Show HN: We Work Contract – London Web contract jobs with day rates | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We Work Contract – London Web contract jobs with day rates

weworkcontract.com

71 pointsjwmoz77 comments

I see a lot of these vacancies on Indeed, etc... In my experience, usually, more than half of the reqs are fake, or misleading. These recruitment agencies are harvesting CVs, to try to place candidates into companies that they don't actually have a contract with.

Yup. It would be nice if there was some way to review the listings, and share info on the roles, but I guess it would be scuppered by the competitive nature of going for the roles.

Looks like just a repost of a site like CWJobs.com, full of recruitment companies. While thats fine, i'd love to see a site that offers contracts that aren't through recruiters. I'd even pay for access to that. Something to think of?

I wonder if the problem there is legal coverage. Would it be possible to have some sort of co-op that accepted a flat or percentage and in exchange handled some of the non-technical steps between "we have this work" and "I completed this work for you".

A lot of banks (and I assume other large corporates) have an in-house contract recruitment function now. I often thought of aggregating roles from those people only.

Where do they advertise ?

I think on their own homepage career section.

YunoJuno does this.

Yes so I just wanted to get it populated with some data then if any users come along allow job posts.

Workfu looked to be really great in that space back in the day, think they were just before their time. Always thought about building something similar when they went under - think it'd be quite a nice little project?

Upwork recently pissed off almost their entire user-base, so now might be a good time for a site like this.

What happened? How did they piss people off?

Raised rates a large amount for freelancers, and imposed a not-before-existing rate for clients.

Every time I see these types of articles I think about forming my own consultancy and farming myself out. If they're paying you $600 a day then I assume they're making $900 a day.

They do. I've seen Frontend Devs sit in Design Meetings for 1500$ a day surfing reddit as their part of the process starts weeks or months later.

The Dev gets paid 800$ a day and makes a killing. The consultancy does also. Not many people are responsible at the customers side of things so these types of waste just continue indefinetly.

I'm fairly content with only getting a fraction of what the customer pays for me. My company has all the risk: If I don't have a project, I still get paid. They pay me while I get training etc. If I worked for myself, any hour not spent working for a client would be time I'm not getting paid.

looking at the rates...I am doing life wrong

Actually, I was just thinking that rates haven't really changed much in the last 20 years. I was earning about 350GBP/day in London, and 300GBP/day in Belfast around 2000, with only a couple of years experience. That was for non-finance work. (Finance work paid 400-500GBP/day).

Now the rates are about the same (maybe 50GBP/day more at most), but the price of housing (both to buy and rent) is 50% to 100% higher than back then.

Still, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to be a contractor. Rates in USA and Canada are a lot lower for contract work, mainly because there isn't as much contact work available.

Your best option is probably to live somewhere cheap on the outskirts of London, contract for a few years, and save as much as you can. (Try not to buy too many expensive toys :)

"Still, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to be a contractor. Rates in USA and Canada are a lot lower for contract work, mainly because there isn't as much contact work available."

I don't know what the overall stats are, but it's safe to say that in the Bay Area or NYC you can pretty strong rates, and by pretty strong I say in the ~800/day USD or higher range. That's similar to the 500/day GBP rates I saw in London. But of course these numbers vary highly by industry and speciality. My numbers are DevOps/SA senior roles.

I'm a contractor and not a big fanatic of day rates. Go hourly, if you can, since 40 hour weeks are rare in today's world, so daily rates at places like the large investment banks are 10+ hour days, frequently. I'd ask 100/hr at a bare minimum for a senior role. You might not get a contract as quickly as you'd get a full-time role, but the demand is there.

Back to the point you raised - there are a great many contract roles in the U.S., but it's very hard to go corp to corp with the client. The recruiters / consulting firms love to skim 40-60% overhead, and it's hard to market yourself directly to clients without knowing people.

As another datapoint, I had a buddy in the UK who was contracting and there was this scheme where he was being taxed at some absurd rate in the 25% range due to being paid from a trust. No idea how common or known that is, but in NYC my tax rate's in the 45% range (after expenses).

100/hr works out to around $200k/year using standard 2087 hours/year for full time work. You can get better or comparable salary as FTE + benefits. It's not much.

