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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?

#401

Post by Mauricebranagh »

snow_mac wrote: post #265

I 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 in…

An employee at 160k costs a lot more than 190k - you can multiply by 2-3 to get the actual cost.

BTW at bleeding edge R&D labs the OH rate can be 500 -600%

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

#402

Post by jameshart »

junon wrote: post #351
Cederfjard wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the top-level comment’s stated point wasn’t that, but rather that Agile is a waste of time, period. So I’m curious what other ways of working handle these kinds of projects better. Edit: This is a genuine question, I'd be very keen to hear concrete ideas on how to work better.

Identify the problems first. Everyone is searching for a solution when half the time they don't even know what the problems are. Sure, releases might be slow. Why, though? Is it because you're not letting your engineers fix broken windows? How long does it take for PRs to get reviewed? If a long time, why? Do your engineers even know how to make proper commits? Are your PRs more than about 100 changes on average? Are…

I wonder if this is just a matter of having a very different frame of reference.

Before agile became widespread, when someone said "We have a problem with slow releases" they meant "we schedule each release 18 months out and yet it always ships 6 to 12 months late."

Now that agile practices are widespread in the industry, when someone says "we have a problem with slow releases" they often mean something like "sometimes the time from code change to it being in live in prod is more than a couple of days," or maybe "the CD job sometimes takes more than 20 minutes to push things to production."

The problems you are describing above are problems that can only exist because of agile adoption. (kids today, get off my lawn, etc. etc.)

Your biggest problem is that you have to wait a couple of days to get your PR reviewed? Before agile, replace that with 'you have to wait two weeks for your change to get integrated into the build then another week to get an incomplete bug report from the QA team'.

And what's more, agile introduced the industry to tools for systematically, continuously identifying problems like 'the releases are slow' and letting the development teams themselves change the way they work to eliminate issues like 'we're not getting time to fix broken windows' or 'it takes us too long to review PRs'.

My understanding of 'we're agile' is precisely 'we give teams space to change the way they work to eliminate things that cause them problems'. If someone tells me they reject agility, I would interpret that as them saying 'we don't let you change the way you do things', and 'you will be dependent on other teams who don't share your goals which will slow you down'.

I think we're in violent agreement about what good software development practice looks like. I just can't believe how badly the word 'agile' has been warped to the point where people actively think it creates the very situations it set out to resolve.

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

#403

Post by snow_mac »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #401
snow_mac wrote: post #265

I 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 in…

An employee at 160k costs a lot more than 190k - you can multiply by 2-3 to get the actual cost. BTW at bleeding edge R&D labs the OH rate can be 500 -600%

Where on earth do you get the 2x-3x? Industry average mark up for recruiting companies is 30% to cover employee costs with w2 contractors.

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

#404

Post by marcus_holmes »

mstipetic wrote: post #399
marcus_holmes wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is a very good question, that I keep asking myself.

Mostly because loyalty and friendship, and the continual hope that it'll turn a corner soon.

But I've put a date on my willingness to tolerate this. If it doesn't turn a corner by July, I'm out.

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

#405

Post by TheMog »

Over three decades in this business, done a lot of contract work (outside the US), currently FTE at a US company.

Other than all the micro-annoyances that a lot of my fellow posters already mentioned and the general "we own your behind" attitude that a lot of employers seem to exhibit towards their FTE employees, I think there are two really, really important points that a lot of companies haven't figured out and the FAANGs have to an extent.

1. Have a proper career path for senior technical staff. That's the part that most companies haven't figured out. In the minds of the people who design the career paths in a lot of places, it's apparently desirable to become a manager as soon as possible. Not to mention the "why bother, they're going to leave in a couple of year anyway" approach, which is a self fulfilling prophecy.

2. Have problems that actually require a senior engineer, and let them get on with it with a minimum of red tape and political BS. Please note that I didn't say _technical problems_, there is a lot a good senior engineer can do to improve your technical team by mentoring, process improvements, tooling improvements and so on. Most of us who've been in this industry this long love what we do (because otherwise we'd be off working as a bush pilot or something) and want to share our knowledge as we've now become the people who helped us in our careers when we were the more junior people.

3. Listen to your senior engineers. Yes, I know, I wrote "two points". This one's on the house :).

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

#406

Post by dopidopHN »

Nursie wrote: post #169
dopidopHN wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

companies investing in training is real. Be it pushing for certification, mooc, internal training credit. All of that was part of my review for instance. It does work.

Ugh, reviews, another part of employee life I haven't missed! That stuff re: training was not something that was part of my life as a perm worker, in the UK or Australia. The companies certainly liked to pay lip-service to employee development, but I didn't see much evidence of it actually happening.

I received quality training on framework, language and protocols by coworker of that company. Those people spend a good 20% of their time doing that for clients anyway, so they are both comfortable doing it and I thougt it was decent dive ( modules span 20-30 hours )

I was not referring to conplicance trainings. Those, of course you won’t learn a thing.

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

#407

Post by Mauricebranagh »

snow_mac wrote: post #403
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An employee at 160k costs a lot more than 190k - you can multiply by 2-3 to get the actual cost. BTW at bleeding edge R&D labs the OH rate can be 500 -600%

Where on earth do you get the 2x-3x? Industry average mark up for recruiting companies is 30% to cover employee costs with w2 contractors.

Who ? you mean the ghastly rip off body shops?

I think you may have misunderstood what we are talking about real self-employed contractors vs FTE's

The 2-3x salary is the actual cost to an employer of a FTE (full time employee).

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

#408

Post by madamelic »

cik wrote: post #79

As someone who spent years contracting, realize that for the most part you're not competing on price. You're competing on value. Day rates aren't usually higher than the fully loaded cost of an employee - but they are higher than the salaried cost. The flip side is that many people (myself included) frankly were tired of the abuse of full time, and not valuing our time. Contracting eliminated all of that - it was pay…

>Provide interesting problems that need solving. Be specific about them.

Something I am starting to realize is that frequently I am pitched some hot project during interviews or quickly after joining, but the projects _never_ pan out.

Not that the projects get tried out then killed. The projects just never materialize.

I was at one place and they had promised me essentially principal engineer, help us overhaul our stuff, we're fucked kind of role.

After a year, I was on a once a month QA rotation and when I wasn't, I was writing Cypress tests and never shipping anything due to the enormous tech debt leadership had no interest in fixing.

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

#409

Post by trcarney »

teachrdan wrote: post #339
uranium wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is good for the company, too. It's a form of fraud detection. When employees take two weeks away in a block, the company can more easily detect ongoing fraud or other funny business going on. That's how a French rogue trader was finally caught: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615...

Yeah, my mom works at a bank in the US and within her department they have to take off at least 2 weeks consecutively and only that one person in the department can be off during that time for just this reason. They use it as a yearly check to make sure there is no fraud going on.

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

#410

Post by [deleted] »

deanak wrote: post #116

Everyone is well aware that any promise of company loyalty isn't worth the time it takes to say it. To attract in-demand employees, you have to make every week count for them so if there is an acquisition or yet another useless management shuffle, they can walk away without regretting the time they invested. The easiest way to achieve this is to offer some amount of equity and/or the exact weekly schedule and vacatio…

[deleted]
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