I've been charging hourly for 3 years but am changing to fixed price contracts in December. I will still charge hourly for any planning/meetings etc unless they give me 100% complete plan made by a competent developer. I make my plans REALLY thorough and they take around 25% of the entire job, all the hard work is actually done in the planning stage the rest is just typing. This means I can give very accurate time estimates or quotes so I won't be doing myself (or the customer) out of money. Because I've been using Delphi and SQL for 9 years I pretty much know all the technical problems that might "hit" me. If you are less experienced with a language and platform it's easy to say, "yeah that'll take 10 hours" and actually it takes 20+ due to a hideous technical anomaly that needs google research to fix (but thank god for google, when i started we just had to figure the crap out for ourselves!). I charge £30 an hour, what's that around $50 or something? As a result I only need to work 3 days a week.
Also I read that the hourly wage of a contractor should be the anually salary of a normal employee developer divided by 1000 e.g. $50,000 gives $50 per hour. This might seem high but employees are paid holiday, sickness, pension and the company pays around 10% extra Tax on top (in the U.K.). Also they *may* not be as motivated or skilled as a contrctor. And you need to buy employees all the equipment and pay light/heat/phone etc. Shall I go on?
octothorpe is so correct about other programmers taking ages. Once I raced this guy to do some code, me 30 mins, him 20+ hours (and it was bugged) no sh*t. This is just one example. Also pros have less bugs, test properly, think up cool little extras but don't actually code them, they tell the client and charge more for them etc.
Also I read that the hourly wage of a contractor should be the anually salary of a normal employee developer divided by 1000 e.g. $50,000 gives $50 per hour. This might seem high but employees are paid holiday, sickness, pension and the company pays around 10% extra Tax on top (in the U.K.). Also they *may* not be as motivated or skilled as a contrctor. And you need to buy employees all the equipment and pay light/heat/phone etc. Shall I go on?
octothorpe is so correct about other programmers taking ages. Once I raced this guy to do some code, me 30 mins, him 20+ hours (and it was bugged) no sh*t. This is just one example. Also pros have less bugs, test properly, think up cool little extras but don't actually code them, they tell the client and charge more for them etc.