You're a founder. You're an officer. You're visiting this webpage out of curiosity or because you need something done, full stop. You're perennially short-staffed because there just aren't enough competent people to go around. Your organization is thriving and you're not shy about writing checks to make your problems go away. Currently, your biggest problems are "business" in nature. (Which "technologies"? Who cares?)
Say you reach out to me. What does the course of our relationship look like?
First, you plug your email into my contact form. There are other fields, but they're basically optional. The contact form is so my inbox doesn't get spammed to hell and back.
Then, within a day or two, I send you an email. We exchange two or three emails and then talk on the phone. By the way, I send emails, I make calls, and nothing else. No videoconferencing, no social media, no weird apps.
Two or three calls later, I either have a good idea of what you're looking for or I don't. If I think it'll be beneficial for both parties, we do it. If I don't think it'll work out, I'll refer you to someone who's able to help.
We do it. It takes three to six months. After three to six months, it's done. It's solid and robust and won't require much ongoing maintenance. I drove it mercilessly from start to finish and you sent me a bunch of weekly checks. Everybody's happy. Everybody wins. The checks made your eyes water but in the end "it" makes more money than it cost and you recommend me and my services to all your friends.
Fundamentally, it comes down to the "human REPL". To a surprising and perhaps unsettling degree, no one really understands what's going on in the computer, we just have to infer what's going on by making changes and observing. So the human being is sitting at his computer making changes and refreshing to see what's changed, and he can only see lag and performance issues that are apparent on his machine. Everything else (not UI) is invisible to him. If the computer did computation instantly, there would be no real way for him to know (much less incentive to know) the performance or purely "mechanical" difference between, say, subtracting 1 by counting down 1 and subtracting 1 but counting up from 0 until the "next" number is equal to the "current" number. Weird concept, huh?
P.S. I've just replied to your very excellent post from 6 days ago.
Just riffing here, but I think a lot of times we do optimize just because it seems like doing good work, polishing things up. If it would feel cleaner, faster, and if we have time, we go back and improve it. Sometimes we even test that concept by running some piece of code millions of times even if, in practice, there is virtually zero speed difference. And I think we probably do that because we want to really know our tools better and more closely than just having the divorced sense that the computer is doing something we don't completely understand, under the hood - shaving off the milliseconds of difference between .map and .foreach and for(let...) or reducing what you need to some arcane series of byte array operations is what does give us the sense of control, that we're not just functionaries in a big REPL. I mean, I do take the time to optimize when I'm approaching a tricky problem as a matter of principle, not as code golf. But the underlying principle holds that, as you said, when lag for a given program approaches zero, so does the incentive to improve it. If I were still writing programs in BASIC on a TRS-80, you can be sure I'd optimize a whole lot more. So when you stick hundreds of such programs together into a framework, and each has its own authors, the collection or platform will tend toward maximizing the available hardware until the very last program, the new one, the one you're trying to write, has to find a way to optimize. And then it will optimize just enough.
I guess you could phrase this as: Software tends toward filling or exceeding hardware capacity over time.
> As it turns out, writing your own code is a lost skill and the companies and individuals who do need that service are willing to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Where do you find companies and individuals willing to pay $200/hr for basic, non-templated web code?
(Or is it one of those things where they find you...)
I rely on word of mouth and repeat business. There are a number of sites I've rewritten 3 times since the early 2000s - first in HTML/PHP, then in Flash/PHP, then in JS/PHP or Node. The code isn't (usually) that basic. I got known in the '00s for doing large, complex Flash sites - some fun ones on the art side, for bands and games, but mainly on the business side, doing online stores, CMSs and reservations systems totally in Flex/Flash. These were not what you'd associate with crazy animated Flash pages; my training was in graphic design, and these were pretty glossy, full-page responsive sites. They were also full-stack jobs, so when mobile became a thing and Flash died, a lot of clients came back needing a new front-end for an existing SQL/PHP stack that still worked. Now a lot of those have been refactored again as PWAs.
For really "basic" stuff, like doing a static website with a couple forms for an auto shop or something, I usually advise people to just go with a template solution. But one of the advantages of being solo is I've built up a really extensive set of tooling over the years, including my own lightweight CMS that's applicable for certain things where non-technical users just want to occasionally edit and preview content in-page. So that's deployed in some places.
Really, the $200/hr rate is to keep away cheap clients. It kind of obscures the fact that I work fast, so, if a client knows exactly what they want from a static website with a couple forms, I might knock it out in 8-12 hours, plus another 16 from the graphic designer I work with (who's billed separately at $100/hr). This isn't unreasonable for, say, a lawyer or a mechanic who wants something high-quality that doesn't look like every other site. We're a one-stop shop, so we'll also do logos, print pieces, etc. at the design rate. I also handle all the hosting, server management and domain registration for smaller clients (everything except email servers) and just send them a retainer bill for $400/year that includes all that plus 2 hours of support. On the higher end, there are a few companies whose stores and business apps I wrote way back who just need to keep making upgrades and changes, so I'm usually booked out for six months and rarely take new clients anymore.
