

Ask HN: In NYC is $40/hr a low rate for an experienced Java guy? - kupertino

I put my resume up on Dice to look for a Java contract (3 - 12 months).<p>I received numerous contacts but the only one to mention a concrete figure was an agency that said they wanted to put me onsite at a gig right away for $40/hr.<p>I haven't done contract work for many years but this seems very low to me.<p>Are they low-balling me to see if I'll bite.<p>And, if so, what's a reasonable minimum to expect, considering that I've been programming enterprise Java since it first came out and would be able to "hit the ground running", as recruiters like to say?
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Swannie
If you're experience really is as you suggest and you are an
EJB/JMS/Spring/RDBMS/transactions/JAAS guru, then yes, that is low-ball, and
I'd have expected you to be getting double that!!!

Caveat: I'm not NY based, but I have worked out of a US telco for a while.
$100/hour was their top rate for telco experienced Java architect/developers.

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zipdog
If you can get a sense of what a permanent Java position in NYC would pay, you
can convert that to a contract rate using a rule of thumb:

$40/hr contract is about $40k/yr permanent

Knowing the cost of rent in NYC, $40k / yr sounds very low for Java.

*(If a contractor can work 40 hr/wk for 50 weeks, they should earn twice what a permanent workers earns in a year, since the contractor is responsible for their own training, new jobs, billing, equipment, etc, and companies generally (in my experience) budget twice the salary of a staffer for their actual cost)

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kls
Metro Florida (Orlando, Tampa, Miami) is $60 - $75 for agency contract. My
rate is above that, but I mainly do Mobile Java, Objective-C and a whole lot
of Javascript now.

I would venture to guess that $40 hr for NYC is obscenely low given the fact
that it is in FL. Especially with all the financial work up there. I hear
people theorizing that NYC's start-up scene is hindered by the financial money
poured into development there, so I would have to assume that, if true, the
money has to be pretty good to keep the start-up scene depressed like that.

My gut tells me you are getting low balled, if you have been in Java from the
beginning. I have been doing it since the .9 beta release so we probably have
similar tenure.

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kupertino
Interesting, thanks. Just been talking to some people locally who said $65-$80
would be a likely range for NYC - so not too far off your estimate for FL.

Any idea if the rate would be better at a national agency
(KForce/Manpower/etc) or a local one? Curious what your experience is since we
seem to have a similar background.

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kls
I think their is a link to my linked-in profile in my HN profile which covers
some of my experience. But to keep it brief, I was doing CGI/C and CGI/Perl on
the web then around 94-95, the green team dropped Java on the net (I think it
was a .8 release) I remember I downloaded it and never got around to playing
with it, by the time I did it was at the .9 release.

At that point and with Netscape's announcement, we all thought Java was going
to be what Javascript/CSS/HTML is now. Anyways, I rode it through its
evolution to a server side language and I ended up doing a lot of Java/VRML
work. I was doing computer based training around 1.2 and was doing Java and
VRML work for a training and simulation company. Anyway, after that, my tenure
becomes pretty standard. with the JEE and Apache web stuff.

As soon as a viable alternative existed for web front end though I bailed on
Java for web as fast as I could. I always felt that we went too far towards
Sun and Oracles vision of the dumb terminal, and that we set the web back a
decade from where it could be, we are just now starting to see what the web
could have been if we would not have been so dogmatic about server side
frameworks and gave Javascript a little more love sooner.

It seems that when Java on the client died so did any effort to place UI logic
in the UI. Anyways, I am totally side tracking, but my point was, my
background besides some forays into simulation and AI, is pretty similar to
other JEE / Web developers who have been in it from the mid to late 90's.

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jasonmcalacanis
$40 is low. $40 x 2,080 hours a year = $83,200

That would be $70k in salary with about $10k+ in benefits.

So, it's sounds like a good deal for the company... but not a horrible deal
for you. You could get more, but make your decision on how great the company
is to work with.

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aquarin
I cant answer you, but when I started to work as programmer, my salary was
$150/mo.

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vlod
i assume the mo is a typo? and it should be hr?

