If you mean in general, a consistent job at 100 $ /hour is completely different from being paid 100 $ / hour for consulting. The former is rather hard, the latter is indeed rather low. The end of Patrick's article gives one of the main reason why (scaling consulting is hard).
I consistently meet people who earn > 200 $ / hour, without much programming experience (but know an open source project of interest very well).
I consistently meet people who earn > 200 $ / hour, without much programming experience (but know an open source project of interest very well).
I see this quite a bit as well. People can "luck into" something that gets hot and ride that wave into decent money in the short term. But a decent programming background is what keeps that ship floating because you always have to stay on top of the next thing if you want to keep that up, and it's hard to keep up with everything and even evaluate new stuff without some fundamentals.
On the other hand, if you can pull in $200/hr consistently (i.e. your yearly income isn't far from $400k before taxes) for at least half a decade, you can save up enough to retire early with a modest standard of living. But as has been said, consistency is harder for these things.
What open source projects have you seen people make good chunks of change from just knowing how to work them? http://www.pentaho.com/ is one I've seen. Also people who know the AWS stack can make a good chunk of change migrating someone's software to the Cloud.
Well, I would take some issue with the idea that a typical $200/hour consultant is billing $200/hour for 40 hours a week and taking that much home (taxes not withstanding). A lot of time gets eaten up in client relations, contract negotiations, skill development, etc... none of which is typically billed for. I've seen agency types bill $200 or higher an hour and log 2000+ hours in a year, but the agency is taking a huge chunk of that money.
For me, Magento (e-commerce) is the open source system that I lucked into. I got involved with it about 4 yeas ago which gives me a significant jump on the majority of devs I encounter. Besides being slightly ahead of the game, Magento has a reasonable learning curve that scares off a lot of the wordpress-eque devs and lots of more competent devs seem to thumb their nose at e-commerce, so the market isn't flooding.
Just out of curiosity, are you offering to set up online stores using Magento or to convert a businesses established online store to Magento? Or are you doing something completely different? Basically, I guess what I am trying to ask is how do you market your Magento skills to make a profit?
Freelance stuff comes my way through a few different channels:
- I do some agency consulting; basically helping them define scope and capability during the contract phase. They're strong on general dev know-how, but don't do enough Magento work to have consistent deep knowledge. These are basically just agency contacts I've built over time and they know to call me.
- I have a number of clients come to me looking to "fix" existing Magento installs that were started by a dev who mostly had WordPress brochure site experience. Lots of people get in over their heads with Magento. This stuff mostly comes to me by word of mouth anymore.
- When I get real bored I'll sometimes do a blanket post to Criagslist saying that I'm excepting new work. You have to put a high hourly rate though because Craigslist is such a bottom-feeder breeding ground that you want to scare off idiots.
It also helps (in some ways) that I have a full time job as a Magento dev for a decent size network of sites. It pretty much keeps me sharp on a daily basis, which gives me an advantage over general dev shops who might only do a handful of Magento projects per year.
EDIT: Contacts at a hosting company are another good source. LOTS of people need their Magento sites upgraded and due to heavy customization and general compatibility issues, lot's of these managed hosting solutions don't really want to do it from their end, so they can send clients who need upgrades your way.
I consistently meet people who earn > 200 $ / hour, without much programming experience (but know an open source project of interest very well).