For many contractors, it's a lifestyle choice primarily. They often don't want to deal with all the performance reviews and would rather "be their own boss". Day rates aren't always as lucrative as they sound when you consider time on the bench and tax rules such as IR35. Contractors I know would only take a perm gig in very desperate times
Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
261–270 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#262PART-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".
From what I've seen there are about four kinds of approaches to Agile, in the wild:
1) "We love agile! We have coaches and everything!" (terrible)
2) "We're agile-ish." (we have performative, hellish standups that are mostly about micromanagement, in which we all get to nervously try to justify our continued employment every day by acting out little one-man plays about how hard yesterday was while going into way too much detail)
3) A range of noncommittal responses that may look a lot like 2 in some cases (often really good, but it's hard to distinguish from #2)
4) "We love agile!" (they actually do, and they actually do adjust processes and add/remove/modify "ceremonies" pretty quickly when the team asks for it; this can be good)
The trouble is it's really hard to tell which you're dealing with (aside from maybe #1, though that can be hard to distinguish from #4 unless they really do start laying out all the dedicated "agile roles" they have, then you can tell it's probably #1).
At this point I'd probably insist on sitting in for a couple "agile ceremonies" before I said yes to a place that "does agile". It's bad more often than not, but can be anywhere from OK to good. When it's bad, though, it's really bad. I'm not sure how to tell which it is without observing what they actually do.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#2631. No agile
2. Managers with a decade of direct engineering experience
3. No PMs
4. 100% Remote
5. Solid tech stack
6. Interesting problem to solve
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#264Out of interest, what are the ballpark daily rates for the contract market in EU/US ?
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#265I work at a big 4 (not tech, consulting/accounting) company as a contractor. They recently offered me a FTE role. $40k less pay for 10-20 hours more a week; meaning they expect their FTEs to work 50-60 hours a week for 4/5 of what they'd pay contractors to only work 40.
The work is interesting, I love my team and such, but cannot and will not give up 10-20 more hours to what amounts to just another job. There's no incentive to convert, no justification to work 2500 hours a year for some lousy bonus.
Atleast I get to keep my contract, keep billing my rate and only work about 1960 hours this next year.
I'd say until companies get realastic about hours, expectations and salary it's going to be difficult for them to convert people. I mean, your company makes lets say $100,000,000 in profit this year with what a 50% margin; probably higher with software. You can pay the contractor $200-$250 k this year, but only your staff $160k, or $190k once benefits and all that get factored in. Really? You can only pay $160k for perm and $200k for contractor? ?!? You're a team of like 30, making like $100m
...
So if you'd like a Snr Eng here's what I'd do:
1. Work life balance. Make it so I can do my job in 40 or less
2. Don't take advantage of me
3. Don't make false promises
4. Pay me really well
5. Give me generous time off and benefits
6. Let me work when and where I want
7. Don't ask me to believe in the culture, or give a shit about the mission. I'm not here for the mission. I'm here to do my 40, make a lot of money and enjoy my time outside of my job.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#266I 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…
Yeah, this is pretty much it. Be a place I want to work. That means interesting work, good people, sane management, and good pay. (You don't have to pay more than contracting, but you have to pay well. I might take somewhat less money to work at a place I like, but if you're pay is lousy, I won't like it no matter how nice the people are.)
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big one I have to add is time off. I've rejected a lot of companies that tell me, "All new employees start with two weeks off per year." Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too. I've been doing this for 25 years, and if you offer me two weeks, we're done.
> Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too. LOL I would add that if the company has "unlimited vacation time" it's really important to press and find out how much time people actually take. I like to ask for averages or how much time has taken off in the last few years. That'll tell you what the limits really are.
Uber had/has unlimited vacation time. When I worked there I took no less than 6 weeks a year and one year took 8 weeks. The formula is one week every quarter and then 2 weeks at Christmas. That already brings you to 6 weeks.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#268It's a problematic category. You want a temperament and style match from someone who isn't a bullshitter.
I've probably been at this too long and likely presume too much competency but I've found the skill continuum model to not have much utility in team formation.
People tend to be generally competent in a way that's independent of how long they've been coding.
Fred Brooks claims 2 years is essentially the Pareto 80/20 crux point here and I believe that agrees with other skills based practices. Martial arts progression, for instance, usually has some test to demonstrate general competence around 2 years or so. Many trade schools have about a 2 year program.
If the bulb is dim after 2 years the trajectory is likely not good for improvement and more importantly for large project delegation.
I've been doing this for over 20 years, been running teams for over 15, there's been a lot of people I put hope into. They were probably mistakes to give work to.
It sounds like predestination and like I'm being a bastard. Truth is I don't really follow the 2 year advice but it's pretty clearly the reality. I just can't be a calculating brute like that. It's way too sociopathic for me.
So now that I've Nicoli Machiavelli'd myself:
Make sure they aren't liars, stupid or arrogant and look strictly at their velocity of adaptation.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#269I'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…
> Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we're interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.
OTOH, there are groups that don't have their shit together. I fought tooth and nail to try to get continuous integration up and running at the last project I worked on, and it was just so fucking frustrating trying to get people to change. They recognized the need and the benefit, but wouldn't take any action to actually implement it.
And now they're actually looking to abandon Gitlab "because it corrupted one of the repositories." They're going to go to a direct git repo and someone proposed building their own CI from scratch out of cronjobs and such.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#270> impossible to match day rates pro-rata You're not expected to match day rates if you're offering a permanent contract. I usually advise people doing contract work to charge at least double what they would otherwise get in full-time employment, just to account for their additional costs and time spent on admin. Compare permanent senior engineers rates with permanent senior engineers rates, rather than with day rates…
Triple is the UK rule of thumb.