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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?

#391

Post by necovek »

g051051 wrote: post #109
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…

> incompetent managers or tech leads. This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job. > Agile is a time stuck and time waster This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. > I'm…

> This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc.

That's curious since "agile", as the name suggests, should be very lean on the process. There is nothing agile about a lot of process details!

Sure, people get too invested and miss the boat, but in general it's not too hard to remind them what "agile" is about (hey, it's in the name!), and in my experience, they usually relent.

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

#392

Post by lmm »

ericbarrett wrote: post #152
lmm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You wrote almost exactly the same thing as the other person who replied. I have to ask (both you and jameshart): What makes you so defensive of Agile? What benefit have you seen it bring? Truly curious, not trying to bait anybody here. My experience with Agile—except when another engineer and I basically stealthed rapid development into a company with 12-month release cycles in the mid-2000s—has been overwhelmingly n…

I've seen Agile be hugely effective when actually done. It results in a much better product that's also more suited to what the customer needs, and therefore much more fulfilling to work on. It cuts through many of the most frustrating and wasteful parts of other kinds of software development at a stroke (e.g. endless architectural arguments). I genuinely think it's the best thing that's happened to my career. So it's frustrating to hear people attack it and especially frustrating when it gets attacked for the opposite of what it actually is.

I don't know how to make people stop lying about what they're actually doing (I wish I did), but I don't think it's reasonable to expect any kind of process to work when you do the opposite of what that process actually tells you to do. (And I'm quite prepared to entertain the possibility that an organisation that actually committed to following RUP or Six Sigma or whatever and followed through on it might be better than half-assed non-Agile "Agile". But I haven't found the HN-endorsed "lol no process" to be effective in practice either)

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

#394

Post by GianFabien »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #31
GianFabien wrote: post #5

The basic mechanism of capitalism is supply and demand. When you write: "it's pretty much impossible to match day rates", you mean that your company doesn't want to pay the market rate. There is no secret strategy. You either pay market rates or hire less capable developers who will work for the rates you are willing to pay.

This. I'm a senior engineer. I'm passing good at what I do. When I left my last company, I started looking for work in a culture that has changed significantly since the last time I'd looked for work (I was at that company for 27 years). It was a shock. The naked and unapologetic disrespect and ageism has been pretty crazy. I threw in the towel, after a few months, and I'm now working with a nonprofit, for no money,…

Aegism is a really big issue. Not only in the form of your $10,000 invoice example.

Persons with a certain amount experience, such as yourself, call out BS when they see it. And that is not welcome.

Employers seem to prefer young 'uns who don't question anything and just do as they're told.

This becomes particularly bad with "consulting firms" who charge by the hour to stuff it up and then charge by the hour to get a new team to fix it and then another team to fix the fix and so it goes. One of thousands of examples is the $6M payroll project in Queensland that blew out to $1B+. My lawyer tells me that I can't name the firm.

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

#395

Post by mschuster91 »

heywherelogingo wrote: post #276
mschuster91 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> What do software staff have to do with laying rural fibre infrastructure?

The rural fibre point was only to illustrate how German Mittelstand is blocked on not just the treatment of their tech staff.

> What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers

Micromanaging octogenarians are who are calling the shots in way too many Mittelstand companies, often against the express demands of their younger staff and management level.

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

#396

Post by lizardking »

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…

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

The difference in compensation more than offsets the cost for insurance, in most cases.

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

#397

Post by g051051 »

chris11 wrote: post #385
g051051 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "agile" environments I've seen, devs are expected to be the ultimate generalist. We have to do planning, documentation, testing, qa, ops, and still write the code.

Personally I don't see that as a bad thing. I care more about ownership, I'd much rather be responsible for a project instead of just tickets.

That philosophy preaches that any person can fulfill any task equally well, which isn't true. QA and ops are distinct skill sets, very different from what's needed to be a good developer. If I'm doing all that other stuff, when does the code get written? By who?

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

#398

Post by g051051 »

necovek wrote: post #391
g051051 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incompetent managers or tech leads. This is one of the things that ruined my last gig. I have 3 decades of experience. Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job. > Agile is a time stuck and time waster This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. > I'm…

> This was the other thing. We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc. That's curious since "agile", as the name suggests, should be very lean on the process. There is nothing agile about a lot of process details! Sure, people get too invested and miss the boat, but in general it's not too hard to remind them what "agil…

You've been lucky. I've seen first hand, heard from my peers in other companies, and read throughout the industry, that Agile is probably the most poorly named thing out there. Just because they put it in the name, doesn't make it a lean, lightweight, easy to use process. So in my experience, "Agile" is not in the least bit agile.

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

#399

Post by mstipetic »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #296
chartpath wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 years experience here. I have recently converted to startup employee (again), giving up a lot of money in the contract market exclusively because I am motivated by the business case and have a deep respect for one of the founders, who is an actual domain expert and proven leader from the industry our customers are in. What I find the most difficult, by far, is "coaching up". Coaching down and motivating junior and…

This is my pain at the moment. My co-founder is new to startup but seems to think that because I can code, I should just focus on that. I've been working in startups for >10 years now, have run Startup Weekends, and have a bloody MBA. Trying to coach him on what should be happening with the marketing funnel is proving impossible. If I was contracting I would be counting the money while watching them mess it up with a…

Why are you putting up with it then?

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

#400

Post by mpalfrey »

dom96 wrote: post #255
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…

As someone that is employed full-time in the UK I must say you (and others in this thread) have piqued my interest. I am still quite early in my career but the ability to choose contracts (and possibly even the tech stack) sounds like a dream. Do you or anyone else have advice on how to get started with becoming a contractors?

I would recommend doing your own research on this one. Contractor UK forums are worth reading - http://contractoruk.com

Contracting in the UK used to be pretty good. These days things have changed a lot with further IR35 crackdowns.

I've investigated this a few times personally over the years and am a permanent employee still. Admittedly a few rungs up the corporate ladder these days, but contracting isn't the gravy train it used to be.

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