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> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; I noticed this early, and spen
by jasonkester 4mo ago
> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost;
I noticed this early, and spent the first half of my career leaning into it. If you negotiate every gig as a contract, you get to double (or more) your salary. And the only thing you're trading away is job security which, if you pay attention, you'll notice doesn't actually exist for your salaried counterparts either.
To nitpick, you also have to pay for your own health insurance. So subtract $200/month from that extra $15,000/month for the sort of catastrophic coverage plan that a 27 year old needs.
- zingar 4mo agoWhat happened that made you switch away from contracting?
- jasonkester 4mo agoThe problem was that every time I stopped contracting for somebody, they stopped sending me money. Building software products fixed that: https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop.html https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-l...
- HeyLaughingBoy 4mo agoI remember your blogabond posts from way back when on HN. I think you were the first to really popularize the "coding while traveling" idea.
- jasonkester 4mo agoI didn’t get to use any of the cool terms for what I was doing though. FIRE and Digital Nomadding hadn’t been invented yet.