171–180 of 304 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the difference is that I factor in structural factors that keep people poor, while you pretend they don't exist.
What structural factors, specifically, stop poor people from attaining the level of "expertise" necessary to buy disability insurance?
The long answer to this question is, in fact, extremely long.
Am I in the minority here for being a contract developer who is happy to be in this place? * I make over 40% more than I did when I was full-time, and I was already in the top band for pay in my title. This far exceeds the 15% markup for self-employment tax. * My wife works full time so she has our back for health insurance * I can save way more for retirement with an SEP IRA than I ever could with a company-sponsore…
For those interested (namely, me) could you describe your current situation? * What sort of business entity are you using? What considerations did you make when choosing this entity? * What is your work like? Are you remote/onsite? Do you have one client or multiple? * What is your staff like? Are you a lone worker? Do you have coworkers in your business? What did you choose to offload onto others? * How do you manag…
* I'm remote currently with high utilization client (as a subcontractor) and smaller retainer clients.
* I am a firm of 1.
* I have an accountant to manage taxes and finances. I keep meticulous records of what is a business vs a personal expense. The subcontractor gig is insured by the main contracting company. The retainer gigs stipulate it is knowledge/access only, so without any IP deliverables required, so there's no need for insurance on that. I may get insurance if my employment situation changes in terms of the contracts I take on. For this, I'd talk with your lawyer.
* I would just buy health insurance through the state. I live in MA, so we have to have something. We're both young and healthy, and she has an incredibly stable job, so I don't worry about this one too much.
I should point out that I'm very new to this (4 months in) so definitely don't look at me as a source of having "done things right" - I am learning every day and still sweating it all.
Am I in the minority here for being a contract developer who is happy to be in this place? * I make over 40% more than I did when I was full-time, and I was already in the top band for pay in my title. This far exceeds the 15% markup for self-employment tax. * My wife works full time so she has our back for health insurance * I can save way more for retirement with an SEP IRA than I ever could with a company-sponsore…
Only 40% is this net? I would be aiming for > 100% Gross as a it contactor in the UK and pay less tax.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you are in the minority. The huge rise in contract work is not in boutique consulting firms or well compensated tech consultants. It's low skill work, groundskeepers, janitors, housekeepers, drivers. Businesses have moved to contracting to effectively lower total compensation.
I guess part of why I posted that is the audience - I imagine in submitting this article to HN, it is meant to resonate with two subsets of people here: 1. Entrepreneurs running gig economy startups and the implications for how they should treat their workforce 2. Tech workers who work in the gig economy (e.g. Gigster developers, PullRequest reviewers, independent developers) So I read this and bring up my point beca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you are in the minority. The huge rise in contract work is not in boutique consulting firms or well compensated tech consultants. It's low skill work, groundskeepers, janitors, housekeepers, drivers. Businesses have moved to contracting to effectively lower total compensation.
I guess part of why I posted that is the audience - I imagine in submitting this article to HN, it is meant to resonate with two subsets of people here: 1. Entrepreneurs running gig economy startups and the implications for how they should treat their workforce 2. Tech workers who work in the gig economy (e.g. Gigster developers, PullRequest reviewers, independent developers) So I read this and bring up my point beca…
That's a pretty limited view. There are plenty of non-entrepreneurs on HN who are looking for interesting technology and tech-related society articles. It could also be meant to resonate with people who just think that the gig economy is questionable development.
> So I read this and bring up my point because it seems like contract work, inherently, is not the problem. The problem is, what others have mentioned, that the government regulates employment in such a way that we tie benefits like health insurance to the employers, and do not align incentives properly. Would you say that's an accurate assessment?
I don't agree with that. I think the problem with contract work, especially the gig economy kind, is that it's a further progression of the dehumanization of work. More an erosion of the social contract than a failure of government regulation. That dehumanization reduces the buffers between actual people and the more sociopathic aspects of capitalism.
Good (edit: in the long run). The services they list, like health insurance, retirement, or pensions, should be decoupled from your employer.
Ideally they would be coupled to our government, but since they aren't providing that, our employers should be obligated to ensure they are providing us with the means to keep ourselves healthy.
Even if the best case where they act if your best interest, you have to deal with all your benefits changing when you change jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a race to the bottom. It's a correction. Why should your health care be determined by your employer? It's a ludicrous system that should have died decades ago.
> Why should your health care be determined by your employer? It's a ludicrous system that should have died decades ago. Yeah but it's being replaced by insurance that is utterly unaffordable for a lot of contract employees. If we want to decouple health insurance and employers (and we should) then we should be proactively working out what that looks like in the future.
Caused in part by the issues of employability of (some) chronically ill people, driving up costs, and making "individual" plans de facto "high risk pool plans". Which would be helped by, as you said (and I agree):
> decouple health insurance and employer
One aspect of the "gig economy" that I've not seen covered is the way it effects gigsters professional social graphs. At the deep end of Mechanical Turk services where work is dispatched by an algorithm (Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc.) there are no upward connections to supervisors and managers and officers and no lateral connections to coworkers. This means that working does not provide insider access to potentially better (…
Perhaps there's not social connection directly in the workplace, but there IS social connection between Uber/Lyft/etc drivers online. It was on HN a week or two ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/40501439/the-network-uber-driver... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16110598 The Network Uber Drivers Built: Ride-hail drivers work alone, but they’re banding together online to compare notes, uncover new policies, and he…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What structural factors, specifically, stop poor people from attaining the level of "expertise" necessary to buy disability insurance?
Fundamentally it's lack of time due to having to work 2+ gigs likely while juggling child care or elder care. People with money can pay people to do things for them, freeing up time. Even if they do it themselves, they likely have a more comfortable life so it's easier to devote an evening or a weekend to figuring out complicated medical/legal/financial scenarios.