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Comment by l1silver | Hacker News Reader

But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?

In the first couple of years I would worry about this, but I haven’t in a very long time. The only occasions when I’ve had a gap between contracts is when I’ve chosen to take a break. I manage my finances to ensure I have several months of equivalent income saved.

My process is that 60 days before the end of my current contract, whether my current client has said they intend to renew or not, I start seeking other contract opportunities. If my client finalizes the renewal, I halt my job search. If they don’t, the 60 day window has consistently been long enough to ensure I have my next client lined up before my current contract ends.

Most of my contracts are 12 months long. I don’t take contracts any shorter than 6 months.

I should note that I’m in Canada and so I don’t have to worry about healthcare coverage.

contacted for many years as well. All my contracts always ran a year or longer. In the end, it felt very similar to full time employment - it was 9 - 5, regular meetings, coworkers, etc.. At the same time, I didn’t get any benefits, health insurance or paid holidays.

I am not sure I want to contract like that again. It has most of the downsides of regular employment but none of the benefits. I think in the USA it would make more sense to just switch full time jobs every two years and take breaks between.

Id love to try contracting again but more like true “consulting” - higher rate and fewer hours. I am not sure though that pure dev work could be high leverage like that - it just takes too damn long

When I worked at Boeing in 1980 or so, there were a lot of contract engineers there. We did the same work. The difference was:

1. full time employees got benefits, contractors did not

2. full time employees got notice before layoffs, contractors could get dismissed at a moment's notice

3. contractors got paid double what full time employees did

The pay is an unequal comparison though. A W2 job gives you:

* 5 - 10 paid holidays like Labor Day, 4th of July, etc...

* another 10 - 20 paid days off for PTO

* 7% less taxes for social security, medicare

* 401k match

* health insurance

So actually, getting paid twice as much hourly might not be too much extra at the end of the day.

At the time, the value of the benefits package was about 45% of the salary (this calculation includes the things you mentioned). The other 55% was for the extra risk the contractor took on.

Same feeling here. This is called “staff augmentation” contracting and is the easiest to find but the closest to FT employment. It can make sense if you get to a high rate or you can convince clients to do 3/4 days a week kindof arrangements

I too would like to find true consulting opportunities but feel that it’s gonna be tough unless you become well known. Another in between approach is to have a more fixed, productized offering… the only one I can think of for someone with a typical full stack skill set is to build MVPs… you could also teach courses…

Or if you can get together with some friends you enjoy working with and form your own mini agency this can be an enjoyable approach

EDIT: One more idea which I know is done is to develop your own framework or set of processes for your client base, but still charge somewhere in between what you have and building it from scratch. But again this isn’t possible in a staff aug situation as you’ll be beholden to the existing team’s tools and processes.

It’s definitely not for everyone, and certainly living in a locale without social safety nets like healthcare would add to the stress.

This is the funny stuff - contracting in countries with public healthcare has very little downsides.

> I should note that I’m in Canada and so I don’t have to worry about healthcare coverage.

Basically anywhere with a robust social safety net (not the USA)

Do you find that you get less comp for your contracts working in Canada?

Historically, yes. Post-pandemic, not as much. When the pandemic caused a migration to work-from-home and companies increased their remote-hiring efforts, I expected that the move to “work from anywhere, hire from anywhere” would push contracting rates down.

Oddly in my experience in the mobile (iOS) development space the opposite happened, and rates increased significantly. Those higher rates have held steady for two years now and appear to be permanent. Plus I’m increasingly taking contracts with U.S. clients.

Of course a full-time FAANG employee with stock options etc. will have a higher total compensation compared to me, but overall I’m making more than I ever have and I’m much happier compared to when I was a full-time employee.

> I should note that I’m in Canada and so I don’t have to worry about healthcare coverage.

This is a BFD. I know that I had colleagues in France when I was also doing contract work (amusingly as a US ex-pat) who a) didn't make as much as me but b) felt more secure in their future

Similar kind of situation if you're in the US but your spouse/partner has medical coverage through FT employment.

> But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time?

This is priced into the contract.

