The better contractors I've worked with all do, here in the UK. The day rates are high. The taxes are the same or lower, health insurance is optional. There's some company insurances you need and you have to get an accountant, but all-in that should be covered by less than a week of work each year.
Gaps between contracts are desirable! Having a whole summer off to live on your accumulated war chest and chill out, it's amazing.
Plus jumping on to a new project every few months keeps the work interesting, rather than stagnating at the same desk for years on end.
For my part, I literally left the UK in part because the industry there was so geared towards contract work or boutique contract houses as the only viable career path for senior developers. It’s just not for everyone. I like staying with a product team and building and owning stuff; I like companies that build their technology in-house rather than outsourcing; I like being able to shape what the technology team contributes to the business rather than respond to already-baked RFPs. I like stock-based comp.
The UK tech job market is very well suited to certain kinds of developers and certain kinds of relationships between businesses (and frequently government organizations) and their technology providers.
It’s not the only way though.
I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners. They also seem to treat their tech staff like children.
There's a potential research paper in this somewhere: "Subtle consequences of mildly antagonistic workplace practices and their effect on annoying the crap out of people to the extent of later bankrupting a company due to the snowball effect."
Been a long day.
This is not just true for British businesses... it's common worldwide across everything that's not a tech startup. The older the people in management are, the less likely they are to even understand what the younger staff is talking about.
German Mittelstand is infamous for this - they're roadblocked on one side by the government bending over backwards to impede proper buildout of real broadband across the country and not just in cities, and on the other side by 80+ aged patriarchs who still are dictating business communication in an audio recorder for their secretaries to type down. These pre-Boomer fossils are only focused on micromanagement and keeping control until the day they literally die, and the Boomer generation isn't much more modern either.
The result? Humble startups led by young people of a diverse background are eating their lunch left and right, and the Boomer+older generation are standing still, scratching their heads and wondering what's going on.
The rural fibre point was only to illustrate how German Mittelstand is blocked on not just the treatment of their tech staff.
> What do octogenarians have to do with software managers who these days are usually younger than the engineers
Micromanaging octogenarians are who are calling the shots in way too many Mittelstand companies, often against the express demands of their younger staff and management level.
Also: no accountability of decision. Fire a few people and keep pushing harder. Never smarter.
This does not convey to quality product. It convey to pass arbitrary deadlines with half the team gone and the other ready to switch project.
Terrible knowledge management, too.
We build software businesses here. The UK should try it some time.
If you can do that, that's amazing. Unfortunately many contractors fall into the "if I don't work I'm losing money" mentality and never stop. Then they start converting everything to how many days it cost them to earn and try to never spend money. I've seen it so many times and it's so unhealthy. Strangely it seems to mostly affect people who do get stupid-high rates.
The most absurd case was a contractor guy in a big corp at lunch with employees from the same team - he was pulling 3x our employee rate equivalent and complaining how he can't afford to take any days off or he'd be "losing" his daily rate.
And it's also important to remember why you got into it in the first place - being able to take significant amounts of time between contracts was a big part of it for me. I intend to take three months downtime a little later this year.
But contractors are usually hired for their existing skilsets where they can jump in and start contributing immediately. So you end up doing similar projects.
eg: If you are a backend programmer, no one will hire you to work on as a machine learning engineer on day rates.
This is a big myth that contractors are working on something new and exciting every few months. Most of contracting work is short term grunt work.
> rather than stagnating at the same desk for years on end.
No its the opposite. Companies invest in training and take a chance on you doing something new inside in the company.
The difference is, as a contractor you can afford to take a few months off and become good at something else - then you'll get a job doing that instead.
You can also pick and choose your projects more freely and there's usually nothing stopping you having long term projects as well as short term gigs, often working for multiple clients at once.
In the US or elsewhere where health insurance is a thing I would probably go perm.
> Companies invest in training and take a chance on you doing something new inside in the company.
I literally LOL'd at this... If you're great at what you're doing, they're keeping you where you are - and "invest in training" could easily mean a 3 day workshop where you find you already know more than the instructor. No thanks.
