[consulting] Consultant Community

[Bert Van Kets]

Fred,

The difference in hourly rate can mainly be explained by the work
involved. I doubt there are many people willing to do difficult module
development for $2 USD an hour. There are several layers of difficulty
in Drupal development, each with their normal price.
- Installing and configuring Drupal (script kiddy click-click-click)
- Graphics work (no development involved)
- Creating themes (less PHP, more html, css, javascript)
- Creating modules (PHP and database)
- Performance tuning for huge sites (the whole shebang)
- ... (magic tricks?)

When mentioning hourly rates, please do put it in perspective. There is
no such thing as Drupal work. It has to be more specific.

What do you think is an appropriate/normal rate for the different
difficulty levels?

Bert


On 23/08/2011 15:08, Fred Jones wrote:
>
> I thought to raise the subject of the nature of this community.
> Clearly it's not the same as it was 10 years ago. Back then there were
> well under 3K users on d.o. Even 5 years ago there were less than 80K
> users. Today there are close to 1.5 million users. These numbers I
> obtained just by playing with the user id on d.o. I even graphed it:
>
> http://imageshack.us/f/585/20110823145904.png/
>
> I'm not here for 10 years, not even 5 really--I'm been hanging out for
> 3 or 4 maybe, so I don't know the history as others do, but aside from
> the exponential growth of the overall community, the developers
> community has also grown in numbers and in diversity. It was revealed
> at a Drupalcon last year (or two years ago) that there are dev shops
> charging up to $300 an hour. Now it has been revealed that there are
> also resources offering their services for $2 an hour.
>
> I am not intending to make any negative inferences towards outsourcers
> (there are American teenagers also working on eLance for a few dollars
> an hour, heh heh), but I am trying to get a feel for what people think
> about the growth of the community and how much cohesiveness there is.
> Or could be.
>
> I think this is quite relevant to this list and I hope at the least it
> provides food for thought.
>
> Fred
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