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

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

#131

Post by dominotw »

sanitycheck wrote: post #126
dominotw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 havi…

> become good at something else - then you'll get a job doing that instead.

I don't understand this. How can someone trust you that you picked up some new skill if you have no experience in it. Do you put it on your resume anyways? How can somone even pickup software sales ( for example) on their own free time.

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

No didn't mean that kind of investment lol. I meant more like taking a chance on you. I was able to convince my manager to let me work on product marketing and sales even though i was regular backend dev. It was one of the best career moments for me. This would've never happened if i was contractor.

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

#132

Post by lmm »

ericbarrett wrote: post #68
jameshart wrote: post #52

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…

From my personal experience across multiple jobs: For every company that tries to embody the old Agile Manifesto there are a dozen who've simply plugged The Latest Trendy Management Practice into that module slot and are continuing business as usual. No, thanks.

Sure, just as for every company that actually offers competitive payrates there are a dozen who just say they do. But it's not like not caring about management practices magically makes a company good at them either.

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

#133

Post by Frost1x »

ericbarrett wrote: post #94
jameshart wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and for every company who advertises ‘competitive compensation’ and means it there are a dozen whose idea of competitive comp is that they’ll match an offer to retain you later. You do need to filter through some BSers to find a good job but that doesn’t mean any company that claims anything good about themselves is lying.

Unfortunately it’s become a high-confidence signal that shenanigans will be ongoing.

I use this as a signal of avoidance: not interested in your varied way to try and manipulate SWE labor and squeeze another once of productivity out or pass off your debt in the form of my time at the cost of my sanity. I know many others that do the very same. Perhaps it's my loss, it's a risk I'm willing to take due to the number of bad apples associated with such practices.

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

#134

Post by proales »

If you are not able to pay market rates (that match the big tech companies) this is the markets way of saying "you should be denied access to this talent because it can be better utilized elsewhere"

Pay up or go away, stop trying to find the secret to underpaying devs.

How much equity are you keeping? Probably a greedy amount. So many startups fail because they cant find devs while the founders are trying to keep a Zuck like share of the company based on some 10 year old Fred Wilson blog post.

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

#135

Post by sirsinsalot »

g051051 wrote: post #118
jameshart wrote: post #52

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…

As a counter-point, i've seen engineer-led Scrum and other agile varients work very well. Low stress, high productivity, high predictability.

YMMV, and sadly the norm tends to be bad practice, but it isn't all like that. Companies with good engineering culture do engineering well.

Companies with a poor culture do most things poorly.

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

#136

Post by mgkimsal »

Nursie wrote: post #111
dominotw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?"

> "Hey, I know it's not your main area of competence, but do you reckon you could have a go at this?"

If you're already working in their systems and domain, you probably have a decent idea of how you can address it, even if it's outside your main area of expertise. This happens to me, and... if I'm completely unqualified, I just say "I can't do that, here's someone else who can" and make a referral/connection to someone in my network. That's often the harder part - finding someone in my network who is both competent and available.

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

#137

Post by kentf »

Have a really bold mission and focus on autonomy and culture.

Senior developers can work anywhere they want. Don’t make the job description about what they will do, but about the impact that will have.

We are hiring Staff and Sr. Engineers at ClearAngel and it’s easier because our mission is so clear and empowering: build the YC 99% of online founders.

The work we are doing will have ripple effects through the economy and through the lives of hundreds of founders.

I spend 90% of the interview talking about that and asking them about what they want.

Then I spend 10 mins on: oh yeah, we use Rails and Python, monolith moving to micro services etc.

Focus on the mission and the culture you will be bringing them into.

Oh and pay them top of market salary and give them meaningful options.

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

#138

Post by PeterisP »

mettamage wrote: post #7

What I don't get is why are the rates so different? Arguments like: uncertainty, getting clients is hard, certain overhead isn't paid, not always having work are all valid reasons. However, they don't seem to make sense for such a big difference. Based on those reasons, I'd suspect a 1.5x difference to be more reasonable, but in most cases it's like 2x to 4x.

Different tax treatment makes up 1.5x by itself, and then you have all the overhead (accounting, insurance, legal - if you're too stingy to pay a proper lawyer and accountant in the beginning, that will cost you much more later) and "benefits" (e.g. vacation and sick days make a ~10% surcharge), so 2x hourly rate means that as a contractor your annual actual cash-in-hand for the same amount of work is roughly the same if you have a pre-arranged contract where everything works perfectly, which it does not - you need to account for customer nonpayment, you need to account for hours worked on sales proposals that don't go anywhere, you need to account for time&effort in getting this customer, negotiating scope and terms, so if you're treating contracting/consulting as a proper business then an appropriate "customer-billable-hour" rate is 2.5-3x to "FTE-contract-rate" for the same person doing the same work.

If you get a good long-term customer that gets you lots of sustainable work on a retainer - reducing (but not eliminating) the overheads on sales,negotiation,downtime and legal/nonpayment risk - then you can go 2x; but 1.5x would be losing you money even in that case, you'd be financially be much better off taking the 1x full time job then.

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

#139

Post by foobarian »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #87

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me. 1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating. 2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figur…

Maybe we should rephrase OP's question as

"How to attract perm Snr Engs when there are so many companies where there is: 1. Interesting work. The day to day is not a slog. ..."

You get the idea :-)

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

#140

Post by dominotw »

atonse wrote: post #119
dominotw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> But a couple of them we work with, we were happy to let them learn elixir on company time

Yes thats what i am saying. Hiring rails devs and letting them learn elixir is no big deal and kind of makes sense. But that not really exciting stuff for senior engineers.

Senior engineers want to learn new domains like sales, learn leadership skills, have a say in product direction ect. That to me is exciting stuff, not learning another web framework.

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