Do you not think your own time is worth that much, if not more, given the mind-blowing amount of business value added by even the most horrible and unmaintainable pieces of software?
Or are you saying that only midwits charge $100/hr, and that real engineers can and should charge much more, so anyone charging $100/hr is probably a hack?
In the case of the former, here's an anecdote: when I was a baby junior, I was working on an in-house enterprise Windows Forms CRM application.
We had a pricing manager that had taught himself enough C# to be dangerous. The code that the guy wrote was such a disaster that it conjured unspeakable horrors from the void. But because he understood the business domain at a level far deeper than anyone on the dev team, he could crank out forms and custom reports that turned misaligned curly-braces into cold, hard cash faster than any of us could say "DAMMIT MARK, YOU BROKE THE BUILD AGAIN".
The lesson I took from that: turning ideas into code that creates business value isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing it in such a way that you don't create an unmaintainable mess that makes it impossible for the business to adapt to change so that it can continue to make money.
In the case of the latter: I think I need to charge more.
There are different use cases that demand different tools. For personal projects the simpler tools from before were totally fine but now they are longer accessible. I think that's a loss.
Or are you saying that only midwits charge $100/hr, and that real engineers can and should charge much more, so anyone charging $100/hr is probably a hack?
In the case of the former, here's an anecdote: when I was a baby junior, I was working on an in-house enterprise Windows Forms CRM application.
We had a pricing manager that had taught himself enough C# to be dangerous. The code that the guy wrote was such a disaster that it conjured unspeakable horrors from the void. But because he understood the business domain at a level far deeper than anyone on the dev team, he could crank out forms and custom reports that turned misaligned curly-braces into cold, hard cash faster than any of us could say "DAMMIT MARK, YOU BROKE THE BUILD AGAIN".
The lesson I took from that: turning ideas into code that creates business value isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing it in such a way that you don't create an unmaintainable mess that makes it impossible for the business to adapt to change so that it can continue to make money.
In the case of the latter: I think I need to charge more.