translating salary to hourly rates

[John Van Ostrand]

On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 09:18 -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:

> 37.5h/week over 50 weeks is how I've always done it. 40h/week if you get 
> paid lunch.
> 
> Not sure if/what the "official" way of doing it is though.


It's really what the market will bear. Competition will play a factor as
well as supply/demand for a given activity and the nature of that
activity. The uniqueness of the work is also a factor.

It's always good to see what others are charging for the same activity.
Keep in mind that larger companies are used to paying more and small
companies are often resistant to high rates.

Take your downtime into consideration. You have to cover the time you
spend looking for work. This is the feast and famine of self employment.
It can be hard to look for work when you are occupied on a contract and
those contracts can be extended or canceled without much notice so you
can never really be sure when you need work. Some consultants I know
don't go very long without work. Some get leads from central sources
(like IBM) while others have well sought after skills and a good network
of contacts.

If your work is similar to "help desk" duty, taking calls and working
minutes or hours on a time and materials basis, charge higher because
your utilization is indeterminate. Figure on between 60% and 80%. If
your work is continuous, like a full-time contract, then your
utilization is based on how long it takes to find work between
contracts.

I've seen programmers with modest requirements charge under $30/hour. I
see consultants charging a wide range from $50/hour up to $250 and
beyond. A typical daily rate for a consultant doing system integration
is between $1000 to $2000 per day for technical consulting.


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