NYCPHP Meetup

[Douglas Clifton]

I'm going to chime in here because this is a topic that I find
upsetting.

I recently had a guy offer me 20 CD/hour to work as contractor
doing professional PHP programming work. After the exchange
rate, paying my own taxes and other expenses, etc., that boiled
down to doing professional programming work for minimum
wage. Which is ludicrous.

I'm no expert on these things, but I think there are two things
going on here. Kids, with no experience or education, that are
willing to work for peanuts or just for the "fun" of it, and the
overseas contingent. How is an American supposed to
compete with that and still have a decent quality of life?
Especially in a major city like NY, or on the west coast where
housing costs alone are to the moon.

I keep telling people that approach me with projects, and are
expecting to be able to get away with a rate similar to what
I've just described, you get what you pay for. Because I
don't know about the rest of this group, but I have not only
seen the quality of the code and database designs from
folks that are willing to work on the cheap, I've also had to
throw a lot of it in the trash and start over. I have even
considered registering domain names and selling myself
on this very idea: we-clean-up-after-[insert slur here].com.

If anyone reading this list is looking for an experienced,
well rounded developer (PHP,MySQL,Apache,Perl,Linux
or BSD Unix,X/HTML,CSS...), then contact me. If you want
to pay me $15 an hour, then please DO NOT contact me.
I am in the DC area, but am willing to relocate.

NY would be awesome.

Doug
-- 
Douglas Clifton
dwclifton at gmail.com
http://loadaveragezero.com/
http://loadaveragezero.com/drx/rss/recent

> From: Aaron Fischer <agfische at email.smith.edu>
> To: NYPHP Talk <talk at lists.nyphp.org>
> Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 02:34:03 -0400
> Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] [OT] Consulting work
> It might be time to look in the classifieds.  =)
> 
> I'm not versed in what the market offers for FreeBSD or Linux, but $15
> an hour for PHP programming (even with benefits and retirement) sounds
> extremely low.