31–40 of 42 posts
I have been full time employee in my whole career, no one had really told me what to wear. I have been to office in sportswear and no one seems to mind that. I don't think this point is necessarily true at least in tech.
It never feels like the contractor is an "expert" in a field, is any more efficient than another employee and is nothing more than another person that has been hired to do programming with less HR/employment overhead. So not sure which audience this article is aimed at. Maybe my experience in London doesn't reflect other places but as a contract and as someone who has looked for contractors it never felt like we got…
Your not paying for the best you are probably paying a similiar amount for your fulltime employees. What you get is all of the people who couldn't find a fulltime role who have to take this without any benefits so the quality is lower. Now if you remote sourced the role gems will be found.
Every contractor I know resigned from a permanent position in their early thirties to go contracting and make 1.5x-2x as much money as a contractor. Businesses regularly offer contractors full-time positions and are regularly turned down.
Contractors may not be particularly special technically, but they will focus on doing what they're told in the team and not attending training, seminars, workshops or HR meetings. I'd much rather build a product with a team of suitably incentivised and managed contractors than a team of permies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you follow the authors other advice of not charging to little (which is strongly connected to how much your client values you), that's rarely a problem in my experience. My client knows my hourly rate, so when I tell them that the extra features take 3 additional hours they know exactly how much that would cost them. No haggling, no negotiations, no meeting. Of course that only works with time-based billing, and a…
This is definitely the case with "good"/recurring clients, and it's very painless. Not so much with others.
I find the term 'full time' unnecessarily ambiguous. Certainly 'employee' suggests something contra to 'contractor', but there's no reason someone working 40 hours a week can't or shouldn't be considered full-time regardless of their permanent / contractor status. I can't tell if this is irony, in the context of being 'precise in your communications' and advice to 'edit ruthlessly': > You must ruflessly cut out bulls…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your not paying for the best you are probably paying a similiar amount for your fulltime employees. What you get is all of the people who couldn't find a fulltime role who have to take this without any benefits so the quality is lower. Now if you remote sourced the role gems will be found.
You have completely misunderstood the UK market - note that the OP talked about London. Perhaps as a way to get past the recruiting problem, UK corporates pay a premium for exerienced programmers on the basis that if they cannot do the job, they are let go immediately without severance. Most contractors are 30+, don't want to be 'in charge' (at meetings, giving interviews, being trained in the latest corporate 'value…
But I always found it a little bit of a lie when the idea of a contractor coming in and working on a problem from day 2 or 3.
Granted this usually was because the problem was poorly defined and/or limited but even when I joined teams that had really good project managers it still was not as simple as "work on this in isolation".
I have since ditched contracting in UK, too much of a mess with the taxman.
It depends on the firm. At some non-tech firms, being an independent is the only way to get higher cash. (Not universal) In this case an expert developer who doesn’t want to manage people escapes junior level salary bands.
In the US, it's a cash vs benefits trade-off. I am happy to sacrifice a lot of salary to get the Cadillac healthcare my company offers to me and my family at no cost.
> Posted by Mohamed Hayibor on Sat, Aug 31, 31089 We're living in 2019, Mohamed is living in 31089 apparently. How's the future? ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, it's a cash vs benefits trade-off. I am happy to sacrifice a lot of salary to get the Cadillac healthcare my company offers to me and my family at no cost.
Why not just buying the healthcare package yourself and paying for it from more cash you make as a contractor? Honest question since I live in a country with a very different healthcare system...
> If you can’t do a “one shot, one kill” email. Then call the person. Please don't do this.
> Posted by Mohamed Hayibor on Sat, Aug 31, 31089 I mean, if I were a time traveller, I wouldn't be spending my limited output on this sort of stuff ;) More seriously - to me this guy seems a bit.. I dunno, try hard? Like they want to prove something about how aggressive they are. You don't need to be all "gogogo" to do contracting. The last bit is kind of illustrative. I think they've had bad experiences in the past…
If you're young and insecure you might fall into the low pay downward spiral trap. You'll burn out.
And I'm not advocative anything "gogogo"or aggressive, in fact I said that you should be aiming to work less hours...
Finally I'd be interested in knowing what life experiences you had to think that this post was "aggressive" or "try-hard".