Give people what freelancing/contracting can't:
I'm thinking, stability, time for their families, visibility over the next years, paid training, peace of mind, etc...
Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
61–70 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#62Earlier 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…
Asking a contractor if they like doing contract work is a bit like asking someone at McDonald's if they like hamburgers. The answer is pretty likely to be "yes".
No argument here!
I'm just taking (minor) issue with the assertion that relatively few engineers want to do contract work. If that were the case you'd expect some contractors to wish they were perm. I think the benefits I outlined are such that quite a few do want to. I've also run into quite a number of perm folk over the years who want to do it but don't quite have the confidence in their own skills to make that leap.
I was one of them!
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#63What 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.
a self-employed contractor is an employer of one person, as such he needs to pay the employer portion of healthcare insurance cost, employment tax, social security, etc... (in the US that's another good 30% on top of salary, in France it can double the cost of employing someone).
In addition the contractor does not get the benefit of bonuses, ESPP, profit sharing, 401k contributions, and takes on extra risk, all of that is worth some premium.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#64I'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…
> Agile is a time stuck and time waster
How do you prefer to organize larger software development efforts that have to be coordinated with other business processes?
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#65[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contract is a instant no for me. I've done the math and haven't found them to be competitive long term after what the above commenter mentioned (and that's before all the headaches of actually getting paid). Most of my peers feel the same way.
You cannot put a price on career-long isolation from office politics
Instead you have politics at the companies hiring you.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#67Full time work just doesn’t offer a competitive amount of holiday. I can contract 2/3 to 3/4 of the year and take the rest off to travel, work on my own projects, meet friends etc. The money works out about the same but 25 days leave (or whatever the standard amount is) just doesn’t cut it for me. The older I get, the more I value time over money.
Exactly. However generous the holiday allowance, it's never enough, because it's on the company's terms.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#68I'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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Don’t do “dog and pony show” interviews. If I have to write code on a whiteboard, or even in an editor live on a call, or look at an extensive take-home test (anything more than a 15-30 minute task), I’m highly likely to pass for anything except an a top shelf package at a company I’m highly motivated to work for. I'm always interested in this point of view, because I understand why candidates don't like it but as a…
That largely is a case-by-case decision I think. Perhaps via open source work, perhaps via a short take-home assignment. Since work in most of the US is “at will”, it’s an easy problem to solve if it turns out someone has exaggerated their abilities. My problem is not with _any_ coding to be clear. It’s mostly the Google gotcha questions designed to make the interviewer look smart, and where the primary takeaway is t…
I always find this argument of "Google gotcha" questions weak. I agree 100% that tricky questions around dynamic programming, linked lists, etc. are a terrible choice. However, I think a lot of these questions do a good job of measuring how well the candidate understands basic data structures. It amazes me how many "seasoned engineers" do not understand when to use things like hash sets/maps (just look at the monthly blog posts about how you shouldn't use `in` in Python on lists because it is O(n)!! It blows my mind this is blog-post worthy).
Also, I would far rather have a company not hire me because I failed a programming assessment than have them hire me and then fire me a week later because they were finally able to assess my skills.
Re: Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?
#70outsource; for 7k usd you can get very skilled people