But you do have to choose specifically _when_ you consult with that medical professional. Late in the afternoon after a day in front of the computer, when your eyes are tired? Or first thing in the morning when they're fresh?
"and they you allowed to answer with anything except "yes" or "no"?"
None of the Celtic languages have an equivalent of yes and no. Just make a habit of speaking, say, Irish or Welsh at work. (To an English speaker, that sounds weird at first, but you get used to it quickly.)
Software people tend to assume that the rest of the world is far more organized than it actually is. In particular, they seem to think that construction projects tend to be well-oiled machines with perfectly followed specs written in advance.
This is, of course, absolute hogwash. If it were true Silicon Valley would have been built in a low tax, low regulation state. Blue state regulations and taxes are what enable technology companies, not the other way around.
Marked as answered is a fundamentally horrible idea and that feature should be removed. The problem is that the person asking the question isn't capable of determining a correct answer. Far, far to often they pick something that appears to solve their problem but actually is a terrible idea.
As a first approximation, there are no C++ developers available. You're probably right that there are more of them than there are Rust devs, but filling a team with either one is going to be a very hard problem.
I take it you haven't done any home remodeling work lately? Businesses like plumbers _love_ cash, in the sort of amounts under discussion. Thinking it doesn't happen is just bizarre.
There's no waiting period if you pay by check. (Yes, real world personal experience.) Don't forget they're happy to let it go with just a promise to pay later.
Because dairy farms go under all the time. These days, the well fed happy cows just stroll over to the next field, where there are massages on tap if the stress of eating grass in the sunshine gets to be too much.
To put that in non-cow terms, the rewards of just getting straightforward compensation these days are really good. So good it's not obvious that starting your own thing is worth it monetarily.
This would have been much improved if the cute legacy system has been speaking a dialect of Latin found in ninth-century Bavaria, with a slang vocabulary developed for its specific problem. And insisted that everyone else use that dialect when speaking to it.
Health insurance is a problem. Solve it before you move to contracting.
Taxes, on the other hand, are completely skewed in favor of consulting. Look at 401k contributions, for example. The limit for your contribution is the same, but your company can contribute a lot more on top of that. And talk to your accountant about how you decide on your salary; that's an important number and it's not straightforward to decide what it is. (It's certainly not your entire income)
Except you're talking about a guy who seems to be happy getting containers filled with almost certainly worthless books. I doubt his values and yours are aligned.
You're overlooking something important: they can't hire C++ people. They just aren't around. Sure, if you're directly competing against someone who has a lot of relevant experience, they're likely going to try hiring the other person first. You're not likely to run up against that in the real world.
I use both. xargs does a simple job reasonably well; if I'm just typing on the command line it often is the tool I use. parallel has many, many more options and ways to turn output from script A into parallel invocations of script B in multiple machines. Parallel is also handy just for parsing filenames; it's become my default tool for manipulating a stream of filenames and then running commands on them. The parallel part is just a nice plus.
The American phrase for this is contract-to-hire. You hire someone on a short-term hourly basis, with the understanding that this is a trial period that can be easily terminated by either side.
The huge downside for the employer is that you're never going to hire away anyone from another company, so you're pretty much cutting out anyone who isn't very junior.
A bit more than half of bankruptcies are medical. And you're forgetting that someone can declare bankruptcy multiple times in their life. But yes, it's a savage system.
And for most software companies, seniority is irrelevant. There aren't any assets to split up, so you'll be the first in line to get your slice of nothing.
If you're going to ask me to do a project that takes n hours, either I'm going to reciprocate and require the same of you, or you're going to pay my consulting rate to do it.
I suspect every good candidate had the same approach. If you're getting people to do this for free, you're not getting very good applicants.
In this market, the people you're interviewing are far more desirable than you are.