Freelance Developers – £15 an hour
Really? In England? Somebody would only charge £15/an hour for development?
Well, that’s what the ad said…
Whilst browsing YouTube recently a number of MPUs have been displayed on the right hand side of the YouTube site: One that keeps cropping up is from a business that has recently stepped up a gear in promoting itself over a period of months.
I initially noticed the business’s PR team throwing content at publishers. As with a lot of PR I see on my desk these days, some of the associations between the business embedding their link in the PR piece and the content itself is a little spurious.
Secondly the rate at which these pieces of PR are being pumped out is, in my opinion at a relatively small scale publisher, flooding the market. To publish content from the same source on a regular basis, with sometimes tentative associations with the content, and all-of-a-sudden when there was nothing before is a little bit, well… Spammy!
But when their display ads appeared pushing devs for £15 an hour, VAs for £10 an hour and the same measly rate for freelance animators, it concerned me a bit. There is a “going rate” for web designers & web developers and, even though I personally operate a little under that rate, I wouldn’t stoop so low as to offer my specialist services, which I have spent over a decade developing, for a rate not much better than the national minimum wage.
So I took a look at their website. Lo and behold, the developers are not even in the UK. The lowest c0st, home grown developers are offering their services at a little under the “going rate” which is fine by me.
If you are looking for a developer for £15 an hour then the chances are they won’t be in the UK. You may well get a good service but if you do want to keep your money at home and spend it locally then a Brit will be worth twice that amount.
As for a Brit offering your services at such a low rate, well it’s up to you if you think you can pay for all your kit, your learning, your office and your travel, mortgage etc on a such a small amount – Don’t forget that as a freelancer you may not be able to get work all the time (especially if businesses are sending work abroad) so work out how much “downtime” costs you.
Personally, I shall be sticking with the industry standard.