

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edpichler
The first pages made me very skeptical, so I stop to read this. Beyond that
there is no data intelligence on these reports, the numbers are weird. It's
showing Colombia's hourly rate more expensive than Sweden's. Also, I know very
much my homeland market, I am sure that it's wrong. I did not go further.

~~~
sheeshkebab
It’s a clickbait article... any article that claims something about rates,
salaries, sales is basically that. They are often completely inaccurate, with
data coming from either self reported numbers (best case), or a guess based on
a sample of job postings they scraped from somewhere.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
Yeah, the whole thing looks to be basically an ad for agencies that have
registered with them.

Nice for the agencies, not all that useful to this crowd for data collection.
Alot of the numbers are just way, way off from industry standards so it makes
me wonder where they got them.

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sacks2k
I oversee the hiring of dev shops for a mid-sized company in the US and the
rates for e-commerce/web development are all in the $120-$150/hour range.

The funny thing is that some of these companies outsourced to the Ukraine and
India and the rates didn't change. I would have thought that we would at least
see some of the cost savings.

Both companies that outsourced ended up being complete disasters (we are still
cleaning up the technical debt 3+ years later), which happened before I was
involved.

Since this is the case, it made no sense to hire any company that didn't hire
all developers directly in the US or Canada (which is now a requirement).

I suppose I should thank these companies, because it's the reason I have a job
today.

~~~
Alex3917
The concept of outsourcing for a writing job is weird. You don't see The New
Yorker outsourcing their essays to Pakistan, Hollywood outsourcing their
scripts to Ukraine, the NYT outsourcing their reporting to the Philippines,
etc.

Tech seems to be the only industry that thinks that hiring writers from
overseas to produce content is somehow going to result in anything viable.

~~~
tcgv
It's not that weird if you consider that a large chunk of software engineering
is CRUD apps and digital plumbing, which doesn't require a lot of creativity.
Nevertheless, I'm sure India, Ukraine and other countries have tons of
talented developers that due to global economics are willing to work for a
lower pay. Maybe the problem with the outsourcing model in these cases is that
it's being poorly executed. It's already difficult enough to build a strong
team within your own city, it wouldn't be any easier to do it remotely across
the world, much less if you delegate it to an HR department purely focused on
costs reduction.

~~~
Alex3917
> a large chunk of software engineering is CRUD apps and digital plumbing,
> which doesn't require a lot of creativity

The issue is more precision and lucidity of thought and language, and the
ability to communicate ideas and emotion to others from a given culture and
socioeconomic background.

Consider that when development velocity grinds to a halt because of "technical
debt", this is almost always just a euphemism for developers not being able to
read each other's code. (I understand there is an actual idea behind technical
debt, I'm just talking about what's almost always happening in practice.)

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ravedave5
Page layout is not great, got to the end and saw founders pictures so I
thought that was the whole article. I'm interested so I reopened to double
check and there's more on the left.

~~~
superasn
Yeah i was feeling so out of the loop wondering wth everyone is taking about..
where is the carousel? Checked the page 2 times before I saw that button under
everything else. It looks like the sort of thing companies do when they don't
want you to click on something! It's such a bad theme.

edit: after checking out the entire article now, it is quite insightful to be
honest. Lots of interesting research and data. I think they should just make a
simple html version like the craigslist website and it will be a super hit.

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numbsafari
I’m confused ... this says Andorra has >15k people working at dev agencies.
The country has a total population of <100k, most of whom work in the tourism
industry.

I feel like these numbers don’t add up.

~~~
Itaxpica
Yeah, this sounds like an artifact of some kind of tax shenanigans rather than
a real number

~~~
moltar
Doubt it. Andorra’s official numbers are still under 100k residents even
counting the for-tax-purposes residents.

There are for sure not 15k devs there. I’ve been to Andorra and visited a few
meetups. They had very few people in attendance.

~~~
numbsafari
Yeah, I'm thinking the simpler answer here is that this data is basically
trash. Based on some of the other comments in this thread, it really seems
like it is not a good quality survey with pretty poor quality control.

It reports fewer agency developers in China than in Andorra. The difference
between the two represents 1% of Andorra's total population and 0.7E-4% of
China's.

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neomindryan
Anyone know why they gave a whole section to "Web" and omitted Ruby? Even C
and Visual Basic are present.

~~~
timdorr
Because these are agencies. They're often called in to maintain legacy
systems, which don't get to use shiny new tech. Hence low or missing numbers
for things like Ruby or React, despite their prevalence otherwise.

~~~
burlesona
Sadly, that would actually point the other direction. Ruby was red-hot circa
2010, and while it’s still widely used, it’s not the new shiny thing anymore.
I would expect to see more “legacy maintenance” Ruby work than brand-new ruby
work these days.

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bentona
It'd be really interesting to see more than just averages for rates. Many dev
shops I've interacted with are all right around $250/hr here in the US / on
coasts, I wonder if there are similar standards elsewhere, or different tiers
in different areas.

