Comment by BywFFi8eMK

I'm one of those mythical 10x developers, too.

Last year, I had a company beg me to start working with them, and I talked them up from $120,000 ($60/hour) of my current gig with a huge corp to $150,000 ($75/hour). I just never gave my notice at corp 1. I did so well at both, and both of my team leads and bosses said I was doing great.

So at the beginning of the year, I added another company, this time, another publicly traded corp @ a 52w high, but they didn't have anyone who had my skills so I was a Team of 1 and I would tell them something would take a month but it'd take 1-3 days. I'd spend about an hour on that job, a week, and everyone was happy. I'd just steadily drip drip drip commits I worked on, on say Monday, through the week and update the issue tracker. Maybe 20 minutes a day.

I was still playing 4-5 hours of video games, a day, and still finishing all of my work by noon, so I took a 4th job, and it pays the least and requires the most work, so I'm going to quit it in about 2 more sprints or so.

That took me down to ~2-3 hours of slacking off a day, but my meetings started seriously overlapping in the mornings, but I've got that figured out.

So today was weird. I did first interview at another company (#5) and the CEO came on the call and said I was hired immediately. Team of 1. No oversight. ($65/hour)

Early this morning, I got a call saying "The client wants to interview and hire you TODAY, if possible". So I interview with them. Huge corporation, corp-2-corp, $80/hour 1099. They interviewed me on the spot and rushed me an offer, gave me a $2000 hiring bonus if i could only give 1 week notice. Team of 1, no oversight. The stuff is easily automated.

Oh, I fully automated Job #2 and do in ~30 minutes what would have taken me about 3-4 hours by hand. That took me about 3 months to automate.

So just when i thought it was already nuts, a recruiter I had completely forgotten about called me up and said the client from 3 weeks ago had extended an offer for $80/hour, so that's job #7.

I added it up... That's $225/hour in just job offers I received and accepted today. That's $450,000/year if I can sustain it (highly doubtful!) and by July 15, if I can manage, that's $485/hour or roughly $970,000/year....

So take $970,000 / 52 = That's $18,654 per week... $37,307 per paycheck or $80,833 per month....

That's big boy money.

So far, all the corporations use sprints. In all but one (the cheapest paid) i'm more than fulfilling my work. I'm currently working about 6 hours a day but when I'm in startup mode, I consistently coded for 15+ hours/day, 6 days a week.

I've been making $255/hour for several months now... That's like $27,000/month after tax. I am saving entire paychecks from corps just to pay the IRS every quarter. I realized if I opened up an S-Corp and did corp to corp and paid myself a reasonable salary of $120,000/year, i'd save many tens of thousands, so now every new gig is nothing but corp-2-corp.

Funny thing? I'm working less intensely than when I was investing my heart and soul into a single project for way less than $150,000/year.