Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#111

Post by Nursie » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #102

Nursie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I have to say to that is "You'd be surprised", particularly when you get a reputation for picking up new things quickly. > Companies invest in training Literally never happened for me in 12 years of perm work, for large and small companies. Discounting trivial/patronising things like security training. I've self trained or picked things up as I go along a few times as a contractor, just as I did when perm.

> I've self trained or picked things up as I go along a few times as a contractor Why would i hire a self trained machine learning engineer with no experience on high day rates when I can hire someone with experience. Ppl hiring contractors don't have time or patience for you to experiment with self training on their dime, I would hire a fulltimer if i have all the time and money for ppl to learn on the job.

Again, all I can really say is "You'd be surprised".

I think ML is probably different, in that it's not something that can be just 'picked up' that easily (AFAICT).

But it's honestly surprised me over the years how often my clients have said "Hey, I know it's not your main area of competence, but do you reckon you could have a go at this?"

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#112

Post by 3np » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

TimTheTinker wrote: post #88

Cederfjard wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agile is a time stuck and time waster How do you prefer to organize larger software development efforts that have to be coordinated with other business processes?

Anything that treats software development as an iterative research and development process, lets engineers self-organize, respects their time, and respects that time estimate certainty is asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.

> asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.

I don't get what you're trying to say here.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#113

Post by jameshart » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #100

jameshart wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s not surprising that people who are doing well in the contract market like the contract market. For my part, I literally left the UK in part because the industry there was so geared towards contract work or boutique contract houses as the only viable career path for senior developers. It’s just not for everyone. I like staying with a product team and building and owning stuff; I like companies that build…

Curious, where are you located right now and did the market there cater to your expectations of less contract work?

I’m in the US, in the Boston area, and yes: I have been successful in growing my career within tech companies.

We build software businesses here. The UK should try it some time.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#114

Post by kamilyt » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

play cusors.io

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#115

Post by kamilyt » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

kamilyt wrote: post #114

play cusors.io

if not edit

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#116

Post by deanak » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

Everyone is well aware that any promise of company loyalty isn't worth the time it takes to say it. To attract in-demand employees, you have to make every week count for them so if there is an acquisition or yet another useless management shuffle, they can walk away without regretting the time they invested. The easiest way to achieve this is to offer some amount of equity and/or the exact weekly schedule and vacation time they are looking for.

The most excited I have seen engineers get is when I tell them my primary goal is to keep them out of meetings, away from process rabbit holes, and focused on programming and documentation. We have one weekly 30 minute meeting limited to the product team, and ad-hoc stand-ups if we are picking a long term path that affects the whole team. The acronym KPI is never mentioned. Our only measure of success is deployed features.

The toughest part here is usually dealing with management who think you can't get anything done in 25-30 hours, or that having "face time" is worth sucking 10 hours out of someone's life every week with a commute. Or even worse, they have mandatory "all hands" meetings or "team building exercises" as if their employees are children. (To anyone offended by that, try building a team of adults through hard work instead of the equivalent of circle time.) They cannot comprehend that a focused 5-6 hours a day is much more productive than trying to enforce 8x40x50 and pretending that every hour is similarly productive.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#117

Post by softwaredoug » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #75

softwaredoug wrote: post #58

I switched from consulting to a company. In short contracting is a headache if what you care about is doing good tech work. Rates in the contract world represent a lot of overhead and headaches you experience there: 1. Payment risk: chances someone doesn’t pay you is surprisingly high. A lot of time is just spent chasing down your money. 2. Poor payment terms: being able to bill after 30 days of work is actually seen…

How on earth do they justify anything except next-day payment? If they can't pay a few thousand dollars what is going on with their cashflow?

They have their own lame, internal excuses.

Often you're dealing with payment from a completely different procurement dept than the group you're delivering services to. So you often have to work your relationships in the project team to nag a completely different part of a company to get you paid. It's a nightmare at large companies.

I had one large client that decided "we aren't going to pay bills in Dec". I'm pretty sure it had to do with the CFO playing cashflow games at the end of the year so their numbers looked good. So all vendors got dicked over... Of course if you're a giant firm, you can ride the cashflow waves. Or if you play golf with the CEO, you can put pressure to get payment. But if you're a small firm or a freelancer, the project team you work with can't really change much about what's happening.

Also, net-60+ clients have a pretty "bad smell" because you know they set that up so they can play cashflow games to make their books look good.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#118

Post by g051051 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #52

junon wrote: post #33

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work…

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…

> You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment.

Fine by me. Everything I've seen and heard of Agile (both in the last company I worked at and from others) is that's it's a dumpster fire. It wasn't created by developers to improve development, it was created by consultants to sell consulting.

DevOps is dumb, too.

> Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean?

That they haven't fallen for the hype and do what works for them.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#119

Post by atonse » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #85

Nursie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relatively few engineers actually want to do contract work. The better contractors I've worked with all do, here in the UK. The day rates are high. The taxes are the same or lower, health insurance is optional. There's some company insurances you need and you have to get an accountant, but all-in that should be covered by less than a week of work each year. Gaps between contracts are desirable! Having a whole summe…

> Plus jumping on to a new project every few months keeps the work interesting But contractors are usually hired for their existing skilsets where they can jump in and start contributing immediately. So you end up doing similar projects. eg: If you are a backend programmer, no one will hire you to work on as a machine learning engineer on day rates. This is a big myth that contractors are working on something new and…

> But contractors are usually hired for their existing skilsets where they can jump in and start contributing immediately. So you end up doing similar projects.

That's not been the case with our best contractors. Yes, in some cases, they were hired for skillsets they already had. But a couple of them we work with, we were happy to let them learn elixir on company time because they demonstrated solid polyglot skills. And that's paid off in spades.

I've had the same experience with my personal consulting agreements. People sometimes hire you for your experience, and know you'll still bring your judgement, experience, and problem solving mindset to the technology du jour and not start from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

#120

Post by geofft » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #52

junon wrote: post #33

I'm a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own: - My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don't know. I'm afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads. - I don't care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I'm going to be happy doing the work…

You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…

Wow, I would love to work somewhere with waterfall requirements-gathering processes and change-control documents. Across several employers, I've seen a lot of misdirected work that just makes future work harder.

Now of course the response is, why would I want to put up with that bureaucracy - won't it backfire on me? But it shouldn't be bureaucracy, it should be something driven by the engineers with the goal of shipping better products.

Which is the problem with advertising agile. When a company says they follow agile, what they often mean is that there are people whose job it is to make sure the agile process is followed, effectively making their own agile bureaucracy. That's what scares people.

I want to know that the company is going to get out of the way of practitioners and let us do big-design-up-front if we in our judgment as practitioners determine that a specific situation calls for it.