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lvice
Hourly rates seem very off for Italy as well, as the real average is much much
lower to the declared $80/hr (web&software). It is especially suspicious that
France ($64/hr) and Germany ($55/hr) have a much lower hourly rate, when in
reality salaries and rates in these countries are at least 20-30% higher than
Italy.

~~~
yulaow
Agencies like Reply, Accenture, Avanade and Engineering are quite overcharging
other companies for their consultants in Italy, taking advantage of the fact
that a lot of big companies are hostile to keep devs in house (almost all of
the big banks for example). I had the chance to see for how much I was being
sold as a consultant some years ago and it was almost 3x the salary I was
going to get (3 x 32k before taxes).

~~~
txcwpalpha
Lot's of commenters in this thread are trying to draw conclusions about dev
salaries from this data, but you really can't do that for exactly the reasons
you described. It gets even more disproportional for some of the bigger, high
price tag consulting firms. In the Big 4 it's common to have entry level devs
making $80k/yr ($~40ish/hr) while being billed out to customers at
$200-300/hr.

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Agoreddah
These rates are quite interesting. After I did one freelance project (managed
team of 3devs, created prototype of 5G API network component), I am thinking
about starting my own small software agency. I was expecting to charge
30-35EUR/hour (Central Europe region), but according to these rates, my
expectations are quite low.

Can anyone give me any advice, books or podcasts, how to get better in
business negotiation, to be more confident to ask a proper charge?

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quxbar
Is developer pay in Cyprus and Malaysia really so great, or do a few digital
nomads just have their lives really well optimized?

~~~
notdang
That's not the salary. That's how much the agency is charging for them.

~~~
commandlinefan
I did a stint as a "contractor" at a body-shop consultancy back in the 90's,
only a few years out of college. Although they did pay well compared to what I
could get as a perm employee, they were charging THREE TIMES what they were
paying me. The friction that this caused was a deal breaker: the project
manager knew that I was costing as much as quadruple what their ordinary
employees were costing them, and expected 4x the output.

~~~
pc86
3x seems reasonable.

I've subcontracted out to folks, and even at a 2x markup, with the
coordination, review, and other unbillable activities I made almost no profit.
As a percentage, it was barely worth even having the initial leverage and I
rarely did it (at 2x markup) unless it was strictly to meet a deadline. In
large orgs where profit is a requirement for just about every interaction I
can see how 3x or 4x would be necessary to justify doing the work in the first
place.

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vmception
I really like this! It is so hard to find and compare Solidity and Truffle
developers for the EVM

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realtalk_sp
The whole site offers a poor UX with weird redundancies, terrible navigation,
grammatical errors, etc. It's probably sensible to conclude the methods used
to gather, clean, and present the data are correspondingly untrustworthy.

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vmception
I wish someone would do this for legal work. I always felt there could be
similar plot charts to help reveal the outcome of wildly different needs, and
still give a feel for what to expect

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andrewon
An example of bias sampling? Better to stratify geographical regions.

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jen140
India with 36$/hour in "web and software developers", is it correct ?

Portugal with 37$, never seen such salaries here..

~~~
nwsm
As someone else mentioned, that is the rate the company charges, not what the
dev is paid.

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jdxcode
How is Andorra the 9th top country for agency workers? A country of 77k people
has 15k agency workers?

~~~
mbdesign
My impression is that Andorra has a favourable tax regime and is close to
Spain and France...

~~~
jdxcode
that's over 20% of every person (including children and the elderly) and the
wikipedia page doesn't even mention software.

~~~
Apocryphon
It's like how every company is incorporated in Delaware and has an "office" in
the Caymans.

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andrewmcwatters
These rates are so incredibly off, that this shouldn't be taken seriously.

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marceloabsousa
Is a dev agency basically a consulting company?

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bgroat
Are all of these values in US dollars?

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qaq
some numbers are really off Ukraine is over 100k

~~~
nwsm
Yeah.. headcount by country isn't a very useful stat in an analysis like this
that is obviously non-exhaustive and potentially biased in selection.

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chrismorgan
Something really, _really_ annoying about this site: it uses automatically-
progressing carousels that cause content reflow below them in the page.

I encounter this sort of thing _so often_ , and it’s really, _really_ bad.
Positively _awful_. _Super_ disconcerting.

In most cases like this, it’s just that one slide is longer than the others.
In this case, there are a couple like that, but also for the rest, image tags
have been used _without specifying their dimensions_ , so they take up no
space as the carousel slide enters, and then once the image starts loading
they reflow instantaneously as the dimenions are known.

Please, if you have a carousel, you _must_ make sure that its height _never_
changes as it progresses. (And please always put width and height on your
images, too, so the intrinsic aspect ratio can be applied properly.)

Oh, and auto-progressing carousels as a whole are a blight, but a sometimes-
just-barely-tolerable one. So long as they’ll _just stop progressing once I
interact with them! Please!_

Does _anyone_ like carousels? I encounter software developers railing against
them, I encounter _normal people_ railing against them (from recently, a non-
techie had _one request_ about a new site, that the carousel inserted by the
developer of the prototype—because it was a part of the WordPress theme
used—be removed), I honestly can’t think of having encountered a single person
that _likes_ carousels. They’re just all-round irritating.

~~~
vimslayer
[http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

:)

~~~
pier25
I've been saying this for years but marketing guys love carousels.

If you can afford to hide content why even put it in the first place?
Specially on the most prominent part of your website.

If you want to deliver a message focus on essential content that cannot be
hidden.

