[true_religion]

My thoughts....

He's just a second year student and the only project I've seen is something that any competent student at my almma matter could produce.

Now look at the marketplace. For $40/hour you can currently get an experienced developer living anywhere that isn't San Francisco or NYC.

$100/hour is $4000 a week and $16,000 a month. Now certainly someone, somewhere can command this price but lets not pretend that it is the natural fit for a student.

If you're willing to pay $16,000 then your rate is comprable to what Google/Facebook pay their summer interns for 3 months whom I assure you have just as much skill and passion as you see here.

[bigiain]

What're you suggesting you can get for $40/hour?

You might get an "experienced developer" for $40/hr on a fulltime employed basis where that means "$80k/year". You certainly won't get the same level of talent on a contract or freelance basis at that rate.

For a freelancer, "$100/hr" is much more likely to mean $2000/week than $4000/week. Even consultants at the top consulting firms can't (legitimately) bill 100% of a 40hr week consistently.

I'm inclined to agree with other posters - if this site pitched him as a dedicated freelance web dev, I'd quite likely consider hiring him at a $100/hr rate based on the skill demonstrated in the HN Stats site. As a "please buy me some ramen and help pay my tuition" plea - I'd pass him over completely even if I needed pretty much exactly what he's demoing. Its all about perceptions and implications of trust.

[true_religion]

I think we're using different definitions for experienced.

Junior developers are still very much more experienced than a student, and won't be making 80k/year anywhere except DC/NYC/LA.

But I find that salary comparisons quickly go downhill on HN because of the bubble that we live in here, so I'm just going to let this conversation go.

[csomar]

Huh, so you measured his skills by his level of education? Even worse, he's an EE student; so Web Dev is really not his game.