I think the pricing works for a couple reasons. Initially I did it because I was tired of clients changing their minds or requesting endless unnecessary features that I felt cluttered up what should have been clean, easily navigated UIs. This was very prevalent in the Flash age when everyone wanted unnecessary animations and crazy splash pages. I would give an estimate for the number of hours involved at the beginning of a job based on the original features they requested, and anything beyond that I would start charging the hourly rate; it dissuaded them from waffling on "let's try this" and ruining their own websites. Over time I came to realize that a certain group of people like to show off a little and say they paid extra for something unique or higher-quality, or from "this guy who's the best" - and the people they bragged to would want to show that they weren't cheap either. Whereas I'm a guy who's like, "guess how cheap I got these boots", CEOs tend to be more of the "look what I can afford" type. And I'm not above tapping into that psychology. An additional benefit turned out to be that as a result of paying more, they actually trusted me more to make good calls about UI/UX, because you trust someone more who comes personally recommended, but also because professionals trust someone more who charges in or above their own income range. I realized this when I found out my in-laws' tiny mortgage office was paying a database specialist $500/hr - back in 2006 - to come in once in awhile and work on their Salesforce installation, back when I was only charging $50/hr for full stack web work. To them, she walked on water. I started raising my rate annually.
One lesson I learned from the art and design world, before I even got into coding, was that under-pricing your own work is the kiss of death. Keeping my rates high enough to drive some clients away has given me more free time and let me shape my career in a direction I actually want.
What I've learned from your (very excellent) post — and this is what I suspected, really — is something you may not like: $200 an hour isn't enough... you're not charging enough. Sorry. And yes, my post was bait in hopes that I would metaphorically lure you out of your lair. Sorry for that too.
You've spent 2 decades building a reputation as "the best guy in the area", you're booked so solid that you don't bother taking new clients, and your rate doesn't reflect your reputation or productivity and your current retainer, including your own labor inputs, is hardly more (probably less) than a basic small-business managed hosting plan.
At $200/hr and your self-described productivity, you're not the "look what I can afford" provider, you're the value provider. Basically, you're doing your "basic", "non-templated" web code (which, oh by the way, includes your own hand-rolled infrastructure) for less than the cost of the template-nonsense that plucky entrepreneurial types are selling to small biz all over the place. (Again, you'd be amazed at what small businesses end up spending just in hosting. It's often as much or more.)
That's what it sounds like to me, anyway. And all this comes with a big fat disclaimer: you know infinitely more about your business than I.
P.S.
> I realized this when I found out my in-laws' tiny mortgage office was paying a database specialist $500/hr - back in 2006 - to come in once in awhile and work on their Salesforce installation, back when I was only charging $50/hr for full stack web work. To them, she walked on water.
It's possible I don't charge enough, now. I'm cautious about raising rates, and the last time I did was pre-Covid. 2020 was pretty rough, with almost no one interested in building new infrastructure; luckily I had long jobs to carry me through most of it.
The $200/hr rate now isn't that different from a $50/hr rate in 2006. It was about half of what a smaller web bureau or design agency would charge at that time. My selling point was that I had the knowledge and will to do the work, if not the manpower and response time that a full agency could bring to bear. So - yes - it has always been a value proposition for my clients who have to trust that a one-man code show with a couple designers in tow can write software that will last ten years and is worth the technical debt incurred with a custom platform. I always remind them that unlike a company, I can get hit by a bus.
But I also omitted the fact that I really only enjoy writing fun, interesting code now... and there isn't much of that. So I find myself spending half the day on my own projects. I don't maximize my income by working long hours. Typically, I work on client projects 2-4 hours a day unless there's a short deadline. Maybe I should charge more for those hours, but I also feel a bit of moral obligation not to raise my prices too steeply on the clients who've made the decision to put themselves into my technical debt. And a lot of times I just do tech support without putting down a charge at all, if it's not really a big bother to me.
If inflation really goes crazy or if this situation ever began to feel like I wasn't being compensated fairly, I would raise my rates more sharply year to year. But... I grew up in ad agencies since I was 15 and got good at eyeballing the price points that brought in just the right customers. I used to be like a "Price is Right" contestant at that age, with the boss asking what I thought an account was worth, what a job should cost, and what they could afford. I've been accused of being too conservative in my pricing before. And of being too expensive. I don't think, personally, that maximizing the amount of money you can get out of a job is a good strategy for building long-term trust.
