What am I worth? What are you worth? What are any of us worth? Advice please.
Do you ever feel like web work is amorphous and intangible? It's hard sometimes for a sophomoric developer like myself to know how I ought to value my professional services. After reading my story, maybe give me your insight on how you approach determining your worth and what you think I should get paid at this new job.
I live in Los Angeles and i'm trying to get a job in web development. In one of my interviews, I met with a private publishing firm. It's a small 8-12 person team that does periodicals, websites, and branding campaigns for non profits and social justice foundations. I would be a fulltimer, general-purpose graphic designer (which I have the chops for) and the lone web developer. My skillset is pretty much perfect for them!
Most of their needs needs are simply microsites with like four pages, they just have to look really nice. Additionally, I would at least want to rewrite their interactive resource directory map/form. Such a simple app could be so good if I wrote it in React, but right now it is bottom of the barrel. They currently have abysmal web tech... I'm talking joomla and poorly formatted wordpress templates with frankensteined plugins. Slow load, bad screen resizing, the lot. I feel like I could bring them up to best-practices!
Luckily I would get to totally own the web department and redo everything, but I would also be required to work with a wordpress back-end so the clients are comfy with making new posts to their sites, etc. Luckily I did some reading and found that wordpress now has a REST-API, allowing you to use it like a headless CMS that has one of the best WYSIWYG editors.
"Great," I thought, because they get their CMS, I can use a React frontend and do some 10/10 work, everyone wins. I found Apollo and was gonna make all my queries to the wordpress api with it to get nice concise data.
> Brief Aside: Is that stupid? Between Apollo, and a good SSR boilerplate like Razzle, it seems like I would knock it all out of the park. Is this hairbrained, or does it sound like it would work? I've never made graphQL queries before but they seem really awesome.
Anyways, we tactfully haven't discussed compensation yet, but the listing said $60,000 to $64,000 (with benefits yet undisclosed). 64k/2087hrs = ~$30/hr. Does this seem low to you? If I'm gonna totally redo their shit to be way more awesome, do you think that I am more qualified than that? Should I gladly accept it as a recent grad and count my blessings? They really liked me, so maybe I shouldn't be shy to ask if there's any more room for a higher wage or else I might have to "take one of my other offers."
I simply don't have the downstream perspective to know if this is a good value or not, but I want to get the most out of this job and know how to approach the conversation. Ideally, I was looking for a job on a dev team that did more app-related and coding stuff, but if this is a gift horse, maybe I shant look it in the mouth. Hard time of year to find a job.
I just want dat money doe. :( Fuck student loans. Thanks for any insight my dudes.
TL;DR: Is $60,000/yr a good wage for me to do solo webdev/design? On one hand, I would really like to make closer to 75, but on the other, it seems like a pretty fucking sweet gig compared to the depressed 35 year olds sitting at holiday ornament kiosks at the mall.