I make double the money I made as an employed dev, so I think I moved upward quite good.
Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
41–50 of 163 posts
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fun to poke fun at the system we have in the US, but we're doing fairly well from a numbers standpoint. Our GDP is fantastic, our median income is quite good, and we still manufacture a bunch of stuff. China didn't actually start to manufacture more than us until just a few years ago, and they have something like three times the population. People say the middle class is shrinking, but seldom mention that the nu…
> It's fun to poke fun at the system we have in the US, but we're doing fairly well from a numbers standpoint. Our GDP is fantastic, our median income is quite good, and we still manufacture a bunch of stuff. NONE of that matters because those metrics measure the winners. The key measure is, does our system have a lot of big losers? If the answer is yes, then that system has failed.
No, those are your metrics. Your goals don't match those of the system. Ill defined terms like big losers don't really help.
I don't think anyone would argue the system is perfect. I'd conclude that it's not nearly as bad as you seem to think it is. By being a part of the system, you're already better off than some 40% of the globe, by default.
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your assessment of being a contractor in the UK. I work as an IT contractor in the UK as well and have been a permanent employee before that. Permanent members of staff seldom get the same money as skilled contractors and have to put up with a lot more restrictions around holiday and work life balance. I would equate a contractor in the UK to being the equivalent experience of being a consultant without…
Also permanent guys get to support contractors' code, which adds an insult to an injury.
On the flip side, contractors have to sort out the mess that permanent guys have made.
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#44Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a contractor in the UK I feel like I have better pay and prospects than 90% of staff members. Not 'promotion', but more respect for my expertise and more choice about my working practices. 'Promotion' is not something I've often observed happening in any of the software departments I've worked with of late. It does scare me when people say things like "40+ contractors still working as engineers", as if 40 is old.…
This is my experience in the UK. After a little under a decade in SWE I've consistently seen contractors grossing about 3x the salary of full time employees, with little prospects of "promotion" for engineers without changing employer.
> contractors grossing about 3x the salary of full time employees
I dunno where you're seeing that but in the circles I move in, no-one is getting even 75% of 3xEFTE. More like 45-50% of 3xEFTE.
(EFTE = Equivalent FTE. Obviously new FTEs cost a lot less.)
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Warning: this post contains personal opinions and analysis, some of which might be deemed political.) There are really two classes of 'contract work' in the US. The first class is what I'd call skilled specialists. These are your independent marketing consultants, security experts, developers, designers, copywriters, etc. These folks are usually, but not always, fairly experienced. They take up contracting or consul…
It's fun to poke fun at the system we have in the US, but we're doing fairly well from a numbers standpoint. Our GDP is fantastic, our median income is quite good, and we still manufacture a bunch of stuff. China didn't actually start to manufacture more than us until just a few years ago, and they have something like three times the population. People say the middle class is shrinking, but seldom mention that the nu…
Numbers are only useful in relative terms. Median is going up, but so is the income and wealth gap. What most people look to achieve in their life is security. Security of resources, water, food, electricity, and physical safety. People want the security of being able to plan for a future, a family, education for their children, seeing their children and children's children move ahead in the world.
What GDP and median income don't capture is that the above security is slipping away from more and more people. Increasingly, you're either a professional married to another professional making $200k+ or $300k+ as a household, which is great. Then you search which metropolitan areas other high income households are moving to and go there and your life is pretty good.
The flip side is you marry someone who makes little, or not marry at all because it's not a prudent financial decision. Wherever you live, your kids are stuck going to school with worse resources and only have other poor kids to become friends with, many in single parent households.
I don't know how it plays out in the end, but I would postulate that large class divides aren't good for societies and nations. Everyone doesn't need to be equal, but there has to be a veneer of everyone being "in this together", and if it becomes too obvious that we're not, then it incentives behavior of "steal or be stolen from", meaning too many people start to game the system and we lost trust in each other.
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm not an entrpreneur if I don't actively think of that place that way. I mean I don't know the logistics of the supply of restaurants. Closest thing would be POS/menus for cooking those look realtively old or maybe it's one of those "does its job no need to fix". Haha the restaurant industry for me is like purgatory haha I look forward to the day that I work as a developer full time. Poverty is my never endin…
Just an idea, why have a POS system at all? Why have a waitstaff that take orders? Why not just give the orders to the cooks and eliminate mistakes made by servers? What about in-kitchen optimizations? What about reducing spoilage? The possible places to improve are limited mostly by your imagination. What complaints do the bossss have? What do the workers complain about most? Those are rhetorical questions, I don't…
Yeah I mean automation is expected to happen however the entire "redesign" of restaurants and the dexterity of human slave hands. I'm glad that hopefully I have a way out of this industry that will ideally be fully automated.
