Freelance Software Developer Rates Up 35% in the United States
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Recently oDesk’s own Henry Walker delved deeply into our wealth of rate trend data and discovered good news for American freelance software developers. America’s automobile industry may be flailing, but “Made in the USA” is not a dying dream in the software world.
It seems that while the UK and Bolivia have seen a dramatic decrease in the hourly fees software developers are able to charge, in the United States–despite the recession–software developers are now charging an average of 35% more than they did in 2008.
This phenomenon flies in the face of Softera Director Mikko Kontio’s predictions on IBM.com last September, when he stated that the future of software development was essentially going to involve a buyer’s demand for faster turnaround and lower cost.
Even earlier last year, in July of 2008, software developer Roy Lawson suggested on his PolkVoice blog that smaller, more skilled software development teams were a better bet in bad economic times. Thus, it could be that companies are simply willing to pay more for skills, as long as they are getting the work done by fewer individuals. In the long run, perhaps this is a savings for the buyer, despite the marked pay raise for the freelancer.
The exact reasons for the incredible rate increase in the face of America’s much-beleaguered economy may remain a mystery. However, it’s good news for those with software skills. As for the less tech-savvy freelancers among us, it’s a sign of hope. Doom and gloom predictions of meager future paychecks don’t always turn out to be true.
freelance drupal developer
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:14 am
Nice article you done a very good analysis on freelance software developer.
Steve
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 am
Um, the reason for this is pretty obvious, only highly paid consultants are still on staff. Everyone else got canned.
Fire all the cheap labor and of course “average wages” will go up.
quasipeak
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:27 am
I’m not buying it; where I’ve worked, they typically get rid of the higher-paid workers first.
Chris
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I think it depends on how they calculated compensation. Was this full benefits? or was this just salary?
One thought is a person making 50k with full benefits (healthcare, pension,etc) is a bigger liability for a company than a a consultant making 60k-70k. So you fire your 50k employees, and up the pay of your consultants so they dont leave (they’ll also need to retain enough consultants to train new hires or become new hires when things get better)?
Tamara
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Keep in mind that these are all freelancers and consultants, they aren’t on staff. I’m not sure how the wages have fared for software developers who are not independent consultants. That wasn’t the focus of Henry’s research.
It’s interesting and provocative because it doesn’t make sense for anyone to be making more money in a recession, but there are reasons for these things sometimes.
Perhaps it’s that high-paid employee software developers were laid off in the past few months, moved into freelancing, and are now demanding better pay than the freelance developers of last year. Just a theory–I have no facts to back it up.
Chris
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:37 am
It’s really a good sign.It is also nice to see Ukraine and Pakistani rate going up.I have found really good quality work with Pakistani and Brazilian work.
Also after the shocking number of Scams of Indian companies It is appearing that companies are loosing faith on them
Flow » Blog Archive » Daily Digest for May 26th - The zeitgeist daily
May 25th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
[...] Freelance Software Developer Rates Up 35% in the US — 4:35pm via Google [...]
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Jeff
October 19th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
As they always say: Choose quality over quantity. It could also be because of bad turn outs with off-shoring software development to other countries, which would cause the average hourly rate to sky rocket, since workers in foreign countries charge peanuts at the expense of quality.