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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Central London contractors can have daily rates of 400/500 easily. That's an equivalent salary of £90k+
600/700 is not unusual in London (several of my friends are on daily rates like that). Plus you can expense a ton of things as part of business costs.
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And contracting in a high-paying field like software development is one thing. Contracting for low-skill labor through a marketplace like Uber, TaskRabbit, Handy, etc. provides even less opportunity for any sort of career development.
I feel an odd magnetic sway towards the future envisioned in Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" where the gig-economy IS the economy.
I'm just glad we're going to have the opportunity to live in a cyber-punk dystopia!!!
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Unfortunately for every qualified contractor you have 20 clueless people hired from some body shop who make a mess of things. Good contractors are a rare breed.
Eh, so are good employees are in the UK. I've been contracting five years, and the state of software engineering seems woeful in the small and medium sized countries of the UK.
Could have sworn I fixed that...
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I have no idea! I get the impression that contracting in the US, at least in tech firms, is a lot less lucrative.
I used to do contracting in Germany and the US. In Germany there was an understanding that you have a higher risk and therefore a contractor should make more money than an employee to compensate for that risk. In the US most companies view contractors as cheap labor and pay their employees more. No idea how general this is. It's just my personal experience.
A lot of the awful ones too, mind!
Do all contract workers have their own companies, do their bookkeeping etc? Seems like a lot of hassle just to do gigs.
Rather that than fill in holiday forms, attend company meetings, have annual performance reviews etc etc.
Do all contract workers have their own companies, do their bookkeeping etc? Seems like a lot of hassle just to do gigs.
I do. Rather that than fill in holiday forms, attend company meetings, have annual performance reviews etc etc.
This mentality is far worse then the article describes. The short sighted lack of institutional knowledge is, for technology companies, a serious issue. We are knowledge workers, and we know too clearly how technology management tries to treat salaried developers as inter-changeable. Add in contract technology developers and you have a recipe for success-causes-failure situations as there are black holes in the insti…
Quoting a bit of comedy:
As long as there are ill-defined goals,
bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be
Real Programmers willing to jump in and
Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for
later.
-- "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL"[0]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, so are good employees are in the UK. I've been contracting five years, and the state of software engineering seems woeful in the small and medium sized countries of the UK.
s/countries/companies/ Could have sworn I fixed that...
Earlier 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…
Please point out where and how you believe I've been "poking fun at the system," or predicting its downfall, or in some broad way denouncing the US, as you seem to suggest I am doing? Critiquing an element of a system does not = opposing that system in its entirety. In this case, the element I take issue with is our short-term-optimized view of the value of human capital. Essentially, we fail to rationally calculate…
most of what you said I generally agree with (about contract workers). then you lamented with the trite: "if only we were like europe" type comment.
tbh, i want to be nothing like europe. who's economy do you lionize? Portugaul 9% ump, Ireland 6.1% ump, Greece 22% ump, Spain 17.6% ump? Even France isn't doing great. Or would you prefer to cherry pick one of the more Nordic countries like Sweden with virtually no ethnic or geographic diversity?
I'm sure Europe is great, but they are by no means an archetype of economic success. Nor is our situation anything like theirs, so this is why people get irritated by such comments.