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  #31  
Old 05-10-2008, 06:02 PM
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Boofo Boofo is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ted S View Post
Have you ever worked on or run a site for profit and/or as a business?
Nope, never have and never will. When I start doing it for money, then the fun is gone.
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  #32  
Old 05-10-2008, 06:05 PM
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iogames iogames is offline
 
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Originally Posted by Boofo View Post
Nope, never have and never will. When I start doing it for money, then the fun is gone.
Told you, He's a 'Starving Artist' LOL
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  #33  
Old 05-10-2008, 06:35 PM
MagnetiCat MagnetiCat is offline
 
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Originally Posted by iogames View Post
$50?!?!
I know excellent coders that have worked for me at $15/h...
I go to Guru.com and many have talent
We charge $65 per hour. $50 is cheap, considering the value of the dollar worldwide (we are from Europe), and the ongoing prices for professional teams. We do offer flat rates. And just to prove that our prices are not "wrong", we never lacked clients. We have always done work outside the vBulletin community; we then started taking some jobs on vBulletin.org (my colleague name in the forums is CarlitoBrigante), for vBulletin, on July 2007. After a couple of months, we had collected so many loyal clients and many more came to us from word of mouth, that we have not had any need of looking for more job on the website.

Nowadays, even $65 per hour is not enough to pay the bills anymore, so we are moving to a different type of development soon. Let me also add that the hourly rate concept vary strongly from developer to developer. For example, I do not charge my clients for time spent researching the subject of their website (with advanced projects this is always needed, like when you are building a DB of collectible Sports cards or dealing with the Forex market), and I do not charge time spent on errors or on coding parts we had coded and that did not make it into the final code.

To be honest, you CAN find good coders at lower prices, but these are often young coders (that often do not work in an office environment or in a team), people programming for fun (but these will often work for free), or teams from countries of the world were average cost of work per hour is lower, like India.

Finally, many clients we worked with had thought their add-ons were developed by "good" coders, just because they got their product in a few days. When they hired us to check the forums, we found out that their "good" coders had not used even the most basic guidelines behind the development of a secure script. This occurred with one of the most popular chat scripts on the market that can be integrated on vBulletin (and our name is still listed in their news page) which had dozens of injection issues, but it also occurred with custom work. A client had all the credit cards of his users stored in a flat file DB, UNENCRYPTED. He had paid $600 for the script. This happened many months ago, not at the beginning of the PHP era of web development.

As impressive as this may sound, in my experience 3 every 5 scripts in vBulletin communities we have worked for during the past months included security holes that were only mitigated by the fact that some of the scripts were exclusive to the website, so the code was not available to malicious users. But we all know that injecting a buggy or unsecure PHP script is as easy as determining which variables it is accepting from the outside.

So, to be brief: ongoing average price for a professional programmer in Western industrialized countries is $60 or more. But prices of a market, like the one of vBulletin.org, is made by contractors and clients. So, how many professional teams or coders (the real ones, not those who call themselves programmers) would work in an environment were they are getting paid less than what they are being paid in other places?

My advices for clients:

1) Specify the budget range for your projects in the TITLE of the thread. Many think this is bad because coders will end up taking all your money, but many programmers will know you are serious when they see this. You will receive much more answers to your job request, EVEN if you are paying a relatively low price.
2) Ask the coder to show you websites he has worked for, with real scripts developed by them still being actively used by his/her users.
3) If your project is a high cost one, ask past clients about their experience with a coder.
4) NEVER NEVER NEVER go the cheap way if you are processing payments or collecting credit card information. This is an act of disrespect for your users, and it's asking for a lot of troubles, and possibly for the end of your online activity if all goes wrong.
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  #34  
Old 05-10-2008, 07:09 PM
Jase2 Jase2 is offline
 
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Huh, Americans best coders? I don't think so. vBulletin is coded by British people
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  #35  
Old 05-10-2008, 07:12 PM
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Dean C Dean C is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by iogames View Post
I will gladly pay those 'few thousands' to someone to code me a Photoshop, a Windows Vista, or a Norton Suite, but I'm realistic a group of 5 or 20 can't do so, thus I will keep going to the store to buy those solutions for just hundreds and I will keep recommending to my clients & friends to chose same method. [don't tell me MySpace have quality, and still they have millions]

But returning to reality, we humans live generally in a tight budget and we business men need to learn how to do much from a little, and I don't recommend to any startup to invest a few thousands
That's because the dollar is so weak against the Euro and pound that it seems a lot to you. Granted, $50 is about ?25 an hour in the UK which is a good wage, but it's not astronomical out here. You'd be hard pressed to find a decent and experienced contractor in the UK who would work for less than that.
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  #36  
Old 05-10-2008, 07:19 PM
MagnetiCat MagnetiCat is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dean C View Post
That's because the dollar is so weak against the Euro and pound that it seems a lot to you. Granted, $50 is about ?25 an hour in the UK which is a good wage, but it's not astronomical out here. You'd be hard pressed to find a decent and experienced contractor in the UK who would work for less than that.
Considering the price of a small flat in big cities in UK, I completely understand that.
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  #37  
Old 05-10-2008, 07:26 PM
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Boofo Boofo is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jase2 View Post
Huh, Americans best coders? I don't think so. vBulletin is coded by British people
So YOU say...
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  #38  
Old 05-10-2008, 07:31 PM
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Paul M Paul M is offline
 
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I think you'll find that not all the vb coders are British
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  #39  
Old 05-10-2008, 07:39 PM
Jase2 Jase2 is offline
 
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Hmmm, Scott must be Scottish then

What I don't get is, vbulletin are a British based, yet they use US phrases, and even use $ as the default currency .
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  #40  
Old 05-10-2008, 08:02 PM
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That has wondered me as well.
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