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Comment by world32 | Hacker News Reader

This mentality is an issue across all age ranges in the UK. For some odd reason employers seem to have a fixed idea of how much an employee should earn for a certain job - and if they can't find any good people for it they usually end up paying more than double to hire contractors. Its quite baffling really. And its not just in IT, I've heard of this same thing happening in social work, medicine, recruitment etc.

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Most contractors aren't getting paid twice what they can get as an employee, it often works out fairly close when you consider time off, the taxes paid, etc. Shit companies obviously do act that way, but you're better off heading elsewhere, because the same companies don't allow their employees to grow.

I'm a contractor myself and made up rates are still a thing. The high end isn't any better than jobs I can see advertising for perms, and many of the companies advertise for perms before they'll consider contracts.

There's actually 3 companies that have been looking for my skillset for around the last 3 months, and they all refuse to even have a call with me because I don't fit in the rate bracket, but they'll keep looking regardless.

Really? Thats not my experience at all that contracting earns roughly the same as permanent. Why would anybody do contracting if that was the case?

Maybe earning double is an exaggeration on my part though. For myself I earn 50% more as a contractor than as permanent (this is the net amount after taxes, holidays, accountant fees etc.)

See, it depends. Realstically, as a contractor you'd be billing ~220 days a year.

Contractor: (Devops, high day rate)

750 x 220 = £165,000. 800 x 220 = £176,000.

Employee: (Devops, high salary) + Employers NI.

150,000 + 19,508.78 = £169,508.78

Said contractor would need to bring his own equipment, pay insurance, and deal with the risk of being let go arbitrarily, and won't get a bonus or pension contribs.

Now where the contractor can make out is, he can pay reasonable expenses, and he can act more tax efficent, especially if he doesn't pay himself more than the higher threshold.

For the record, I'm not a big fan of the politics that comes with being an employee, I like to just come in, do the work, and leave, so quite happy as a contractor.

Hmmm, a £150k salary seems much harder thing to achieve than a £750 day rate, I can see quite a few DevOps contract jobs at £750 / day but no permanent ones at £150k! As you say though, it depends on how you look at it..

I think there's a reasonble amount of both but large bureaucracies like gov, banks or multinationals have finance departments that set salary bands.

These usually don't reflect that skilled IT is vastly different from desktop jocky, and that it's a well paid field, thus they're forced to use contractors or outsource.

Skill wise, they're probably same same.

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