I am a freelance web developer, and as such I work in isolation much of the time so I have no way of measuring my work against that of other developers.
One thing that I have been wondering about for a long time is how long most developers take to complete a project. I know that I am probably slower than most because at my stage in life I really don’t want to do the high pressure, get-it-done-as-fast-as-you-can, type of job, and I give my clients a break in terms of my hourly rate to balance things off.
I would like to know, however, approximately how long other developers would take to complete a job - say a custom CRM with about 30 database tables (approx. 400 fields in total), four large forms, a front-end and back-end, login system with three roles determining access to various parts of the application, reports generated from the forms which are printable. The CRM would be built using a php framework - either Laravel or CodeIgniter. The client specs are about 10 pages long.
Could some people please give me very general approximations as to how many hours they figure they would take to do this project?
(BTW, the client already has my proposal with my time estimate and I am about a third of the way through the project - I will not be using anybody’s answers in any way to adjust what I estimate or charge). This is just for my personal education.
You are asking a question that it is impossible to answer without knowing the specifications.
From what you have mentioned, we could be talking from two weeks to over a year.
Instead of wondering on how long another company or freelancer would spend on completing the project, you are better off trying to set your own goals. If you are working on module B and you estimate that you normally spend 10 hours on similar tasks, try to complete it in 9 hours instead.
In the end, person A might do task C several hours faster that person B, but person B will finish task D much faster than person A.
This is kind of what I thought when I read the OP, then waited to see if anyone else would say that.
One thing that I’ve been doing recently @webmachine is time tracking everything on freelance projects. Down to as specific about time on tasks as I can get without impeding my workflow. I’m hoping to gather enough data to better predict the duration needed for particular bits of a project, and get better time estimates in my head before generating estimates.
That’s not comparison to other developers, so that doesn’t help / answer your original question, I know. But I suppose if you’re not really competing with other local (or otherwise) developers in the time and money side of the business, the question is why would it matter to you?
Thanks for your response. I guess what I’m looking for is some way of comparing myself to the “industry” out there. Because every project I do is different from the other ones and involves quite a bit of problem-solving, I am really bad at estimating how long it will take me to complete it (under-estimating quite a bit).