In answer to the original question, offer more money than you think you can offer and set it up as a 3 month contract-to-perm situation (don't write that down anywhere if you're in the UK - they'll immediately be inside IR35) so you know it's a good match. Alternatively, skin in the game in the form of shares or whatever - but they'd have to be confident in the business, I've rejected that offer in the past.
I don't understand this. How can someone trust you that you picked up some new skill if you have no experience in it. Do you put it on your resume anyways? How can somone even pickup software sales ( for example) on their own free time.
> I literally LOL'd at this... If you're great at what you're doing, they're keeping you where they are - and "invest in training" could easily mean a 3 day workshop where you find you already know more than the instructor. No thanks.
No didn't mean that kind of investment lol. I meant more like taking a chance on you. I was able to convince my manager to let me work on product marketing and sales even though i was regular backend dev. It was one of the best career moments for me. This would've never happened if i was contractor.
Well, for anything which produces tangible output you can show off (I'm obviously thinking of programming) it's fairly straightforward to prove you can do it. Software sales? Yeah, no, I couldn't learn that in my spare time - good point.
Personally a jump to marketing and sales sounds roughly as enticing as the time I was offered either redundancy or a new role as a Lotus Notes dev, but I'm happy it floats your boat.
How? What do you put on your resume ? I am genuinely curious. Forget about sales, how do you prove that you can now implement their machine learning projects.
When I was contracting, companies would generally contract me for a week or 2 based on nothing but me telling them I could do something. If I delivered on that initial result, they'd come back for more.
The difference in compensation more than offsets the cost for insurance, in most cases.
> Companies invest in training
Literally never happened for me in 12 years of perm work, for large and small companies. Discounting trivial/patronising things like security training. I've self trained or picked things up as I go along a few times as a contractor, just as I did when perm.
Then contracting has been no different to perm work in that respect, for me. :shrug:
Why would i hire a self trained machine learning engineer with no experience on high day rates when I can hire someone with experience. Ppl hiring contractors don't have time or patience for you to experiment with self training on their dime, I would hire a fulltimer if i have all the time and money for ppl to learn on the job.
I think ML is probably different, in that it's not something that can be just 'picked up' that easily (AFAICT).
But it's honestly surprised me over the years how often my clients have said "Hey, I know it's not your main area of competence, but do you reckon you could have a go at this?"
If you're already working in their systems and domain, you probably have a decent idea of how you can address it, even if it's outside your main area of expertise. This happens to me, and... if I'm completely unqualified, I just say "I can't do that, here's someone else who can" and make a referral/connection to someone in my network. That's often the harder part - finding someone in my network who is both competent and available.
I know a few very experienced people who have looked into contracting or freelancing over the past year either for the first time or for the first round in many years. They have good skills and the aptitude to pick up whatever else they need, but without the broad network that comes with years of doing short term gigs, they've found the market very tough to break into. I doubt they would recognise the talk of a seller's market and ever-increasing rates that we see on sites like HN!
If you don't have that network and people actively seeking you out, you get stuck with looking via agencies (= ghosted often if you don't already have exactly the right buzzwords) or the online marketplaces (= low rates, poor quality clients and high risk of problems with the marketplace itself). And even if you do, I've seen more than one person whose whole network basically all fell apart around the same time because whole industries were hit by COVID.
Today even more than usual, it is about who you know as much as what you know.
Be it pushing for certification, mooc, internal training credit.
All of that was part of my review for instance. It does work.
That stuff re: training was not something that was part of my life as a perm worker, in the UK or Australia. The companies certainly liked to pay lip-service to employee development, but I didn't see much evidence of it actually happening.
I guess the exception was one quiz about bribery I had to take at IBM. It asked me what I would do if I were offered a cook to go with my lodgings where I was staying during an engagement. This woke me up to the possibilities of bribery I didn't know people were getting. I'm not exactly looking for bribes, but my the hypotheticals had me thinking way too small.
The “Active Shooter” one at JPMC was somewhat sobering.
I was not referring to conplicance trainings. Those, of course you won’t learn a thing.
That's not been the case with our best contractors. Yes, in some cases, they were hired for skillsets they already had. But a couple of them we work with, we were happy to let them learn elixir on company time because they demonstrated solid polyglot skills. And that's paid off in spades.
I've had the same experience with my personal consulting agreements. People sometimes hire you for your experience, and know you'll still bring your judgement, experience, and problem solving mindset to the technology du jour and not start from scratch.
