I am asking for a rough ball-park. I'm looking for a range that people are making from "Oh, my God, they got screwed and will be eating ramen for months." to "I can't she had the balls to ask for that rate." [...] If this is a taboo subject.... my bad.
It's not taboo, it's a great question. Several answers already posted are excellent, but I'll add another. In the market I work in, for independent contractors:
"Oh, my God, they got screwed" => anything less than $40/hr
"I can't [believe?] she had the balls to ask for that rate." => $150/hr or higher
Of course it depends, blah blah blah, but you did say ballpark.
For deciding what you should ask, Jerry Weinberg has a great piece of advice: set your rate so that you're happy either way. That is, not so low that you're unhappy if they say yes, and not so high that you're unhappy if they say no.
Now that I think of it, get Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting and read it. It may save you all kinds of trouble. In case you don't know him, Weinberg was part of the very first generation of programmers, and later became known for his work on human factors on software projects. A lot of his stuff is good, but Secrets of Consulting is a must-read, I think, for any hacker who wants to do consulting work to pay the bills.
Comments
I am asking for a rough ball-park. I'm looking for a range that people are making from "Oh, my God, they got screwed and will be eating ramen for months." to "I can't she had the balls to ask for that rate." [...] If this is a taboo subject.... my bad.
It's not taboo, it's a great question. Several answers already posted are excellent, but I'll add another. In the market I work in, for independent contractors:
"Oh, my God, they got screwed" => anything less than $40/hr
"I can't [believe?] she had the balls to ask for that rate." => $150/hr or higher
Of course it depends, blah blah blah, but you did say ballpark.
For deciding what you should ask, Jerry Weinberg has a great piece of advice: set your rate so that you're happy either way. That is, not so low that you're unhappy if they say yes, and not so high that you're unhappy if they say no.
Now that I think of it, get Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting and read it. It may save you all kinds of trouble. In case you don't know him, Weinberg was part of the very first generation of programmers, and later became known for his work on human factors on software projects. A lot of his stuff is good, but Secrets of Consulting is a must-read, I think, for any hacker who wants to do consulting work to pay the bills.
Good luck!
Absolutely agree on Secrets of Consulting. It was a major revelation to me when I was first starting out.