Hourly rate for PHP ?

iMax

Just wondering if anyone could give me a ballpark hourly figure for PHP programming ? I've possibly got a little bit of work to be done & want to know a rough cost before putting it out there.

Thanks in advance

Trojan

Depends who, where and what experience. Ballpark €40-100/hour but it's piece of string really.

Liam Byrne

Trojan wrote: »

Depends who, where and what experience. Ballpark €40-100/hour but it's piece of string really.

By those rates I'm seriously undercharging! :eek:

Off to rethink some rates......

iMax

Thanks Trojan, More expensive than I thought.

If I was engaging someone what should I ask them beforehand ?

TitoPuente

Could be minimum wage, could be €150 an hour. Depends on how much experience you have, how competent you are, how quickly you can get things done, etc, etc, etc. Completely impossible to put a price on it without knowing more.

seamus

iMax wrote: »

Thanks Trojan, More expensive than I thought.

If I was engaging someone what should I ask them beforehand ?

How much experience they have, whether they can show you any examples of work they've done and so forth. I wouldn't be too put off by someone who can't give you examples - if he's fresh out of working in a company, he may not be able to provide you with them. But most will because they code in their spare time anyway.

Unless you know a bit about web programming yourself, I wouldn't get too much into "what technologies do you know", because any spoofer can spout off a list of buzzwords and sound impressive.

There are unfortunately a lot of spoofers out there who've dabbled in programming and will often take on jobs they can't do for a knockdown price and make a mess of them. I do nixers primarily (I have a day job) and typically charge €50/hour, but if someone has a larger project that needs doing I'll give them a fixed maximum quote or refer them onto someone else if it's too big for me.

My rate also depends on the complexity of the coding; I have separate rates for HTML -v- PHP and complex code -v- simple bits. I'm a bugger for doing something free of charge cos it only took me 20 minutes. So as Tito says above, it's hard to get an actual figure without knowing the work involved. You're better off putting it out there first and then evaluating the quotes you get.

Placebo

personally i dont see how an hourly rate fits this sort of job. Considering most/some methods will be problem solving, it comes down to the persons problem solving skills. I might have 4/5 years experience but it might take me so and so to get the algorithm sorted. Just my 2 cents.
If it takes me half an hour to find out im missing silly variable on a bad day, i dont think its fair charging the guy for that.

I'd usually quote for the job rather than by the hour for PHP work. A low hourly rate can work out very expensive if the hour count ends up higher than expected.

Most developers would be able to price the whole job for you, assuming they had enough detail about the job. They will be calculating the price based on the number of hours they expect to spend on the job, plus a contingency, and multiply that by their hourly rate.

That way you have a firm price, although the developer will want more money if you start moving the goalposts and adding features.

Trojan

I've hired a lot of coders in recent years, as well as doing some subcontracting myself.

Almost without fail, the cheaper the hourly rate, the more the project costs in total

An experienced coder who you trust not to overestimate times will usually do stuff quicker and better, and point out design/architectural issues before starting.

I'd suggest as the folks do above - spec the job out and post it, and then evaluate quotes.