I've done both FTE and contracting. They both have their benefits. Looking at my FTE job with the attitude of "This is a business relationship – you pay me, I work" has been the best balance for me. You can do more deeper bigger things than you can as a contractor plus the lottery tickets are nice.

Honestly, if companies wanna pay extra (they do) for me to go "Rah rah rah $Company is changing the world!" and wear swag, so be it. When $OtherCompany pays more/better, I'll do it for them. Just like an athlete changing clubs.

This is very true.

Though it’s really tough for most employees (especially the 20-somethings) to resist the internal tribal messaging from their employers and instead see their employment relationship as just transactional.

I wonder if this is due to lack of job experience at that young age? Prior to that, young adults were in school, which fostered a community view beyond just paying for classes/degree. I know I learned about how large corps view labor when I worked summers at a big box retailer. I viewed that as purely transactional as well: I stock shelves, you give me money.

Plus Gen-X often watched our parents get laid off when we were younger, so there's that lesson too.

Ha, yes our Gen-X “slacker” generation (LOL) started out with a potentially different worldview.

I think you’ve described the challenge 20-somethings face when it comes to resisting the tribal messaging from their employer pretty well — coming out of school many people want to continue that sense of belonging. People develop close friendships, and romantic relationships, and they connect that to their work experience. Employer messaging around being part of a family and striving to a higher purpose is meant to foster loyalty and better productivity.

The flip-side is when layoffs happen the employees who have bought into these team/family ideals feel betrayed, and I’ve seen people struggle with coming to terms how their employer could let valuable people go after being told how special and important they were.

And to be clear, lots of these people are special and important; but that’s obviously not a protection against big businesses looking after their own selfish interests first.

To put my cynic's hat on: All young people, men especially, look for a sense of purpose and belonging. Militaries have exploited this for eons. Governments exploit it for propaganda. Gangs exploit it for recruitment. Fringe political groups lean on it. Religions use it. Cults are crazy good at it. Brands use it all the time to sell us more stuff.

Really, a modern future unicorn is just using that same cult/religion/government/brand playbook. Often unknowingly. It happens to work best on the young.

Compared to what? Either you're on contract and they could simply not renew it when the 1/3/6 month timeline is up, or you're an employee and they could simply lay you off without warning on a completely unpredictable and arbitrary timeline.

Everything is tenuous compared to living off the safe withdrawal rate of a $10 million diversified investment portfolio.

There's an old cliche that when you go from being an employee to being a contractor you trade the illusion of security for the illusion of freedom.

I think the idea here is that when you're on contract, you are much more aware that your employment is time-limited and transactional.

So you live your life, financially and otherwise, with this in mind.

I have no doubt that this sounds (and would be) more stressful for some people, when compared to full-time employment, particularly in the US where your job is typically tied to health care and other benefits.

But most folks I know who have been laid off from long-term employment were shocked by (and ill-prepared for) the event.

Of course they both have risk categorically, but they differ greatly in magnitude and scheduling.

With Contracting you know that there is say a 50% chance the contract will expire on a given date and can plan accordingly. As a direct employee there is say a one percent chance you'll be laid off and it could come at random times.

I’ve considered independent contracting many times in my career. But I just could never get past the possibility of the stress of being in between gigs.

Did you read the article? What about the stress of being in between jobs? You have a single point of failure that's outside your control.

With contracting, you can take as many clients as you can handle, and you'd have to lose all your clients simultaneously to end up in an equivalent position.

That’s still a greater risk though. If you end up in the position where you do lose all your clients simultaneously, it can be catastrophic.

I suppose it’s also the hustle of finding new clients that never interested me much.

The time between contracts is amazing. I spend loads of time with my kids and go on adventures.

I need to do about 4 months of work to cover my family's living expenses, then another 2 to make sure I've saved adequately for retirement, then ideally I take 6 months off.

Seriously? Do you live off grid or something?

I live in the UK where the cost of living is very low (less than half that of the US), and contractor wages are high. Contractor wages are so high in the UK because our labour laws are so strong. Companies will pay a huge premium to be able to terminate my contract with a week's notice.

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