Yes thats what i am saying. Hiring rails devs and letting them learn elixir is no big deal and kind of makes sense. But that not really exciting stuff for senior engineers.
Senior engineers want to learn new domains like sales, learn leadership skills, have a say in product direction ect. That to me is exciting stuff, not learning another web framework.
Not all senior folks are interested in that stuff though. Some are more interested in picking up new tech and delivering good quality technical work than they are in going outside of tech to other parts of a business, or getting into management.
> That to me is exciting stuff
Sounds to me like you're less interested in the software creation aspects these days, which is also fine :)
One of the contractors was a rails dev, the other one was actually just a polyglot, although we had hired him for Ember.js help.
But the project is also a high impact, high stress, and challenging project (COVID vaccination software) so yes the domain, level of challenge, and impact helps tremendously to stand out.
As a tech exec and senior engineer myself, I find it highly appealing to do contract work mainly because there are many options/opportunities, and the ability to take a gap wherever you want. That's why I've had my own company for roughly 12 years.
I do think it'll remain that way for the foreseeable future. Many of the smartest people I know are happy to remain contractors because of the flexibility.
I will say though, that I would never do this without Obamacare (in the US). If not for that, I would be "stuck" in a W-2 job just so I could insure my family. (honestly not trying to pass judgment on people who have 9-5 jobs, I'm just not wired for climbing the corporate ladder, etc)
Which is why I always say, supporting Medicare for All is (ironically) one of the most pro-business moves we could make. It will unleash entrepreneurial spirit unlike anything we've ever seen in the US. The number of 1-2 person businesses will explode. All the talent that's stuck at large employers so they can get those health benefits for their families (even though, thanks to Obamacare, you really don't need to anymore) will get liberated.
I'm just taking (minor) issue with the assertion that relatively few engineers want to do contract work. If that were the case you'd expect some contractors to wish they were perm. I think the benefits I outlined are such that quite a few do want to. I've also run into quite a number of perm folk over the years who want to do it but don't quite have the confidence in their own skills to make that leap.
I was one of them!
Do you or anyone else have advice on how to get started with becoming a contractors?
Contracting in the UK used to be pretty good. These days things have changed a lot with further IR35 crackdowns.
I've investigated this a few times personally over the years and am a permanent employee still. Admittedly a few rungs up the corporate ladder these days, but contracting isn't the gravy train it used to be.
The main problem with contracting is lack of career path and random, not very interesting projects where the contractor has little say.
The downside of employee life is non-technical meetings, personality trainings and yearly reviews. They make me feel like a kid.
I also miss the luxury of buying VAT-free tax-deducible gadgets.
Like what kind of gadgets ?
The critical thing is to get a pipeline of folks you know that send work your way. So rarely idle. That was done by working 15 years in the field in a variety of companies. I keep in contact with many old colleagues and remind them I've got bandwidth.
I never made more money than I do contracting now. I've never had to 'chase down money' - never had a bad check, never been stiffed. Had some late checks for sure. Probably due to the quality of my contacts.
I get a lot of cold emails from recruiters and the jobs always seem to pay the same rate, which is no better than what I make.
Most SWEs doing 'contract work' aren't actually 1099 contractors, what it means is they work for an intermediary and then 'contracted out' to a big company with a recognizable name (Google/BofA/Verizon/IBM). These jobs are W2 so you don't pay self-employment tax, they usually have mediocre insurance options, and you lose your job as soon as the work dries up.
It's simply a way for a company to staff up quickly without going through as strict of hiring committee and having any obligation to keep said staff around if plans change.
It's often easier for a department to get a req for a senior/staff contractor (and make salary exceptions) than a FTE, so what happens is departments will offer 200, 250 an hour for temp work but only able to hire engineers for 150k a year because their 'employee' req is slotted lower.
It's "etc". Short for "et cetera". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_cetera
It seems unlikely that the existence of contract work is preventing senior engineers from joining your company. To be blunt, it’s more likely that you’re simply not paying enough to be competitive or you’re not an attractive place to work.
Without knowing more details about your specific situation, the obvious change would be to simply offer more compensation. Higher compensation can make an unattractive job more attractive.