It's true that regular employees don't quite work the same way. There are company outings, seminars, meetings which are included in the salary. Someone online working on just one project and sometimes being monitored (I find that ridiculous) is constantly focused on the end-goal, at least in theory. I doubt there are any freelancers who always have jobs lined up, so the 100k per year can quickly become 50k a year.
With today's tools any smart and capable freelancer can ensure that he has 8 hours of paid work a day. And health care and other gimmicks should come out of the pocket of the freelancer not the client. A 700 dollar health insurance contract pernonth should have your family pretty well covered. Of course running such business out of the US makes very little to no sense. Nobody in Bulgaria or Russia whom I vetted to be capable of working on some of my development projects is asking me to pay up so he can feed his family or cover for health insurance. You can't have the cake and eat it too. Either you are competitive with world wages or you are not. And you are right, 100k gross works out to less on a net basis and even less on a discretionary savings basis. That is simple economics. I base my calculations on the value that is provided. The amount of education required and the hardship of the work done in comparison to a roofer or plumber or architect or other professions. The reason salaries are so sky high is because of a lack of supply nothing else, otherwise any Google developer would earn 100k as well. When you have 2 oil wells and 1 refinery gasoline may cost 20 dollars or more per gallon, that does not mean the gas is intrinsically worth that much, it just means that there is a severe lack of supply. Listen, we can argue about tweaking a few numbers here or there but fact remains that the asking price by someone with just average expertise of financial applications is outright shameless and completely removed from the actual value added. The reason you pay good dollars for a ready made platform that is actually not very widely in use at all but is still relatively affordable priced is because the company knows that they cannot cover the cost with the price they ask for the software but that they make a multiple of that from consulting gigs. You would pay a multiple the price of this app if you hired coders to write it for you. The problem is that in most cases you don't get a project done twice as well or twice as fast when you pay a developer 200 bucks and hour vs 100. Most of the time the correlations are even inverted, I see a lot of incredibly arrogant developer freelancers who aks for 200 or more per hour and love to talk a lot all day long yet don't get their stuff done twice as good or twice as fast as someone who charges half the rate.
Well if one is a decent developer and has solid knowledge of financial markets and advertises that intelligently I am absolutely sure he or she can line up work on multiple projects at the same time all year round and fill 8 hours of work each day. The issue is that those people are in dire demand and most developers rather go the convenient route of doing a bit of web development or other crud stuff instead of building a niche and specialized expertise. Check out stackoverflow then you see why JS or other web related technologies are so popular, it's because every fart is doing it. Obviously the demand for web developers is higher than for those with financial applications expertise but the imbalances between supply and demand between those two groups is striking. When someone charges 150 per hour for rock solid deep neural network expertise and then another C# developer charges the same then I find the latter asking price laughable. For the first you need solid skills in mathematics, statistics, and Python, skills on perhaps a masters or PhD level. For the latter you can gain enough expertise via online courses and 2-3 years of project experience. Hardly compatible in terms of required inputs.
Well, of course. That is very obvious. Same can be said for pro sports athletes or any other service or product that is subject to supply/demand constraints.
Can't agree with you on this. No matter how hard millions train only very few have it in them to become pro athletes. That is the intrinsic value I am talking about. But every child can learn Java or c# or Node.js on the side in high school. When you now compare salaries, let's say 1million per year per average NFL player (just checked and was actually spot on with my guess) and how few are qualified and destined to become players and the many years needed to get to this level and the short number of years they can play and the high risk of injuries and compare that with a greater then 100k salary for an average developer then can you still not see my point? In direct comparison either the NFL player is hugely underpaid or the developer should be paid 10k per year or less. All else is supply and demand imbalances but not related to intrinsic value.
In the past, I've hired people to keep a pipeline full. I pay them base plus a small commission or a fat commission (30%). If you're a project manager or a tech lead, you can usually bill a team at $150/hr/warm body and pay them between $60-80/hr leaving you about $20/hour. This is why I prefer fixed bid but flexible contracts. There is a lot more room for a profit margin for you (I routinely get 50%). Billing hourly is what you do if you are not good at your job or the project is ill defined. Check out million dollar consulting for the general template
I'm mostly concerned about getting effective and secure automation, as nothing I've done so far with automation attempts has been successful. Given my technical incompetence, is there a path through using platforms and/or hiring programmers? What do other people use to automate their strats, especially if they can't use/understand code?