In April I started working for Urban Airship, and I’ve been meaning to upgrade my blog and move to it to a shorter URL for some time. You should be reading this on schmichael.com instead of on the old site at michael.susens-schurter.com. I think I setup the write .htaccess magic to make all of the old links properly redirect to the new domain. Sorry if I broke anything.

For anyone confused by the personal rebranding from “Michael Susens-Schurter” to “schmichael”, it’s all because I’m lazy and hate typing. Also, there’s already a Michael at Urban Airship, so I’m pretty much “schmichael” to everyone these days.

A really rough table of my rates as a contractor:

Language	Experience	Rate per hour
PHP	Entry Level	$8-20
PHP	Experienced	$20-65
PHP	Specialist	never got here with PHP (thankfully )
Sysadmin	Slightly Experienced	$45
Python	Entry Level	$25-35
Python	Experienced	$35-65
Python	Specialist (Django)	$65-85

However, I think I’ve billed pretty cheaply, especially for Python work. If I had continued in the contracting world I think I would have been aiming for north of $100/hr for new contracts by the end of 2009.

Important Notes

• All of the experience levels and rates are really rough estimates, please don’t read too much into it. I just wanted to give people some idea of what rates are floating around. (I also have a terrible memory, so these numbers could be way off. Mea culpa.)
• The sysadmin job is a career oddity for me and consisted of mostly doing Active Directory / Exchange setup (snuck in a Debian server of course). That being said I still enjoy sysadminish type work today.
• Experienced means you have a few “serious” projects under your belt (not the meaingless “5 years of experience” so many job descriptions call for).
• Specialist is a poor term, but I needed someway to describe the shift from “I’ll do anything if it’s PHP or Python” to “I’m a Django” developer. My guess is that real specialists (contributors to major projects or popular plugin/module authors) fall into the upper end of this spectrum and can often charge well over $100/hr for highly sought after specialties (Anything + Facebook might be a good example of that right now).
• I started with PHP first (2000-2006), so I was just less experienced in general.
• Not only does supply & demand help Python devs fetch a higher rate (reasonable demand, with low supply), but also a Python developer knows how to write code.
  
  A PHP “developer” could just be someone who has setup a few WordPress or Drupal sites and maybe done some theming. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a web developer who couldn’t be described as having PHP “experience.”
• My entire career in the “Specialist (Django)” range was in Portland, OR which has a vibrant web related economy (at least as far as my untrained eye can tell). All other rates fell at least partially into time periods where I lived in Illinois (and not Chicago), so that could account for some of the upward shift in the my rates.
• These numbers are also rough estimates because I’ve done flat per-project billing, retainers, and a variety of other crazy ways of exchanging money for labor. Dollars per hour is still what it all comes down to in the end (like DPS for you MMORPG freaks).

So I’m {ripping off,getting ripped off by} my clients?

I don’t know, but I doubt it. If anything my rough estimates should show what an inexact science billing is. It probably varies more on project factors than on the contractor’s experience.

Right up until I took my full time job at YouGov my favorite client was still paying me at my $35/hr rate. In fact sometimes I wonder if there might have been an inverse relationship between hourly rate and job satisfaction.

This could be a quirk of me being a pretty neurotic person and therefore feeling more pressure when working at a higher rate. At lower rates I generally worked more hours and spent more time tweaking designs, writing tests, and doing other tasks other than putting my head down and coding. Thus at the end of the day, the more hours I worked on projects I liked, the less money I made (relative to working fewer hours on less enjoyable projects).

* Ok, so it looks like I brought it up… but I’d like to think it spawned some good discussion.
Left off the Python category as that gets syndicated on Unofficial Planet Python, and I don’t think this post is high enough quality to deserve that.

War on Terror + DoD ~= 21.6% of our budget. I know we can’t cut it all, but a guy can dream can’t he?

My favorite line is in regards to how different political parties approach budgetary spending:

Republicans and Democrats judged by actions not rhetoric: government should be 105% of whatever it just was. Disagreement on where the new 5% goes.

So true. Neither party has been fiscally conservative (or even responsible) for the past 30 years. The Republicans just spend more on bombs while the Dems spend it on evil socialist programs like welfare.

Emphasis added to denote sarcasm.

I’d much rather my tax dollars paid for some poor person’s laziness (as many conservatives see welfare) than have it spent bombing the same country into oblivion twice in a bit over a decade.

It is sad to see us throw away 9% of our federal budget on interest payments. Hopefully our economy will recover quickly enough for President Obama to start paying back the deficit like Clinton did in the 90s.

I really didn’t realize how much my situation had improved until my friend, Aaron Colflesh, pointed me to HeyWhatsThat.com which generates elevation change profiles for you based on coordinates:

My current route from home to work:

It has a good 100′ hill in it. Not fun on the way home, but it doesn’t last too long.

Now compare that to my old route from home to work:

No wonder I never did it more than once a week! It was brutal coming home.

We’re much happier in North Portland in general, but finding these diagrams made me feel much better about struggling to get on bike at the old place.

There are many reasons for my decision, but I should make it clear that it has nothing to do with Chris! It has been great working with him, and I’m glad we get to continue to share office space even if we’re working on different things. There is plenty of client work stacking up for him to do as well, so I’m not bailing on a sinking ship.

So why am I leaving Lo-Fi Art?

The biggest reason is probably stress. I’ve just stopped enjoying client work because if I’m not stressed about getting the current client done on time, I’m stressed about finding the next client. If its not one of those two things, I’m probably stressed about when the next check is coming in. How much was it for again? Wait, did I already get that one? Argh! On top of that I’m terrible at managing money. While Chris does a great job with the company books, that doesn’t keep me from screwing up my own (don’t even ask me about how my tax return went this year).

On top of that, contracting gigs just have a lot of overhead. For me overhead is anything that keeps me from writing code. I really don’t enjoy writing proposals and meeting with clients to discuss (or often: haggle over) implementation details. Its not that I don’t like people. I love people! But I like working with a team more than a client.

Some people really thrive in the consulting world. I think its just taken me years to realize I’m not one of those people. I could see returning to consulting someday, but I can’t imagine it would ever be back to the 2-4 week projects I currently spend most of my time on.

Why am I joining YouGov Polimetrix?

I’ve been a consultant for PMX working on the BrandIndex project for over a year now, and it was getting to the point where I needed to either commit or focus purely on Lo-Fi work. It was a really hard decision, but in the end PMX just gives me the opportunity to do what I love. I work in a fantastic team* with lots of fun technology in an organization that places high value on their IT resources. What more could I ask for? Oh yeah, a steady paycheck. That was a plus too.

* Some of the dev team at PMX: Jamie Turner (@jamwt), Christian Wyglendowski (@dowskimania), Eric Larson (@ionrock), and Robert Brewer (fumanchu on irc.oftc.net).

The slides are available as HTML or the source OpenOffice.org Impress file.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and thanks to the Open Source Bridge organizers for putting on an excellent conference!

I have a bzr repository full of my log files I’m considering uploading. Unfortunately the meanings of the log files are mostly in my head, so I think I should clean them up before unleashing them on the world. Ping me by tweet or e-mail.