I have one client who, I know, thinks they have gotten an unfair and obscene amount of value from my hourly work. At one point when the stress of what they were putting on me was breaching what I could handle, even if I doubled my rate, they perceived this and just gave me a percentage of the company. So I'm of the attitude that if you do good work, and really put your complete attention into it, the world will provide for you. I hate hustlers and businessmen, hungry entrepreneurs, etc. I'm not a competitive type. Good craftsmen will never starve. To some extent, coders overrate their importance as part of a priesthood of industry in something new and poorly understood. We're architects and "engineers" with no real qualification. If the toilet in your small business backs up, the guy who comes to fix it is worth more than re-designing your online store. Or - differently, and I'm rambling here - I drive a 1980 Datsun. The only guy within 500 miles who knows that car is a mechanic who has Datsun tattoos on both of his arms... and lives in his shop, surrounded by Datsuns and charges an eminently fair rate. He built a new engine for me after I hauled him an old block. A craftsman.
Too often I hear, "you could be rich", or this or that. From ambitious people, of course. The truth is, the great thing about this life is that I have no ambition to be rich by working for someone else. If/when/how I get rich will only be if/when one of my own projects makes money. Without investors, who I hate, and certainly not on these clients' projects. I don't want or need to take advantage of them just because I could do so.
/rant - Hey, this just touched off a lot of thoughts and I don't normally explain my full thinking about this.
Frankly, I dislike work. I came to this realization a few years ago. Back then, I had a very good job with a top-shelf company, yet I was spending an inordinate amount of time wondering if "this" was "as good as it gets". Rolling out of bed in the morning is hard if you don't have a reason. Nothing to live for. This continued for a period of time. Finally, one fine summer's day, I knew that I had had enough; I called in, announced my resignation, returned the laptop, packed my bags, got in my car, and went on a very, very long drive.
Today, I work to live, not live to work. My philosophy is simple: live well while working as little as possible. So I trade high-impact expertise for cash, and spend the cash on fast cars and fast sports, and they all lived happily ever after.
Let me tell you a little about something else. I'm a perfectionist. Unfortunate but true. It's physically impossible for me to produce something inferior. Equally, once I start something, I don't stop until it's done. So I don't start very many things, and I make sure that what I do start will be worthwhile. In other words, it should be in good taste, and it should be throwing geysers of money in my direction.
Are you made for me?
* You are at or near the helm of a small- to mid-sized tech or tech-adjacent company.
* You need (my) outside expertise more than you need (your) money.
* You know what you want but not what you need.
* You want it sooner than later.
* You value quality and efficacy above all.
* Your company isn't doing anything creepy or weird.
* You have a certain fighting spirit.
* You live like every minute is precious, because it is.
The incentive is in the mind of the beholder. $42,000 captured the mind of the author; for its promise, he worked extremely hard and long, mustering a productivity far and above what he normally would have achieved. Then, when he in fact received not $42,000 but $3,666, less than one-tenth what he expected, he convinced himself that this was not a loss but a win because $3,666 is $3,666 more than $0.
What is your lesson here? My lesson is to become the house, because the house always wins.
It appears that your null hypothesis embraces the benevolence of tech companies. Is this a reasonable assumption? How, after all, do they make their money?
You could take literally any line of code and make an unfounded claim. "It calculates a hash, and fingerprints use hashes!" "It stores a variable, and analytics uses variables!"
It's on the burden of the person making an accusation of bad behavior to actually demonstrate that. Otherwise it's no different from me declaring you're an evil hacker because you comment on Hacker News, guilty until proven innocent.
The null hypothesis determines the "unfounded claim". For example, judicially, the null hypothesis is, "You are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law." Similarly, commercially, the null hypothesis is, "If it's profitable and mostly legal, corporations will compete to do it better."
Fingerprinting is both profitable and legal. It is so profitable and so legal that today's most dominant corporations, entities representing trillions of dollars of value, are founded on its premise.
The "unfounded claim", therefore, is yours. Or do you have any evidence that you are not being surveilled?
You're a founder. You're an officer. You're visiting this webpage out of curiosity or because you need something done, full stop. You're perennially short-staffed because there just aren't enough competent people to go around. Your organization is thriving and you're not shy about writing checks to make your problems go away. Currently, your biggest problems are "business" in nature. (Which "technologies"? Who cares?)
Say you reach out to me. What does the course of our relationship look like?
First, you plug your email into my contact form. There are other fields, but they're basically optional. The contact form is so my inbox doesn't get spammed to hell and back.
Then, within a day or two, I send you an email. We exchange two or three emails and then talk on the phone. By the way, I send emails, I make calls, and nothing else. No videoconferencing, no social media, no weird apps.
Two or three calls later, I either have a good idea of what you're looking for or I don't. If I think it'll be beneficial for both parties, we do it. If I don't think it'll work out, I'll refer you to someone who's able to help.
We do it. It takes three to six months. After three to six months, it's done. It's solid and robust and won't require much ongoing maintenance. I drove it mercilessly from start to finish and you sent me a bunch of weekly checks. Everybody's happy. Everybody wins. The checks made your eyes water but in the end "it" makes more money than it cost and you recommend me and my services to all your friends.
The End
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