Ask HN: Got talent overflow

10 points by Ryan_Shmotkin 13 years ago | 7 comments

So, I keep reading posts telling us there is a huge shortage of talent in the valley and everywhere. And then I look around, and I got at least a dozen super talented people unable to get the work they want.

CONTEXT: Been developing for 10 years now, from army days, where I built a large network of great developers *. Many of them worked in the big names here (MS/Intel/Google/Nice/etc) and/or got offers of either to work or relocate with others. But they went the startup way and now slowly trickle back to the market looking for freelance and project work.

And while amazon gladly offered my friend $120K to relocate to the states, no one is willing to give him a freelance project if he wants above $50/hour (unless he sits full time in their office and becomes de-facto employee).

Can someone explain how this can be ?

(o) To be clear, these are Java / C# / Rails, areas that should be super hot (even had an Android dev who couldn't find a decent project).

ig1 13 years ago |

Because you're talking about two different markets, when you're talking about applying for a job as a full-time in-office employee you're basically competing with the limited pool of people in the local area.

If you're applying for a remote freelancer role, you're competing against people all around the world. Not only are there more of them but many of them will live in areas where their cost of living is an order of magnitude lower than yours.

That's the fundamental reason remote freelancers earn less than in-house employees.

If remote-freelancers were equivalent to local employees then arbitrage would drive down the price of local employees, but they're not. Companies place a premium on local employees (less overhead, better team dynamics, long term investment, stronger IP protection, etc.) and that's why local employee salaries haven't been driven down.

orangethirty 13 years ago |

Contrary to what people here tell you, its not so easy getting pad anything above $50/hour as a freelancer. Its possible (I charge more than that and have a healthy stream of customers), but it takes a lot of marketing in your part. If you can't market yourself, then you are better off charging less. In fact, I've been thinking about lowering my prices in order to have more time for other projects (most notably Nuuton).

debacle 13 years ago | |

I don't really think this is true. I'm in a small market full of stingy clients, and most developers sell their time to each other at $50 an hour and bill clients at $80-150 an hour.

It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to work with good clients and spend a bit more time on sales (maybe a 40/60 split), then a higher rate is what you want. If you want to spend more time developing and less time on sales (say, 20/80), then your rate will probably be half of what it could have been.

If you don't want to do sales at all, and just focus on development, you're not going to be able to make it as a freelancer.

RileyJames 13 years ago |

Where are you based? You mentioned you do not want to work in-house and become a de-facto employee, but are you in a position to do a face to face to kick off a relationship?

I run a startup called Dragonfly (http://dragonflylist.com) and we've found that creative and digital agencies are always looking to take on freelancers (at well above $50 per hour). The only barrier with remote work is trust, which is why most jobs on Dragonfly start with a face to face, meet and greet, and then become remote. Bigger clients, like agencies, just want to know they can depend on the freelancer. The risk for them is that the project isn't delivered and their client leaves (which could be 100k or even a million dollar loss, the development side is not necessarily the biggest part of the brief)

Keen to hear more about your story, this is exactly the problem we're aiming to solve. Email me: riley@dragonflylist.com

Murkin 13 years ago |

Always felt like a price / market issue to me.

They see everyone around them hire full time developers at $100+K/year And they see everyone getting freelancers at $40/hour

So they assume this is how things are.

timjahn 13 years ago |

I've noticed it depends on the type of company too. For example, startups tend to be comfortable with remote working arrangements and paying a better rate, while traditional big companies and/or agencies of many sizes want your ass in their seat and paying you as little as possible.

We recently opened up the beta of matchist (http://matchist.com) to help those freelancer web/mobile developers out there looking for quality work (at quality wages) find it.

project23 13 years ago |

Just a side note but talent isn't just in coding ability. All else being equal, what ig1 said.