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

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121–130 of 424 posts

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

#121

Relatively few engineers actually want to do contract work. The day rates look high, but they have to pay self-employment taxes and health insurance, as well as charge more to cover inevitable gaps between contracts. It seems unlikely that the existence of contract work is preventing senior engineers from joining your company. To be blunt, it’s more likely that you’re simply not paying enough to be competitive or you…

> To be blunt, it’s more likely that you’re simply not paying enough to be competitive

I get a lot of cold emails from recruiters and the jobs always seem to pay the same rate, which is no better than what I make.

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

#122
post #19

PART-TIME and REMOTE are the keywords you are looking for. Also, stay away from Agile/SCRUM bullshit. I personally stay away from companies who have "Agile Coaches" or "SCRUM Masters".

YES. Part-time jobs are getting more popular. Some people are looking for works that give them more free time. Look at GumRoad which offers part-time jobs with competitive salary ($100 - $150 per hour).

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

#124

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…

I put 'payment due on receipt of invoice' right on the invoice. That's worked for me even at large companies with policies of net-30, net-60 or even net-90. I submit; the payment shows up in a week or so. Another way: give a 2% discount for payment within 30 days. Haven't met an accountant that passes up a discount.

I think this works for a small company, but large companies, that outsource their payment team, they probably don't care... They usually don't want to deal with anything weird from a vendor, or if they do, they'll screw something up with payment.

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

#125

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 routines for paying bills and services, it would be very inconvenient to pay ad hoc. And I’ve never even heard of next day payment, except maybe for manual labour.

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

#126
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…

I've been contracting for 16 years, had a few perm jobs before that. While it's true that you get paid to do what you're already good at that's the case for everyone.

The difference is, as a contractor you can afford to take a few months off and become good at something else - then you'll get a job doing that instead.

You can also pick and choose your projects more freely and there's usually nothing stopping you having long term projects as well as short term gigs, often working for multiple clients at once.

In the US or elsewhere where health insurance is a thing I would probably go perm.

> Companies invest in training and take a chance on you doing something new inside in the company.

I literally LOL'd at this... If you're great at what you're doing, they're keeping you where you are - and "invest in training" could easily mean a 3 day workshop where you find you already know more than the instructor. No thanks.

In answer to the original question, offer more money than you think you can offer and set it up as a 3 month contract-to-perm situation (don't write that down anywhere if you're in the UK - they'll immediately be inside IR35) so you know it's a good match. Alternatively, skin in the game in the form of shares or whatever - but they'd have to be confident in the business, I've rejected that offer in the past.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You're hired!

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.

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

#129
I've been exclusively contract my entire (15 year+) career. Contractors tend to be money oriented. The simple answer is, pay more.

As a Senior/Lead software engineer, I get paid more contract, for the same work and there's no shortage of it. That's the market reality (in the UK at least).

If a perm position matched what I was making as a contractor, I'd consider it. The hit to the wallet is too great to consider anything else.

If I went perm i'd be looking at a 50% pay decrease after taxes in real-terms.

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 routines for paying bills and services, it would be very inconvenient to pay ad hoc. And I’ve never even heard of next day payment, except maybe for manual labour.

> They have their routines for paying bills and services, it would be very inconvenient to pay ad hoc.

But why?

A bank transfer is fast and trivial to do. Where's the inconvenience? I presume the actual administration work of checking they had money in a budget to pay for the work happened when the work was contracted not at the end.

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