Well sure, because in salaried jobs no one counts your hours. However, in my experience in both finance and ad tech, you end up working more than 40 hours. My IT buddies making 250k+ work 55-60 hour weeks, easy. It's not much better in the UK, where I have also worked. When you do the math, the contractor is ahead, because that 200k figure you cited is a 40 hour week.

> Still, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to be a contractor. Rates in USA and Canada are a lot lower for contract work, mainly because there isn't as much contact work available.

Contract work in the US seems to be a lot of B2B. But, if you get in that area, you can easily charge $250+/hr for development.

Last time I was contracting (around y2k) I was seeing rates as a (then) dev of around £500 a day, but then again y2k itself was a blip. A very lucrative blip :)

The listing is web scraped from other sites (jobserve, cwjobs, etc), which is a problem since most of them are fake. It would be great if there was an actual site/company that had real jobs for the "HN crowd". Even if just a few.

Several months ago I've moved to London with the goal of finding contract work but my experienced has been quite negative. But that is simply my case where (1) I'm not a specialist and (2) have no UK experience.

I've realized that not all that glitters is gold. All that glitter also made me commit the mistake of asking for market rate, which likely didn't help.

Many of the ads are fake and the recruiters just call you to try to get info from you "how are you finding the job market? any interviews? with who? what tech did they use?" Just politely answer "I'm sorry but that information is confidential and I respect my business partners"

At this time I started searching for permanent roles, but have an obvious preference for contract.

Anyway, what I really wanted to ask is for any tips in landing a contract based role. Or if it's hopeless for someone without "UK experience". I have a CS degree, have 10 year of professional experience, but very broad tech. But only the last 2 years are "devops" related which is what I'm interested. I like developing tools and automating. I don't mind backend (and known a bit of Django). I also have a keen interest in ML (recently finished coursera ML MOOC).

Curious: why are rates in the UK frequently quoted as day rates (vs. hourly or monthly)?

The custom in the US seems to be hourly, but in the UK, it seems day rates are the norm. Curious as to whether this is just happenstance, or whether something else is involved.

This is for fellow contractors where we take a day rate rather than your usual permanent yearly salary.

I get that it's for contractors (the title of the post says so). It's just that in the US, contract roles are posted as e.g. $YYY/hr and not $XXX/day.

I'm just curious as to whether there is any concrete reason for this. Based on the comments here, it sounds like it's not very friendly to the contractors.

lower rates tend to be hourly, higher ones tend to be daily.

though that's not a hard and fast rule.

and don't forget, day rates are often based on 7.5 hours per day and pro-rata up or down, so you actually get paid hourly!

As a contractor for the last 6 years in London, I have never seen a day rate prorated. The hours of various companies change which does end up with the same result in a way but the actual amount should be defined by you.

I've never seen this either.

I do sometimes charge half days or 3/4th days if I have to leave work a few hours early.

Do you ever do the reverse and charge e.g. 1.5X if you have to stay late?

Is there any advantage to this system versus hourly billing?

I never had a contracting job that requires me to stay late, just 8 hours a day. I would have billed 1/4th more day if I had to stay 2 more hours.

So if you do a long week (say -- 60 hours in 5 days toward a deadline), do you earn the same as in a shorter week (e.g. 40 hours)?

Or do you get to bill 1.X your normal day rate for longer days?

I'm curious as to whether there are any advantages to using day rates versus hourly.

A daily rate is usually for a "professional day" and not prorated. If they're paying £600 and up, you're going to be going 60+ hour weeks.

This is simply not true and just something permies make up.

Yes to be honest I've been treated far better and been able to make much bigger changes within code and organisations as a contractor than I ever could as a permanent person. The money is nice but it's just a bonus to being able to build great things.

Same here, but my problem is that you don't have the opportunity to learn things on contract jobs.

Company doesn't invest in your ability to learn and adapt, it only invests in your ability to solve that specific problem. In my experience.

You're half right. The rate is for a professional day, and even as a contractor in banking the last time I did a 60+ week was a one-off working on overnight deployments.

So are you saying that if you did 70 hours over 6 days, you get paid the same as if you worked 40 hours over 5 days?

If I worked 70 hours over 6 days, I'd get paid for 6 days. However, if I worked 70 hours over 6 days for more than a week or two, I'd try and renegotiate my rate.

Good catch; I conflated the # of days. Thanks for clarifying!

No C# (or .NET) on there at all?

I see a ton of C# work now, maybe your comment sparked a change!

Freelancing in Berlin since 2 years.

Seems like 400-500 pounds a day is the average rate.

In Berlin, normal freelance rate is ~ 50 eur/h and again it is way higher than 40-60k + 0.000N percentage of a startup.

A bit sad, because lots of companies are dying to hire good developers around here, but seems that their only option to find them is either look for freelancers or head hunters.

Or offer more money?

Where do you go for euro contracts? I very rarely see them advertised.

You can start here :

http://berlinstartupjobs.com/contracting-positions/

IT jobs are not filtered, though but they exist.

Another way is to approach companies and offer freelance service, of course they prefer to hire you, but usually if you show qualities, they consider to work with you as freelancer too.

Also headhunters are willing to find you a freelancing project.

50€/h seems rather bad :/

Wow, what's wrong with what I said...

Just an FYI since I'm assuming this is a newly-launched site? "WeWork" is now a pretty big/established co-working & real estate firm that plays in the tech space, so they'll likely take issue with your domain name if this becomes big enough.

Good advice. It doesn't matter whether it's right, no one wants the headache of lawyers or a name change.

Looks good, though no category for .NET? Would've thought that would be an in-demand skill in London.

This looks great. Is there any removal of positions that have been filled, or is it just hit and hope?

Atm just hit and hope but depending on users I can build deletion checks etc.

This of interest, thank you. Does this hook into job website APIs like monster etc?

Haven't checked monster but I will have a look now.

The results displayed on the website correlate with my experience that C++ is not a popular language in London specially for web [back-end] development.

I'm not sure you need to put a geographic bracket around that statement. I very rarely see C++ for web development.

You used to see it more often about 15+ years ago but even then it wasn't the most popular choice.

Certainly not web dev. I do see it in jobs ads from bank after bank, broker after broker, information dealer after information dealer.

I don't really know what "popular" means in this context. There's certainly no shortage of jobs requiring C++ in London.

I don't think I've ever seen a web development job ever that explicitly asked for c++ knowledge.

Possibly not web development, but a C++ programmer in London, can get pretty good money either fulltime or contracting. Mostly in finance, but also Google, MS, Facebook actively seek C++ programmers.

it's not a popular language anywhere for web dev

Also Perl CGI :)

Any remote roles available?

I'm an American, currently in the UK time-zone. These JavaScript roles would be ideal if I could work remotely.

Try http://weworkremotely.com (not affiliated).

Maybe a dumb (american) question, but in the UK, what is the average / minimum length of these day rate contracts?

Most will be three months initially with an extension where required. Obviously there's shorter ones available too, but 3 months seems to be the most commonly quoted initial length.

Yeah. Three months is usually the minimum for a contract. 6 months is more common in my experience. And then there is the chance of renewals on top.

Usually 3 to 6 months (unless you specifically go for a horrible couple week contract) and every contract I've worked has rolled on or been extended.

Have you had any issues with IR35 with regard to long-term contracts?

Never, ever, ever nor has any contractor I have ever worked with. Saying that the longest contract I've worked was 1 1/2 years.

IMHO the IR35 stuff you see is just companies trying to sell you advice and consultation and build a market around it.

Interesting that most of the PHP jobs are paying much less than say Python or Javascript.

The problem with the PHP market at the moment is that there's a split between semi-skilled Wordpress / Joomla / Drupal development and more highly skilled development work that would fall under the same rate as Python / Rails / Node contract work.

If you are a skilled polyglot developer and want to seek out PHP contracts at the senior end of the market you will be able to earn the same day rate as with other languages, but there are also a lot of agencies that are hiring not highly skilled developers to pump out cookie-cutter sites and so many of the PHP jobs will be for this sort of work and thus pay a lower day rate.

Saturation.

got any of these for the united states?

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