I place developers with US tech companies for a living. Before that sentence makes you close the tab: what follows is the thing I tell developers for free, one conversation at a time, until I got tired of saying it one person at a time.
Last month a developer in Prague asked me if 55 dollars an hour was a reasonable rate.
Nine years in. Kotlin, AWS. He had built and run a payment system for one of the largest Czech fintechs. Three million transactions a month. Zero P0 incidents in two years. A profile most US startups would fight over.
I told him what the US market actually pays for that exact stack at that exact level. He went quiet for about thirty seconds. Then he said: "I have been contracting for three years. I just did the math."
He had left roughly 180,000 dollars on the table. Not because he was not good enough. Because no one had ever told him the number.
