I’m seeing two strategies that are friends are using to get to $250k+ right now and much more…
1. Several have left for left/right coast former startups companies that are publicly traded. Their base comp is $160-180k but they are also receiving a large pool of equity that vests in tranches of $75-100k a year.
2. With everything being remote, several senior engineer friends are working two jobs at the same time. Some are telling their employers and others are not.
Companies are desperate for senior engineers and many are unable to compete with the “we’re remote, have free beer and no vacation policy.”
Be accurate when it comes to the truth but not necessarily the facts.
In the US resume fraud is a thing. Some companies like telecoms selectively check resumes for accuracy. Resume fraud can be a fireable offense.
Omitting isn't the same. If you ask for references, I probably won't list people who will give me a bad reference, either.
In the US employment is at will and can be terminated for cause or no cause at all, no need to go to court. Omitting important facts about employment history can be in violation of company policies. Some telecoms ask you to explicitly submit information for "employment history verification" as a condition of employment.
You can easily lie by omission.. The root of it is deceitful intentions.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/at-will-e...
Anything (or nothing) in the US can be a fireable offense, so I wouldn't worry too much about what you put on a resume.
So it doesn't matter if it's fraud or the employer just doesn't like the employee. The implications are the same.
They get to do that too, but it means they can get taken to court because of it.
If someone’s the kind of person to work 2-full-time jobs simultaneously then I think they’re the kind of person who’s OK hiding some of the facts on their resume.
It can be tracked during your background check (using SSN). They will make you sign a form that you authorize them to perform such a check. Fail to sign the form - job offer is rescinded. Again, depends on employer.
Can you show me a background check service that offers a list of previous employers found by SSN? I did not know that exists. Unless they're consulting the IRS, I don't know how it could exist.
Background checks as I understand them, tend to check things like: credit score, contacting references (that you provide), criminal records etc. Primarily publicly available information.
You can check your own for free. Employers buy in bulk. Mine is completely accurate and includes full and accurate W2 info, i.e., salary and bonus (not stock grant) history to the dollar. Lying on a resume is generally a bad idea.
You sign the contract and then never show up anymore?
My current company has interviewed 3 ppl in 6 months, lack of candidates. Someone good, but in the wrong timezone would be a compelling hire.
1. The position was actually recently filled. We likely will have another opening soon but the posting is not yet up (perhaps will be in a month or two).
2. It would be personally identifiable
Trying to even find examples of such job postings... I think there is a market fit for a new job search website, it should be far, far easier to find these kinds of jobs postings. I'm not sure how a person can find these things without a recruiter contacting them.
remoteworkhackernewstempemail@gmail.com
Feel free to email me, I would be happy to refer someone. The pay would be somewhere in the $140-$170k range. It is a good company, tiny team working in biotech and oncology. Feel free to email me and I can share details.
I have a side client that I met 11 years ago that I charge $150 per hour for remote development. They feel lucky to get that rate! Most people around us charge $200 per hour but since I work full time for someone else and can’t always be available I give them that discounted rate.
I don’t think they’re hard to find at all for consulting. Being a full time employee for $250k, I agree with you that those are more rare. In my experience you have to possess an in-demand specialty for that or get into management.
Average professional job has about 8-9 paid holiday days, plus vacation time on top. My worst number of vacation days was 10 at my first job right out of college (they had to change after they struggled to attract employees) but every other job has been more than that.
But only accounting for 10 unpaid days per year would barely cover minimum federal holidays, so it’s not realistic. It’s equivalent to saying you’re never going to take time off unless the company is shut down for a federal holiday.
Of course good companies typically don't offer only the minimum.
In general you work 272 days a year and the rest is vacation and days off (this is also the reason we get a different amount of days off every year).
I have about 40 working days off, of which the company can choose the dates of 10.
People whose work is counted in days get special "extra vacation days to catch up" (this is more or less the real name), around 15 per year I think.
I have "3 weeks" but it's only 15 days.
The worst deal I would sign is a day rate (no logging hours) but fixed scope/duration is far better.
Of course, there are a number of professions (law, accounting, etc.) where hourly charges are absolutely the norm. I've done some legal work and it was in some ways very nice to get paid whenever you were "on the clock."
Most of the work we did in general was for specifically scoped deliverables and we actually tried very hard not to do day rates, much less hourly rates, but this was one case it really wasn't avoidable--and, of course, was the way the white shoe law firm operated.
But yes, you did some law work and they want you to charge hourly rather than based on value.
Hourly is a good choice for contracts where they are looking to buy labor. Which is a common model, because they often see contract labor as a substitute for employee labor.
The other models you mention can be much better, but also require the contractor to have both particular skills and enough relationship power to make them work. I have seen well-meaning developers absolutely get screwed on fixed scope contracts. And I've also seen less-well-meaning developers absolutely screw their clients on fixed price contracts. This is an area where blanket statements are harmful.
