The op was asking about contracts of 6 months or greater, full-time. $400/hour may be your billing rate but I doubt you'd be billing that to the same customer for 8 hours per day for six months or more. Or am I really wrong about that?
You are absolutely right. I was asking exactly that, because all the previous polls were tailored for non-long-term freelancers/consultants, including what tptacek might thought about.
When this topic comes up on HN, discussion is normally focused on consultancy rates, because consultancy is more compatible with a startup side-project - it's easier to dial up or down the hours you do as a consultant, whereas contractors are locked in to hard agreements about time which makes them much more like salaried employees.
However, I'd like to see more discussion of contracting because it's still a good step away from being an employee. For me, contracting has meant:
1) Doubling of my take-home pay compared to working as an employee
2) I have my own limited-liability company now, through which I am paid. You don't always need this as a contractor, but it's a good way to learn the essentials of setting up a company, paying tax, etc.
3) If you save a good portion of your income within a company, you can fairly easily build up a fund which would enable you to work solidly for 6 months on a startup without external funding (though some paying customers would be good!). I've got about $50,000 saved from a few years of contracting, and that really hasn't been difficult.
Sadly, information about contractor rates is hard to find. In my (albeit limited) experience, the best rates can often be in doing un-sexy "enterprise" stuff, not Rails or Node or anything likely to make the front page on HN. Most PHP devs I know make more money than Ruby devs (the trick is to be a "Drupal" or "Magento" developer rather than a "PHP" developer). This doesn't really match up at all with what gets the most buzz in the startup world.
