9 years ago I was working for a major broadcasting company in the arse end of London as a junior dev, building one of their Android apps.
We'd roll features out months before & enable them with feature flags via a json file we'd manually push to a prod server at a later date.
We'd just built a huge new feature letting you request content to be downloaded to your set top box remotely & it had a 250k marketing campaign to go along with the launch.
Senior dev trusted me with prod deployment rights.
I pushed the wrong json config to prod, launching the feature weeks before the marketing campaign.
Thank god I was a junior perm, that was definitely a firing offence.
> Senior dev trusted me with prod deployment rights.
That part's crazy! If you think it was a firing offence wouldn't they've been fired? (I don't think it is, but obviously requires system changes/explanation.)
Don't think housing is cheaper in London than SV - its just public transport is better allowing for a longer distance commute
Interesting but a contractor on 100k is only equivalent to circa 45k as a FTE using the 3x rule I would expect a contractor rate for a FTE of 80k to be in the 200k range.
Also do they offer the same value in share options /rsu's etc. that SV companies do
Startups in London will offer shares for senior positions in much the same way as San Fran, normally with a vestment period, but it's not as common.
I'm not 100% on what the 3x rule is.
What I do know is that most of my contractor friends are on around £500 per day, which assuming a 260-workday year is 130k. There's a couple of oracle DBA's on around 800pd, which is 208k.
But then you have to administer a database & there's only so much I'd be prepared to do for money.
As a contractor, normal tax rules don't apply (and are normally much more beneficial). So a contractor earning 90k & a FTE earning 90k still results in the contractor coming out miles ahead in terms of raw income.
Obviously there's offsets to this. No sick pay, no paid leave, no free pension contributions etc.
In my experience so far and what I was told was bank on 1000hrs worked in a year.. figure out how much you want to make in that many hours. You need to triple your FTE salary because insurance, taxes, and savings(401k)). For me that comes to about $105-125 an hour.
My experience is that your price is set by how much work you want. When I first started I had a really low rate, and I complained to a much more seasoned freelancer that I had to much work.. and he responded with something that seems so obvious now, but at the time I didn't even think this way. He told me, "If you have to much work, you aren't charging enough." So over the next 3 or so months I kept raising my rates until I found a happy medium between the # of clients I have and how much I'm bringing in.
My work has benefited from it because I'm not having to work 50hr weeks to make the same amount of money. The hours my clients are getting are much higher quality, and my work life balance is sane.
in the US in my first year, full time contracting I did 130k on right at 1200 hours worked.
I'm on pace to do the same this year working mostly 20-30hr weeks. The rest of the time I'm spending working on my own projects and hopefully generating some recurring revenue.
Not looking to be the next big thing. I'm completely ok with a "lifestyle" business as people call it in SV.
I did this from my remote bunker nestled in the mountains of Vermont and am completely satisfied with that.
did you know that boring FST100 companies like BT offer shares to all staff? if you had maxed out a share save scheme a few years ago you would have made over 150k tax free?
I do. As a guy contracting for a FTSE 100 company now who've just had a buyout offer from the states, I'm surrounded by a bunch of execs that are incredibly happy (assuming it comes off)