How do clients get screwed with fixed fee? Clients should pay for value, not hours sat in a chair.
I think the implication is that if one party is capturing the excess value produced disproportionately, that is screwing the other side. Particularly if this occurs because of information that is asymmetric in negotiation.
If my SAP implementation is going to save over 1 million per year in increased manufacturing efficiency, how should I price my services? The floor is set by the cheapest contractors in my market, the ceiling is how ever high I can negotiate.
The client will capture far more value than me over the lifetime of the product. I also don’t want to charge by the hour because there’s a conflict of interest and I want to detach hours worked from fees charged otherwise I’m just slaving away.
Hourly is for blue collar work, it’s not professional at my and your level.
Now that you have shipped the technically correct but not very useful thing, you collect the fee and then start accepting "change orders" at a punitive rate. At this point switching to another contractor will be even more risky and expensive, so they'll probably just suck it up. Or if you're really good at the game, you then negotiate a whole new fixed-fee contract with a higher price tag, and the deliver what they now think they want.
Bonus points if, as I've seen a big-name global contractor do, you deliver something not even barely working but possibly conforming to specs, and then just walk off the job. Even though the client has contractual obligations that they can't fulfill if the software doesn't work. At that point, the client realizes that a) they still need the software, b) the big-name contractor is the only who can deliver in time, and c) suing is risky, will take years, and anyway the big-name contractor can afford more lawyers. In this case the client signed another multi-million dollar contract with the big-name contractor, easily doubling the "fixed" fee. I lost touch with my contacts there before the thing ever worked, so I don't know how many times the big-name global contractor pulled this off on the same job.
Many large companies absolutely refuse agile delivery and require fixed scope and cost to get anything done.
Yes, waterfall is a bad choice. But no, clients aren't to blame for trusting a vendor to do right by them.
Why use quotation marks for something I didn't say? Nothing I've said means "fuck the clients" unless you are maliciously taking the worst possible interpretation.
A change that takes a massive amount of time and effort isn't something I should do for free.
I'm more than happy to build a backlog, refine it, and build until there's a RC... so few enterprise clients want to subscribe to the perceived risk, they'd rather spend months specifying everything upfront to make some senior person happy whether that delivery methodology has been proven to work or not.
I actually get six weeks vacation at my full time US job and I use part of that to work in my part time consulting job.
In my thirties I worked in many different countries for many different companies. Going new places with different cultures and being able to enjoy my time there was always the main driver: i.e. experiences & work/life balance over salary.
I would never trade these experiences for early financial independence at maybe age 50. I think there is a best before date for some experiences in life.
Maybe now it is possible for a select minority to have both. But most of of my friends in their 30s who work 'normal' jobs and have this early financial independence aim it doesn't hold true.
I.e. they will simply not have made these experiences when they reach that goal. Few have ever managed to leave their country of birth for anything else but holidays.
Some personal examples:
Living & working in Japan and thereby traveling the country on weekends or going to a cool club in Tokyo. When you're 35 vs when you're 55. Would you even do the latter at that age? Would it be the same?
Living and working in India and thereby going for a weekend hiking trip in the western Ghats were you're sleeping in an abandoned train station in the middle of the jungle. When you're 35 vs 55. Would you even do the latter at that age? Would it be the same?
Living and working in Sydney, going to a party of friends on a yacht on Friday after work and on a diving excursion to the Great Barrier Reef on Saturday morning when you're 35 vs 55. Would you even do the latter? Would it be the same? I was still hung over when I put on the diving gear but it was ok. With almost 55? You would simply have to skip the diving trip.
None of the above are made up. The pandemic-related lockdown made me realize what rich tapestry of experiences my past life choices have afforded me.
I have four people in my circle of friends who are actively working on early retirement. They do 'compensate' a lot on the weekends and when they go on holidays but that is not the same as the above.
But still pitiful and anti-health, on first principles. "Normal" though it may be in a workaholic and ideology-driven country like the U.S.
If it's a trade-off you choose to accept in exchange for early retirement, though, that's another matter.
I love my current job, the people, the work, the challenges. I still need an occasional break, and I still like seeing different things.
You said you found your $150/hr 11 years ago. How many other $150/hr clients have you met since then? What makes you say that it’s easy to find them?
I think it’s easy to say that consulting is easy when you’ve had a single, long-term client that pays well. In practice, it’s much harder to find these clients when starting from 0, unless you have such luck to find the dream client right out of the gate.
It’s easy to find clients - one of the best ways I did it was to go to computer stores and tell the salespeople if they got me a new client I would pay them $15 per hour in perpetuity for every hour I charged the client. I had 3 people that made more from me than their regular job.
Then there are chambers of commerce, LinkedIn messages and frankly just putting yourself out there. I met my long term side client studying for a certification while my oldest son was at a baseball clinic. My client saw the book I was reading and walked up to me and said, “Are you in IT?”
I imagine he has covered his business development expense by now.
