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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR The founder of Gumroad fired all his employees and replaced some with and rehired some on contract. Gumroad does not provide benefits like healthcare. Your hourly rate gets cut cut in half after you work more than 20 hours a week.

The article is a nice way of saying that the founder largely just collects rent while putting minimal resources into the business.

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This is right. They sell the whole picture of freedom really well. Contractors have existed for long, nothing new. The product is in a unique position to not need a lot of Full time employees and like he said, its accidental. I do like it though (and had underestimated) that there are lots of people who are ready to consider working like this in tech.

Yeah, hard pass. If I'm gonna be a 1099 contractor my rate will need to be very high (roughly $500/hr). Otherwise I'm sticking with my FTE job. And I'd need to be able to pick up more than the 20 hours per week than this guy will give me too, so I'd need multiple clients.

20 hrs a week @ 500 is 520k/y. you only need one client.

minus vacation, taxes, health insurance, overhead (time tracking, billing, book keeping, etc), time between gigs. 2050052 you are coming in way high. You can cut that in half and get a reasonable estimate for take home.

There are people who are perfectly happy with about $250K of take-home pay a year if that means they have plenty of freedom to do other things. In fact, I bet many people in the US will be happy with $30K a year, not $250K.

Of course, but why would someone be happy with that if it's a significant downgrade from where they are now?

at that rate they're probably the top of the field? I'm a UX engineer for ten years and the highest rates I've seen are "only" 200ish...

Once you add in the cost of all the added contractor taxes and loss of benefits like healthcare, this would be a bit of a paycut for me. I'd want more hours.

I've had some contracting experience as a freelance dev. In my experience even smaller companies (not Google, FB etc.) tend to have high budgets. I ended up with gigs anywhere between $200-300/hr, but that was 40 hrs week. Of course you have to pay for insurance, get your own retirement plan and a bunch of other logistics stuff, but it can make you a lot of money.

Unfortunately that would be a large paycut for me and it would also cost a lot of stability. I wasn't making up the $500/hr figure; that's what I would actually need for this to be worth considering switching to.

Based on the article it doesn’t sound like you couldn’t make that much, as long as you convinced the boss it was a good investment, and then made sure it was.

And on 1099 you can have as many clients as you want.

I can understand why someone would pass, but within its own context it doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me, particularly for people who for whatever reason don’t need to bill that high.

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