I do find comfort in knowing that I could build the scheduling system that they use. Granted not at scale (yet). Any script kiddie I imagine like me could put something together.
I don't know, I'm not looking into the restaurant industry" as something to work on passion drives things and the food industry is not for me.
Also regarding orders people may ask for some random thing that isn't programmed an "exception".
Anyway thanks for responding to my needlessly long initial post, I will actually edit it, (nope I can't anymore) ahh my social interactions are usually a cringe moment due to my own social ineptitude.
I'm impatient is all, takes time, work, gotta earn it.
Edit: I should expand (human slave hands), I can't judge other people(choices in work occupation/not a choice), I'm laughing at myself/think of myself, well... performing a menial task. But someday if I work hard I will get out. Look at that, two sentences. Grateful to have a chance.
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#48I've done mostly contract work because I liked the freedom when I was younger. Now I notice a lot of people my age have moved on to management or jobs "higher on the ladder" while I stress about the uncertainty of income when contracts end. I assume the lifestyle might suit people who are extraordinarily good networkers, but I feel mostly tired these days. My younger self didn't know about the fatigue the responsibil…
> ...I notice more and more graveyards of abandoned projects and services running without anybody present who was involved in building or setting up. I've seen this happen a lot in full-time-only shops. It's possible it happens more often in shops that lean heavily on contract work, but it happens everywhere. It takes strong technical leadership to keep that sort of technical debt quantified and prioritized without k…
The IT department in my company is an example of the result of a totally outsourced organization. At the top you have a huge layer of well spoken, very personable people who "facilitate", "align" and call meetings. They have no technical knowledge. Then there are a few "architects" who sit in these meetings. The architects come up with a solution and then send the work to India. At the place the work is actually done the people have no idea why things are the way they are and they often do nonsensical stuff. The organization never learns anything because next time around it will be a different set of people working on the system. It's really bad. The overhead is enormous and even the simplest project need weeks of meetings, planning and budgeting.
But to the CEO it looks like a lean organization because the permanent headcount is so low. I bet they would be better off if they had a fixed staff of experienced people who actually know the systems they are working with.
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#49I've done a lot of contract work as a software engineer over the past 5 years. It's a good way to experiment with a lot of different companies and industries. It's generally true that contractors can't get promoted within the company. It's not unusual to see 40+ year old contractors still working as engineers. The money is great but you really need to have a low risk investment strategy on the side... I don't think y…
When I was contracting in IT I liked that I wasn't looking for promotion, I could just get on with doing what I was good at. I haven't got the skills to be a project manager, head of department, CTO etc. Many of the permanent staff were always looking to their next cushy job in the company and were laden down with politics and not being constrained by that was great. I also liked moving to new companies, learning new…
As contractor I found useless meetings much easier to bear. Every 15 minutes I would look at the clock and think " you just wasted another $30". Now as employee I feel they are wasting my time instead of their money.
Re: Is the Rise of Contract Workers Killing Upward Mobility?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm not an entrpreneur if I don't actively think of that place that way. I mean I don't know the logistics of the supply of restaurants. Closest thing would be POS/menus for cooking those look realtively old or maybe it's one of those "does its job no need to fix". Haha the restaurant industry for me is like purgatory haha I look forward to the day that I work as a developer full time. Poverty is my never endin…
Just an idea, why have a POS system at all? Why have a waitstaff that take orders? Why not just give the orders to the cooks and eliminate mistakes made by servers? What about in-kitchen optimizations? What about reducing spoilage? The possible places to improve are limited mostly by your imagination. What complaints do the bossss have? What do the workers complain about most? Those are rhetorical questions, I don't…
The cooks are in the back and the waitstaff are in the front, with different specialised skills. Oh and you can't go from kitchen to front of house and back to kitchen without washing your hands or at least changing gloves.
The POS system is not just a communications system, it's also a means of taking EFT payment and a means of auditing. Even trivial places like donut shops have a POS system in order to take payments. And as soon as you get a business large enough that the owner isn't the only one handling money, you need an auditing system to avoid being defrauded by your staff.
(I work in a POS company at the moment. Our origin story is exactly that of an hotel entrepreneur solving his audit problems by building a POS system - in the early 1980s.)