[desireco42]

These are sweet rates. How do you get your foot in the door for such work? Is there a way to apprentice for it, I don't think I would need much time to get up to speed, I did some minor SF work but nothing that would qualify me for such projects.

[kgermino]

Do you want to do it as an independent or with a consulting firm?

If independent, go to Trailhead.com setup an account and start getting some badges (there's a lot for Apex)/ developer certifications (Platform Dev I is a good one). They're kind of a pain, but relatively straightforward and are a good, in ecosystem, way to show prospects you know what Salesforce is.

If you want to work for a firm and have development experience, find a Salesforce consulting firm you like, and see if they'll hire developers who don't know Salesforce. Many will since Salesforce devs can be hard to find.

Working on Salesforce can get a bit wonky at times (like any platform), but the primary back language (Apex) is a Java derivative and will be vary familiar to anyone with Java or C# experience. Front end dev work uses web components which are similar to react. Overall I like it since the platform takes care of a lot of boilerplate and lets me focus on solving the actual business problems. My email is in my profile if anyone wants to reach out and talk about it more.

[mh-]

> nothing that would qualify me for such projects

In my experience on the client side of a contracting relationship, that doesn't seem to give the agencies pause at all...

(As a sometimes consultant, though, I'd never bid on a project I couldn't confidently do.)

[HeyLaughingBoy]

And from my experience on the "agency" side, it's at most a minor speedbump.

Client wants us to do what? Oh, I found some tutorials online and there's a lot of StackOverflow posts on the topic. Also, Jim says he did something kinda like that about 5 years ago and thinks he still remembers some of it. Let's SWAG it at $200k estimate for T&M and see if they bite.

In the 5 years I worked at an engineering services (embedded systems) company, I remember exactly ONE project we didn't bid on and that's because I kept saying over and over that we'd lose our shirt on it if we even tried.

[brd529]

These are the rates that the agencies certified by salesforce as “platinum” “gold” etc charge their customers. One idea is to start by working for one of those agencies, figure out how the system works, how salesforce refers them to their customers, etc and then when you feel like you have enough connections start your own agency to charge those rates.