3 ms·

Depends what kind of business Making yourself a one man consultancy or contractor is also a business and has a decent success rate if you’re actually good A S

Depends what kind of business Making yourself a one man consultancy or contractor is also a business and has a decent success rate if you’re actually good A Saas business, startup, or similar? Yeah much lower probability But even in the latter case if you don’t have much living expenses it can make sense to make a modest living and enjoy your day to day much more. Bottom line as with so many things in life: don’t do it for the money

scarface74 4y ago
Let’s talk about “consulting” and what the word actually means. First you have people who call themselves “consultants”. But they are really just staff augmentation. Those “consultants” are a dime a dozen and all in, can’t command a premium and would probably be better off working a full time job. You can find some just as good overseas and a lot cheaper. Then you have your actual strategic consultants who have “a seat at the table” and talk with people who control budgets. They can charge a premium. After working with both as a tech lead between 2016-2018 is what made me pivot to getting experience in “cloud” and specialize in “application modernization” - enterprise dev + cloud + “DevOps”. You have to both have a network and find companies willing to do C2C contracts. Those are also some of the first people to cut during a downturn. You saw that a lot right after Covid. I now work in the cloud consulting department at AWS. It’s a full time position and my compensation structure is like SDEs. I would hate to be constantly hustling for clients and take care of all of the other minutiae that I have an entire organization to handle.
- granshaw 4y ago
  I agree with everything except the staff Aug part. Anecdotal I know but I myself found a subcontract(!) as my first solo gig that easily beat my previous fulltime jobs pay, which weren’t peanuts either. And this was just Rails web dev. My impression is that you can pretty easily beat fulltime pay doing fulltime staff aug, except faang salaries. Of course it helps if you have a spouse with health insurance. But in this new market, hard to say I guess
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Unlike a lot of posters in tech on HN, I have experience with both the enterprise dev side of the world where most developers work and FAANG compensation. I’ve worked a lot longer as a developer. But because of bad career decisions until 2008, I ended up doing a career reset. My first experience with staff augmentation type contracting was in 2011-2012. The company I worked for went out of business and was sold for scraps and I got a contract working with one of our customers. Local tech salaries for my skillset were in the low $100s - standard mid level C# developer. I couldn’t push above $60/hour. At 1800 hours a year, it was a wash. But no health insurance - I was also married. The next time was in 2016. I purposefully took a contract to perm job to get my first tech lead experience. I couldn’t find contract jobs for more than $70/hour. That translates to about $126K which was a little below average for senior dev in my area ($135K - $150K). But a racked up on hours. When I was hired full time, we were paying the contracting agency $90/hour and the contractors were making $70. Looking at one of the sites I use to use (https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424 https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424), it still seems like your average enterprise dev is still getting $70/hour. I’ve seen the same numbers on other sites.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      Just a weird thing I’ve noticed from looking at jobs posting recently. Enterprise roles around Java seem to pay better than .NET stuff.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      Perhaps there’s something at play where for more “common” languages like C# and Java, there’s more competition hence lower rates, whereas something more niche like Rails can command higher rates even if the total number of opportunities are fewer?

scarface74 4y ago

Let’s talk about “consulting” and what the word actually means. First you have people who call themselves “consultants”. But they are really just staff augmentation. Those “consultants” are a dime a dozen and all in, can’t command a premium and would probably be better off working a full time job. You can find some just as good overseas and a lot cheaper. Then you have your actual strategic consultants who have “a seat at the table” and talk with people who control budgets. They can charge a premium. After working with both as a tech lead between 2016-2018 is what made me pivot to getting experience in “cloud” and specialize in “application modernization” - enterprise dev + cloud + “DevOps”. You have to both have a network and find companies willing to do C2C contracts. Those are also some of the first people to cut during a downturn. You saw that a lot right after Covid. I now work in the cloud consulting department at AWS. It’s a full time position and my compensation structure is like SDEs. I would hate to be constantly hustling for clients and take care of all of the other minutiae that I have an entire organization to handle.

granshaw 4y ago
I agree with everything except the staff Aug part. Anecdotal I know but I myself found a subcontract(!) as my first solo gig that easily beat my previous fulltime jobs pay, which weren’t peanuts either. And this was just Rails web dev. My impression is that you can pretty easily beat fulltime pay doing fulltime staff aug, except faang salaries. Of course it helps if you have a spouse with health insurance. But in this new market, hard to say I guess
- scarface74 4y ago
  Unlike a lot of posters in tech on HN, I have experience with both the enterprise dev side of the world where most developers work and FAANG compensation. I’ve worked a lot longer as a developer. But because of bad career decisions until 2008, I ended up doing a career reset. My first experience with staff augmentation type contracting was in 2011-2012. The company I worked for went out of business and was sold for scraps and I got a contract working with one of our customers. Local tech salaries for my skillset were in the low $100s - standard mid level C# developer. I couldn’t push above $60/hour. At 1800 hours a year, it was a wash. But no health insurance - I was also married. The next time was in 2016. I purposefully took a contract to perm job to get my first tech lead experience. I couldn’t find contract jobs for more than $70/hour. That translates to about $126K which was a little below average for senior dev in my area ($135K - $150K). But a racked up on hours. When I was hired full time, we were paying the contracting agency $90/hour and the contractors were making $70. Looking at one of the sites I use to use (https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424 https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424), it still seems like your average enterprise dev is still getting $70/hour. I’ve seen the same numbers on other sites.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Just a weird thing I’ve noticed from looking at jobs posting recently. Enterprise roles around Java seem to pay better than .NET stuff.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    Perhaps there’s something at play where for more “common” languages like C# and Java, there’s more competition hence lower rates, whereas something more niche like Rails can command higher rates even if the total number of opportunities are fewer?