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Ask HN: How to find gigs as an independent contractor

4 points by mancerayder 11y ago

After 14 years of service working for 'da man' as a Linux Admin (a.k.a. DevOps Engineer, as the youngins now call it) in the corporate world, I've decided to form an LLC and work corp to corp hourly only, with a specialization in automation (scripting, config management, fixing up operations procedures, policies and monitoring, infrastructure advice and setup, etc.) Already in my first contract now, and the joys from billing hourly and watching full-time colleagues work more hours, and on-call/weekend ("unpaid overtime"), while I get paid for everything I do, make it joyful compared to my FTE days. I also feel a lot more productive since my work is project-based and focused. What's less joyful is looking for my next gig after this one ends. When I use Dice, I get contacted by recruiters every so often who do have gigs, but want to take 50% of my money. For a 140/hr gig, they want to pay 80. This is a running theme, and what they do is contact a bunch of people like me, soliciting the lowest bid, regardless of skillset. They all do it. How do I avoid this race to the bottom, and get access to employers / small businesses / etc. looking for automation engineers like myself? Is there a site that's for people like myself? Sites like simplyhired cater more towards full-blown devs, and I'm a 'sys admin who can code'. Also have some cloud experience. Anyone do something like this? I'm in NYC, by the way. If so, how do you keep steady contracts coming your way?

sharemywin 11y ago
Reputation, network, or hire a salesperson. Sales and marketing cost money. Some state contracting companies don't markup that much because they're on the preferred vendor list and just push the reqs off to other contracting companies to do the recruiting. You can try call your state and get a list of preferred vendors for your kind of work and contact them directly to work out a better deal.
- mancerayder 11y ago
  That's not a bad idea, thanks. Are there better job boards than Dice for this? State HR is a solid piece of advice, and confirms a friend's experience here in the city. But it'd be nice to look at non state/city roles too! Startup type job boards perhaps?
sharemywin 11y ago
Also, since you work for yourself you might want to look at the max contribution for a sep ira. pretty sure it's like 25% of you income. I was looking into it when I was going to to the corp to corp thing.
- mancerayder 11y ago
  Absolutely! One of the many reasons to go rogue these days, the 50k limit on 401k contributions.

4 points by mancerayder 11y ago

sharemywin 11y ago

Reputation, network, or hire a salesperson. Sales and marketing cost money. Some state contracting companies don't markup that much because they're on the preferred vendor list and just push the reqs off to other contracting companies to do the recruiting. You can try call your state and get a list of preferred vendors for your kind of work and contact them directly to work out a better deal.

mancerayder 11y ago
That's not a bad idea, thanks. Are there better job boards than Dice for this? State HR is a solid piece of advice, and confirms a friend's experience here in the city. But it'd be nice to look at non state/city roles too! Startup type job boards perhaps?

sharemywin 11y ago

Also, since you work for yourself you might want to look at the max contribution for a sep ira. pretty sure it's like 25% of you income. I was looking into it when I was going to to the corp to corp thing.

mancerayder 11y ago
Absolutely! One of the many reasons to go rogue these days, the 50k limit on 401k contributions.