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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?

#271

Post by runT1ME »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

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…

> The day rates look high, but they have to pay self-employment taxes and health insurance

Most SWEs doing 'contract work' aren't actually 1099 contractors, what it means is they work for an intermediary and then 'contracted out' to a big company with a recognizable name (Google/BofA/Verizon/IBM). These jobs are W2 so you don't pay self-employment tax, they usually have mediocre insurance options, and you lose your job as soon as the work dries up.

It's simply a way for a company to staff up quickly without going through as strict of hiring committee and having any obligation to keep said staff around if plans change.

It's often easier for a department to get a req for a senior/staff contractor (and make salary exceptions) than a FTE, so what happens is departments will offer 200, 250 an hour for temp work but only able to hire engineers for 150k a year because their 'employee' req is slotted lower.

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

#272

Post by sameboat632746 »

mooreds wrote: post #224
LanceH wrote: post #209

Earlier 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.

Yup I have interviewed at a lot of companies with unlimited time off, every single one of them seems to have taken less than 4 weeks off. This is what I get at my current company with no unlimited vacation. And at our company, sick time and mental health days are separate and not counted against your regular PTO.

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

#273

Post by lacksconfidence »

andreilys wrote: post #241
LanceH wrote: post #209

Earlier 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.

Isn’t 2 weeks the standard within the US? If you’d like longer vacations then Europe is your best bet

Not in tech. We aren't anything special and we start with ~30 days holiday + vacation on day 1, up to 49 after a decade.

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

#274

Post by uranium »

mooreds wrote: post #224
LanceH wrote: post #209

Earlier 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.

That's a very important point. My company has always had unlimited time. We just had an announcement from our HR head that managers are going to start making sure you take at least 2 weeks a year, ideally in a big block. I've never had trouble taking my vacation, but I'm really pleased that we're going to be enforcing a minimum, to help folks who are more hesitant to take theirs.

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

#275

Post by hansvm »

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?

It's not justified; it's just something they want. If somebody offered me a 0% interest no-strings-attached loan for a couple months I'd probably take it too.

Cash flow games can allow a growing business to take a loss on every transaction indefinitely. It's a powerful tool -- ideally to build a legitimate business that requires at least some economies of scale.

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

#276

Post by heywherelogingo »

mschuster91 wrote: post #165
Nursie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly agree that the UK market for senior tech people is very poor, you're right that past a certain point the only way to keep advancing in your career and keep raising your income is to strike out on your own this way. I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners.…

> I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners. They also seem to treat their tech staff like children. This is not just true for British businesses... it's common worldwide across everything that's not a tech startup. The older the people in management are, the less like…

What do software staff have to do with laying rural fibre infrastructure? What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers, either because they went straight into management having negligible interest in tech, or because they soon found out they weren't any good at implementation?

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

#277

Post by npsimons »

dochtman wrote: post #15

I don't know your context, but here are some thoughts on what I've seen/experienced: Allow remote work -- European rates are much lower than Silicon Valley rates even now, and I imagine the same might be true for other parts of the world. Flexible working hours -- as a parent with kids, my current contracting arrangement for about 25 hours per week works quite well, and it's unattractive to me to return to a regular…

> Interesting tech stack -- in the Rust world that I participate in, there is a lot of discussion about the lack of jobs (especially outside the blockchain industry), so if you can offer something that is more novel, that might help.

I've been trying to escape the C++ world, despite my mastery, and get into Common Lisp. I would honestly take a pay cut to work on only Common Lisp code.

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

#278

Post by topkai22 »

ryandrake wrote: post #223
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…

I once worked at a place on the opposite side of the "process" spectrum: No source control No bug tracker No formal QA No versioning or release process. When a customer needed a build they just took whatever happened to be on the lead developer's PC at the time. No roadmap planning process. The CEO would walk into your office and spout off about some idea for the product, and that's what you'd be working on next. And…

I interned in the software process group for a defense company building sattelites. It had the other extreme of the process spectrum- true waterfall/CMMI processes in place, but they were so painful that people just did work and then figured out how to claim they followed the process afterwards. They actually had a couple good processes that I walked away with (different levels of formality for code reviews, structured and a risk based QA processes), but overall it was about frustration and a molasses like movement. I was glad to end up on consumer software for a while after college.

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

#279

Post by npsimons »

myfavoritedog wrote: post #84

I'm going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :) I'm not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc. Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I'll make use of the in-o…

> Why do I want to work with a bunch of people who are mainly there for the freebies?

I mean, some of us value work life balance. Even on projects I'm insanely passionate about, I need to pace myself, otherwise I'll get burnt out.

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

#280

Post by Mauricebranagh »

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.

Your underestimating how much the OH head costs of employees is.
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