OT: hourly contracting rate for a software engineer in GTA

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 1:17 PM, David van Geest
<david.vangeest-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
> A little off-topic, but thought this group could provide some good insight.
> My wife and I are planning to move to Toronto in the next couple months
> (back to the motherland!).  I'm a software engineer, and the plan is for me
> to keep working on a contract basis for my current employer, who is based in
> Michigan.
> I can figure out an hourly wage based on current salary and some expense
> estimates, but I'm curious as to what the going rate is for contract
> software work in the GTA.  Obviously the type of work and the contractor's
> level of experience play a large role, so if you have a number, it would be
> good to see some context.  As for me, I do a wide variety of stuff, anything
> from C on embedded QNX platforms to Rails in the cloud.  I'm 3 years out of
> my Bachelor of Science in Engineering.
> Any insight into this would be appreciated.  Thanks!

You can likely work backwards from a seemingly-analogous salary to
work out what the rate ought to be.

Supposing a salary of $80000 is what is being paid for salaried staff
with similar qualifications, then consider...

*] (/ 80000 (* 50 40))
40

An hourly rate of $40/hr is thus equivalent to $80K.  However, there
are several disanalogies that point to charging rather more than
$40/hr:

1.  Salaried staff commonly have additional benefits that should be
accounted for.

1.1 Vacation pay of at least 4%
1.2 Medical benefits are often non-zero; likely add 5-10%
1.3 You'll be paying "employer's share" of CPP on your wages yourself;
you'll want to check rates, but I think that's not distant from 4%

So, if you are anticipating that the contract will be full-time
equivalent for the year, then it's likely that $50 might be plausible,
although probably it should be somewhat higher than that to account
for the fact that the contractee is free to let you go at almost a
moment's notice.

2.  If it's pretty regular but part-time, then you should be bouncing
it up by some moderate increment (I'd WAG at 20%) to account for the
fact that you need to be doing extra logistical work to deal with a
multiplicity of clients.

3.  If they call today, wanting to pull you in for 4 hours on Thursday
morning, you ought to bounce up the multiple to at least 2x or 3x to
account for the need for *sudden* scheduling, as you may need to
cancel work elsewhere to satisfy their requirement.

None of this should be too surprising, and the only *major* variance
I'd expect between here and Michigan would be that down there, health
benefit fees are likely to be radically higher than is the case here.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists