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Comment by Swinx43 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your assessment of being a contractor in the UK. I work as an IT contractor in the UK as well and have been a permanent employee before that.

Permanent members of staff seldom get the same money as skilled contractors and have to put up with a lot more restrictions around holiday and work life balance.

I would equate a contractor in the UK to being the equivalent experience of being a consultant without the politics and drama that comes with it. I have worked for almost a decade as a consultant in different countries and much prefer being a contractor to that.

Promotions seem to normally equate to more responsibility with a meagre if at all pay increase for permanent members of staff. People forget that there is only 1 CTO in an organisation, not everyone can ever get to that level. Most get stuck in middle management hell doing unfulfilling jobs.

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Any tips for transitioning to contracting? Should you be in a certain place (experience, ability, etc) or is just about taking a leap of faith?

Apply for contract work. Ask for it from recruiters who contact you. There's plenty out there in the UK, as long as you look. It's easy enough to get set up with an Ltd in 2-3 business days for everything you need, so don't worry about applying for stuff. Just manage your permanent role's notice period - contracts are generally looking for folks in a short time frame.

I would be happy to give some assistance and guidance if you would like. Get in touch with me, my email is in my profile.

If you're willing then I too would love to pick your brain about this. Can't see an email on profile though.

Sorry about that. I have added it. Feel free to send me an email and I will get in touch asap.

You shoulf have a buffer of about 3-4 months money put away. You may not need it but there is always a significant delay between doing the work and actually getting paid.

After that, just have the confidence to push for it, to ignore the recruiters who will tell you you won't be able to - they just want the commission for placing you in perm work - yeah. I waited until I had about 12 years experience. I don't think I needed to wait that long.

Also permanent guys get to support contractors' code, which adds an insult to an injury.

On the flip side, contractors have to sort out the mess that permanent guys have made.

And that's why we get the good money...

Unfortunately for every qualified contractor you have 20 clueless people hired from some body shop who make a mess of things. Good contractors are a rare breed.

Eh, so are good employees are in the UK.

I've been contracting five years, and the state of software engineering seems woeful in the small and medium sized countries of the UK.

s/countries/companies/

Could have sworn I fixed that...

To be fair, the UK is made of up small and medium countries.

As is the state of software engineering pay, and being lumped in with "IT".

And when the contract ends, the permanent guys have to sort out the mess the contractor made.

That's what you get for working with other people, I guess.

I get what you are saying. There are plenty of sub par contractors out there. Unfortunately there are just as many sub par permanent employees and consulting firms.

I have seen terrible disasters developed by every single sort of person. The issue normally comes when we as developers seem more interested in doing "clever" things at the expense of making sure we code for maintainability and support ability.

Combine the above with a large part of our community being terrible at communicating and you have a recipe for confusion and chaos.

> developers seem more interested in doing "clever" things

[looks at current codebase]

> at the expense of making sure we code for maintainability and support ability

[cries, etc.]

(The current codebase is a masterpiece of cleverness - a single person's homegrown ORM and ObjectModel in Perl. Unfortunately that also means it's an overly complex, horribly unreadable, utterly unmaintainable piece of crap.)

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