Difficulty level: stop thinking of yourself as a 'programmer' or an 'engineer', and start thinking of how your programming/engineering work impacts the business' bottom line. See: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
tl; dr - humans are weird.
A) I would do it as an LLC, as it's cheaper, easier to set up and doesn't require a partnership structure.
B) Not every company is looking for a 1099 employee. In fact, I'd wager that most would rather hire W-2 (US) instead.
C) Trying to go the real consulting route will lead to long-ish sales cycles depending on your rate and what you're looking to do. You'll also need to go through procurement at a big enough place; that, in and of itself, can take a while.
D) You're on the hook for health insurance and retirement. Health insurance is expensive.
E) Days off outside of the weekend and federal holidays comes out of your PnL. You can (and should) factor that into your rate, but see (C) for why that might make building a book of business more difficult.
F) You'll need to sell yourself much more than you would as an employee. If you're the type that hates writing/speaking/meetings/selling, then I wouldn't recommend consulting.
B) Not in my experience. W2 employees have a 20% overhead for various insurances, taxes, etc. There's also significant employment law one has to follow to a T, 'or else'. Consultants, you can be a little looser with.
C) Not disagreeing on this one, but there's also _tons_ of smaller shops and startups who have expensive problems a consultant's specialized knowledge/experience may be uniquely suited to solve.
D) As a non-smoking overweight single male, my 'gold plan' insurance on the west coast is ~$400/mo. At consultant profit margins, that is effectively 'lolwhatever' money.
E) This is yet another example of why hourly billing is nuts. Don't bill hourly. Bill per-project, and charge for the business-value of the work to the business. Considerable literature has been written on this, see works by Jonathan Stark, Alan Weiss, etc. tl; dr - if you're billing hourly, you're doing it Wrong(tm)
F) Strong agree. But just because one may hate writing/speaking/meetings/selling doesn't mean one can't A. learn it, and B. learn to excel at it. Would _you_ take a course on public speaking and read a book on negotiation if you were reasonably certain you could make your current annual income in a quarter's worth of work?
E) I agree that Fixed Cost is better than T&M/hourly...if you're good at estimating and scoping the work beforehand. I.e. if you have lots of experience to sell. It's very easy to lose money on the margin if you're not, hence why I'd recommend hourly for someone new to the game.
(I'd wager that it only makes sense to get into high-rate consulting if you have tons of experience, but that's another debate.)
D) I didn't know it was that cheap for young and single people! But it gets expensive fast if you have a family or advanced conditions.
C) Right, but you'd better be specialized enough to make it worth a startup's while to employ you. Also, it is easier to find startup's willing to hire you in hotspots like NYC or SF than, say, Columbus, OH. You could work remote, but that is a more difficult sell depending on what you do and your rates.
Definitely definitely agree with (A). Mistakes in filling are costly, and you'll eventually have a contract dispute that is easier to suss out with a lawyer.
If I'm giving advice to job seekers, I'd say move around enough to get good salary increases, but don't do it too frequently or potential employers will start to see it as a red flag.
If I'm giving advice to hiring managers, I'd say hire great people, but keep in mind that the best people often get bored or want salary increases, so they tend to move around. If you see someone who has moved around very frequently in the past, then there's certainly a good chance they'll be moving again in the near future.
Not necessarily. When I was interviewing for the job I have now, they were trying really hard to weed out people like OP who claimed to have been at one place for a longer time than they had. They demanded HR contacts for my last _three_ jobs (which in my case stretches all the way back to 2002) so they could make sure that the start & end dates I put on my application matched up with what HR stated. Well, we ran in to an immediate problem with the second job ago - the company had gone out of business since I left, and there was nobody to contact. They shrugged their shoulders and moved on to the most recent job. Well, that was a startup, too - when I started working there, it was a contract-to-hire position, so I was actually an employee of "warm body providers corp" for the first six months. Then, when I was converted to perm at that job, it was bought by "megaglobalcorp" a year later. Then, about six months before I was let go, megaglobalcorp sold our entire office to "evilcorp, inc." who decided to shut down the office (which is why I was out of work in the first place). So when HR at the job I have now started making calls, I had had _four_ different employers in a three year period, even though I had been in the same office, sitting at the exact same desk, reporting to the exact same boss throughout the entire period. I think I may have explained this to the "currentjob" HR eight times before they finally gave up and decided to trust me when I said I had only had three different jobs in the past 16 years.
It was a pain in the butt when I bought a house, though, and I needed to write a formal letter explaining all the changes and why it looks like I kept switching jobs according to my tax documents.