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October 08, 2004

[WWDC] Partial recant

When I returned from Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in July, I made a post accusing Apple of “shaving the edges” in several areas. Most of that post, I still stand by.

Howver, one area I mentioned was video. In 2003, all the sessions were taped, and DVDs of all those sessions were delivered to the attendees. This year, the big video cameras were absent from most of the sessions, there was no video available online via the Apple Developer Connection site, and there was no mention made of DVDs. I concluded that Apple had decided to forego the DVDs.

Things got better a few weeks later, when PDF versions of the slides (originally in Keynote) from all the sessions were posted. Those slides were, in most cases, more valuable than video of someone walking around on stage, but the contextual information of the presenter was still lost.

Yesterday, my DVDs (!) arrived - and now have I to take back all the nasty things I said in that arena. Turns out that while they didn’t videotape the actual sessions, they did tape the audio as well as the video that was displayed on the projection screen present in each room. My ten DVDs contain a nice little front-end application that lists all the sessions, and presents me with the ability to either watch a quicktime of the session (which is basically listening to the speaker while watching the slides in a 400x300 window), or I can view the slides myself at high-res (great for reference).

This is a lot more useful than a plain videotape of the session in progress. Great job, Apple.

Posted by jim at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2004

What am I worth?

What do I charge for my time?

It’s a fairly normal question for people who have been sararimen all their professional careers and are looking to do some freelance work. Searching for comparable rates rarely helps - web and IT geeks (my line) rarely advertise their hourly rates, same with editors (my wife’s line of work). So how do you figure out what to charge a client?

This is my take on it. It assumes you want to earn the financial equivalent of someone who has a full-time job; someone who works 40 hours a week (not 50, 60, or 70), gets benefits, sick time, training, vacation, and paid holidays. Sound good? Climb on board.

So, first off, decide your salary. That’s why you decided to freelance, right? Let’s say $60,000/yr - it’s a nice, comfortable number. First thing we’re going to do is take half of that, and add it back in. Why? A workplace provides you with all kinds of benefits: workspace, office supplies, office furniture, phone line, computer, printer, fax, paper, pens, electricity, bandwidth, email, coffee, trash service, tech support, purchasing office, training, voice mail, software, insurance, employee discounts, sick leave… just to name a few. I work in Higher Ed, so I also get many spiffy discounts, and access to lots of university stuff. Work for, say, a basket-making company? Bet you get a discount on baskets. It all adds up. But you, you lucky devil, you’re self-employed, you have to supply all these things yourself. So long as you’re putting yourself in the under-$100K range, let’s say that all those things are worth - collectively - about half your salary. So multiply your salary by 1.5. That gives us $90,000. Write that down - that’s how much it costs, per year, to keep you around.

Now, how much do you want to work? Really now. For the sake of argument, let’s use the old standard of 8 hours a day of real, live, billable hours, 5 days a week. Do you want holidays? All said, there’s about 12 valid non-religious (well, save for Christmas) holidays. Vacation? Let’s not be greedy, and take 2 weeks - 10 business days - of paid vacation a year. We already budgeted for sick days in the previous step.

Now let’s do the math. 52 weeks in a year. You work 5 days a week, that’s 260 days a year. But you don’t work on those 12 paid holidays, and you don’t work on those 10 vacation days. That leaves us with 238 working days each year. We liked 8 hour days, right? 238 days at 8 hours a day… that’s 1,904 working hours every single year. That’s our magic number: 1904.

Go back up 2 paragraphs. How much money a year did we need to keep us in beer and cheese-whiz? $90,000 for the equivalent of a $60,000 annual salary. And we decided we wanted to work 1,904 hours a year. Divide the first by the second: 90000/1904=47.27 (rounded).

There you go.

If you want to live the life of someone who earns $60,000 year at a 9-to-5 office job with benefits, holidays, and paid vacation, you need to charge $47.27/hr for your time. Or, to make a nice geek equation of it:

( salary * 1.5 ) / ( ( ( 52 * daysinweek ) - ( holidays + vacationdays ) ) * hoursperday )

Don’t have a calculator handy? Fill in the numbers, then cut-and-paste into a Google query. They’ll do the math for you.

Now, I admit, the biggest leap of faith is the first one - that all your benefits add up to half of your gross paycheck. I’ve spent over a decade in workplaces where, to make you feel good about your (often small) salary, they give you a “benefits analysis” each year to tell you what your bennies add up to. And each year, it’s been close to 1/3 of my salary. Add in all the costs of putting you in an office and keeping you equipped with Post-Its and red Swingline staplers… that stuff adds up pretty quick. So, for a ballpark figure, I’ll stick by my 1.5 for sub-$100K jobs until someone gives me a detailed proof otherwise (and you’re welcome to do so).

So, now you know how much you should charge for your time. Or, if you’re a salary-earner, how much your time is really worth. It’s a powerful number, and can change your perspective on things. Here’s an example:

Let’s say I did the above exercise, and my time is worth about $40/hr. I have a house with a yard. It takes me about an hour to tend to the yard, each week, with a basic mowing and trimming. A kid in the neighborhood offers to do the job for $15. Now, if I like tending to my yard, it’s not even a question. But if I don’t - if I consider it an odious task - then having someone save an hour of my time (which costs $40) for $15 is a bargain.

Before you all rush off and start applying this to everything in your life besides your freelancing hourly rate, I want to make two last points:

There. You’re armed now. Set your rates.

Posted by jim at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)