Ask HN: How can I help spread important labor advice to career-beginners?
To give you an example, I have collected various patterns about contract work in tech, and what makes it especially perilous for entry-level workers in these four major points:
* Many don't understand contracting and get severely underpaid. A contract position should pay 50% more than a full-time equivalent to be worthwhile.
* Do not become a contractor with 1-2 years of experience. There is no mentoring for contractors. Spend a couple of years in good firms with good education or mentoring, then look at good contracting/consulting opportunities, especially for niches that you spent working in.
* A lot of low-paying contract jobs are disguised as "contract-to-hire" and use the "hire" part as moving goalposts to keep workers spinning their wheels until they decide to quit.
* It is a much easier time start consulting after a considerable amount of experience. In most niches it is a small world, so those who don't have a good baseline end up bouncing gig after gig a few months at a time. Better people can spend years at same clients, being almost the same as an employee but earning much more money.
I know several people, including myself, that enter the industry completely blind, not knowing the above points, and fall into labor traps easily. They either lack the network of professionals to explain the good, bad, and ugly about different types of worker relationships, or won't know what to research. It's not simply a learning problem- it's a "I don't know what I should learn" problem.
What can I do to get this knowledge out to as many entry-level people as possible so that they don't need to go through the same school of hard knocks that I did? Like getting it out to colleges and bootcamps everywhere, and perhaps beyond. I learned a lot of things the hard way, and want to use that experience so nobody else has to.