After looking up how to come up with an hourly rate, I was firstly astounded when the most common advice I could get from the interweb goes something like this.

1. Decide how much net profit you want to get. (e.g. $200,000/annum)
2. Add annual expenses. (e.g. $60,000/annum)
3. Decide how many hours you want to work in a year. (e.g. 2000 hours which work out to be approximately 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year)
4. Divide desired profit by desired working hours. (e.g. $160,000 / 2000 hours = $80/hr)

I was secondly astounded that the same applies whether you’re a one man show or a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Go figure.

Jeff Atwood, bolstered by Moore’s Law, points out that acquiring hardware is almost always the more cost effective solution, versus optimizing code. Here are some examples.

1. Buying a bigger hard disk vs. Writing a better data compression algorithm.
2. Adding an extra CPU core vs. Making the code run 50% faster.

Read his article here.

Also, the realization that code optimization can very well become an addictive obsession.