This is how I do it too, by the way. Long term relationships with good companies. It's more like contracting, but without the 40h expectations of a contractor. ( Unless I feel like working 40 hours in a given week for some reason).
It sounds like he’s basically been employed by this one company for 11 years, albeit on a contract basis.
These positions exist, but they’re not all that common. Usually if a company is paying a single person a premium for many years they’ll just hire a full-time person and be done. The average freelance contract you find should not be assumed to be a decade-long opportunity.
I only give the discounted $150 per hour rate because I work full time at another company.
Since someone else brought up tax advantages - I don’t pay social security tax on my self employed income. Because I max it out on my full time job. I also have an Individual 401k plan that I can contribute 20% of my self employed income as the employer contribution. I can’t contribute my self employed income as the employee contribution though because I max that out at my full time job.
Having combination W2 and 1099 income gives a ton of tax benefits.
That's not too surprising, and depending on what you are doing might be a great deal for everyone. Usually contracting work out is done at 1.7-2x the rate you'd pay an employee. This is because the the consultant has costs and risk that an employee does not. Costs like insurance, accounting, legal, personal benefits (i.e. savings to allow for vacations, healthcare), sales overhead (consultants have to keep finding new clients). Risks like contract cancellation and getting paid on time.
However if your goal is to work to replace your employment you should start out looking at the full picture, and pricing your work accordingly.
Edit: Not sure why people think otherwise. Maybe they are used to companies where you have to pay money to get those stocks? Big companies gives them to you for free, there is no exercise cost.
If you can’t afford a single but if variance then I guess RSUs won’t make you happy. But for everyone else they work just fine (unless your company goes down in flames, in which case you have bigger problems and are probably job searching anyway)
Bottom line, with stock payment, you have a say in their ultimate value. Do good work, company value invreases, you enrich yourself.
Statistically speaking, they're correct.
Recently learned this from the excellent and very pithy Michael Batnick blog https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2020/09/10/most-stocks-suc... who was citing https://wpcarey.asu.edu/department-finance/faculty-research/...
If you keep the stocks after they vest then that is your fault for keeping them instead of selling them.
This claim is patently false. If you receive $100k in cash, you can immediately exchange that to $100k in public company stock. The opposite is not true (if you receive stock with a vesting period, you cannot immediately exchange it to cash). Therefore, getting cash is at least as good as getting public company stock, not the other way around.
Let's say you know you will get a bonus that pays out end next year worth 10k. You can chose to receive 10k cash or 10k of google shares at today's prices. Most would trade the risk for potential upside.
It's a free call option on the stock. If it goes up you keep vesting at the new stock price which might be way above market rate for you position and if it goes down you get refreshers at the end of the year to bring you back to a market rate salary.
You can also have your broker automatically sell.
It is pretty close to cash.
Sure, but specifically in the direction where cash is always at least as good as stock, not in the other direction.
Want to know how I know? Because I'm working at my 3rd company where my 6-figure stock grant is vesting at 7-figures due to appreciation.
Say you are granted $600k that vests over 4 years. Well lucky you, the stock has 1.5x after year 1, doubled at year 2 and tripled by year 3! That means you've cumulatively vested $225k at year 1, $525k at year 2, and $975k at year 3. If you had cash only compensation, you would have received a total of $450k for that same time period.
That said, if I can choose between receiving $600k in cash today, and receiving $600k worth of public company stock today with restrictions on when I can sell it, then I will choose the cash, because it is worth AT LEAST AS MUCH as the public company stock (because, again, cash is freely exchangeable to public company stock without restrictions, and the opposite does not hold true in this hypothetical).
If you get $600k in cash, and you immediately exchange that into $600k in company stock (with no restrictions on when you can sell that stock), how could that possibly be a worse deal than getting $600k in company stock with restrictions on when you can sell?
1. A grant at $Xk, converted to shares on start date and vesting proportionally over 4 years
or...
2. A salary bump equivalent to the grant in (1), paid out ~bi-weekly at (1/104)*$Xk. 104 being the amount of bi-weekly pay periods to occur over a 4 year span.
> getting the $100k worth of stocks a year is at least as good as just getting the cash
I am arguing that getting $100k worth of cash is always at least as good as getting $100k worth of stocks. You're saying that it's not realistic to have the option to get cash instead of stocks, and that's true but it's besides the point.
Because stock compensation can be vastly different experiences therefor not just as good as getting cash.
I mean this scenario only happens at just about every startup if you read peoples experiences though I don't know if there are or if its possible to have a study done on this since the data is likely private.
Nearly Every highly paid SWE in the US takes a significant amount of their pay in equity. As an anecdote - I take around 70% of my pay as equity and so does everyone I work with.
And in pre-IPO companies that’s the norm, but that’s beside the point.
I have never seen an offer from a public company that has a # of shares attached to it. Only a dollar amount. Then it converts based on market value at conversion time.
The vesting schedule is where you need to be careful.