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I would love to have a salaried job. I hate tracking hours and I am very aware that any kind of creative work is inherently hard to track in that manner. Dilbe

I would love to have a salaried job. I hate tracking hours and I am very aware that any kind of creative work is inherently hard to track in that manner. Dilbert has done a number of comics mocking this. In one, he flicks his fingers at work and talks about "Look! I am getting paid to flick my fingers!" I think in another he is getting ideas for work in the shower and the comic makes the point that if you get paid for ideas, it's really hard to say when work ends and when it begins because you can't turn the brain on and off like that. I currently try to do paid freelance work on a project basis because I don't like tracking hours. I also blog and do various projects online and I try to monetize that with Patreon and tip jars. Out of respect for the many valid criticisms of online ads I have seen on HN over the years, I don't think I currently have ads on any of my sits. I also tend to not have Amazon links, though I think I did add one of those to something recently and I am not averse to using them. I'm aware of the criticisms, but it's not so much a "moral" stand on my part, like with the ads. It's more just that I have never figured out how that works. If I were making sufficient money from Patreon, tips and other paid work, I probably wouldn't bother with Amazon links. But my income remains stubbornly below what I really need and it's an avenue I'm willing to try given how poorly other avenues are doing.

jmchuster 6y ago
Ah, contracting work is really really hard. I've only ever done consulting as part of a company, and the conditions there that made it sustainable seemed to be: 1) pick a specialty, so you have little or no competition, in a field where your clients all have a lot of money to spend and then must spend it on someone (with their only option being you) 2) have very skilled very connected sales people constantly getting your next contract, you need to have maybe a half year's worth of projects always lined up and ready to go 3) build a reputation, so then even amongst your very few competitors, people ask around when they need a job done, and your name always come up near the top of the list When you crunched the numbers at the end, 60% of the employees were always making billable hours on a project at any time, and our clients paid the company maybe 4x per hour what they paid the employees. So very little profit total for the company, but enough to be sustainable. Oh, and the sales guys were the best paid by far, all making at least double what our founders/c-level made. Now, if I was just on my own, I have no idea how I would be able to recreate those conditions. I don't currently have some kind of ridiculous specialty or reputation, so I'd just be nameless in an endless pool of candidates. Then with such a lopsided demand-supply balance, I'd get paid the minimum level humanly possible, and then even lower than that if they were willing to put up with remote workers from different timezones. There's no way I'm hiring a sales guy to build me a pipeline, and if I was that good at doing so myself, I'd be way better off just joining a company and get paid millions to sell much more valuable contracts instead. So, instead, probably once I find a client, I would probably want to maximize how many times I come back to them as a repeat customer. So then at point I'm basically now an employee of sorts, who gets paid as little as possible, and is actively trying to be replaced by someone cheaper at any time. So, uh, yeah, that all just translates to, I'd always go for a salaried employee position. The calculus in the company's mind with regards to compensation just changes completely once you're at that point, more along the lines of what I've referred to previously.

jmchuster 6y ago

Ah, contracting work is really really hard. I've only ever done consulting as part of a company, and the conditions there that made it sustainable seemed to be: 1) pick a specialty, so you have little or no competition, in a field where your clients all have a lot of money to spend and then must spend it on someone (with their only option being you) 2) have very skilled very connected sales people constantly getting your next contract, you need to have maybe a half year's worth of projects always lined up and ready to go 3) build a reputation, so then even amongst your very few competitors, people ask around when they need a job done, and your name always come up near the top of the list When you crunched the numbers at the end, 60% of the employees were always making billable hours on a project at any time, and our clients paid the company maybe 4x per hour what they paid the employees. So very little profit total for the company, but enough to be sustainable. Oh, and the sales guys were the best paid by far, all making at least double what our founders/c-level made. Now, if I was just on my own, I have no idea how I would be able to recreate those conditions. I don't currently have some kind of ridiculous specialty or reputation, so I'd just be nameless in an endless pool of candidates. Then with such a lopsided demand-supply balance, I'd get paid the minimum level humanly possible, and then even lower than that if they were willing to put up with remote workers from different timezones. There's no way I'm hiring a sales guy to build me a pipeline, and if I was that good at doing so myself, I'd be way better off just joining a company and get paid millions to sell much more valuable contracts instead. So, instead, probably once I find a client, I would probably want to maximize how many times I come back to them as a repeat customer. So then at point I'm basically now an employee of sorts, who gets paid as little as possible, and is actively trying to be replaced by someone cheaper at any time. So, uh, yeah, that all just translates to, I'd always go for a salaried employee position. The calculus in the company's mind with regards to compensation just changes completely once you're at that point, more along the lines of what I've referred to previously.