

LibriVox hits 100 Million downloads, looking for a PHP Dev  - hughmcguire
http://librivox.org/2012/04/05/100-million-dowloads-and-a-mellon-foundation-grant/

======
jnbiche
Congratulations on the landmark download. Seems like a very laudable service.

With that in mind, may I make a suggestion re: your PHP position? I totally
understand the below-market pay you are offering (35-50 USD/hr); after all,
you are a non-profit with a limited budget, and there are other rewards for
working for a non-profit. Nonetheless, it will likely prove very difficult to
find a qualified developer at those rates, particularly once willing to work
with PHP. And yet, you are requiring 5 years of development experience. Do you
really need someone with that much experience?

If I were you, I would consider lowering that requirement to 2 years at the
most. There are probably some well-qualified PHP devs just starting out who
might like to work for you, and who would be perfectly capable of meeting your
requirements (btw, this does not include me, since I haven't done significant
work in PHP since 2003).

Finally, if you choose not to lower those requirements, you might want to ask
yourself why a developer with 5 years of experience is willing to work for pay
so far below the going rate. Unless he/she is a philanthropist whose life
mission is to spread the use of audio books, I'd be willing to bet that this
applicant is a very poor developer. Wouldn't you rather have a talented, eager
developer with a year or less of experience?

Normally, I wouldn't take the time to write this kind of missive, but I
appreciate your work and ideals and just want to alert you to going labor
market conditions.

tl;dr: it's a hot job market for developers, so you might want to re-consider
your hiring requirements.

~~~
ceejayoz
Unless I'm doing my math hugely wrong, $50/hour is a little over $100k/year.
That doesn't seem particularly low, at least not in my area.

~~~
showerst
$100k/year with no benefits and a relatively short fixed term, plus the
overhead of setting up the contract and having the space/equipment to fulfill
it (admittedly those are minor in this case.)

In my experience for good contract work like this the prices start around
$50/hour (at least in big cities in the US), and tend towards 75-100.

I'm not saying that _this_ should cost that much, just taking a stab at the
rates I usually see in the DC area.

