> I can charge a month of minimum wage for a day of my labor. That's awesome for me, but that's not normal.
I’ve been working mostly as a contractor for quite a long time now. This honestly is quite normal. I’ve done contract work through 2 financial crises now, and the longest I’ve been unintentionally out of work was two months, and otherwise I’ve managed to charge high hourly/daily rates the whole time.
I have seen a lot of my contractor friends go full-time during this pandemic though. When it first hit, the place that I was working at converted about 1200 contractors to full-time. The allure of job stability was too good to pass up.
But the risks were an illusion the whole time. There was a shortage of software engineers during the GFC, a shortage of software engineers for the 10 years after it, and there’s been a shortage of software engineers during the pandemic. It’s just gotten so bad recently that people who were previously more risk averse have started to notice it.
Not normal for most industries. Or in IT before 2000.
> I have seen a lot of my contractor friends go full-time during this pandemic though
Yeah, that's why I think it's important to have an elastic life style if you are a freelancer. So that you can suddenly cut 80% of your expenses. If you have big loans, an expensive car, 2 children in private school and live in a pricey area, if you revenue get shots, you are in trouble.
> But the risks were an illusion the whole time.
It was surprising though, wasn't it? I mean I expected calls to stop, but I got more of them. Now I have people calling me for things that are very far from my specialty.
It’s been normal since software and the internet started to become an important part of every area of society. But that’s how economies progress. There was a period in recent history when demand for manufacturing labor greatly outstripped supply. Our skills are simply in demand by the fastest growing areas of the economy right now.
Personally, I wasn’t surprised by this outcome. Temporary instability is what I was predicting. For demand for software engineers to actually tank, demand for software and software services would have to tank. I figured this was possible, but would require the entire global economy to collapse. So I figured it was unlikely, and in either case declining the offer I had to go full-time last year (when my employer at the time said they were terminating all their contractors) was most likely to be the correct decision (because full-time employment wasn’t going to protect me from global economic collapse).
The thing that I didn’t predict at all, is how long travel restrictions would be in place. Which has turned out very well for software engineers in developed economies, because all developed economies import software engineering labor from developing economies.
Sure. Also, we were the industry with the most experience and tooling to work remotely, not to mention the best format for that. That couldn't have hurt.
With the flood of boot camp graduates etc on one hand, cs grads , not being able to find work after sending out hundreds of applications — what would you consider a “software engineer” in terms of merit for being sought after like you mention? Open source ? Have sent a large codebase to prod successfully? Or just have the basics of modern workflows with DevOps /cicd / web / basic leetcode
Do you have some numbers on this? This contradicts what I've been seeing/hearing - that companies are snapping up novices and fresh grads to fill more senior roles.
I started out contracting through a firm. People complain about them clipping the ticket, but if they’re actually good at their job, then they can be pretty worthwhile to work with. The guy I worked with was great, and I was recruited by him to work a contract role the same way recruiters are constantly reaching out to people for other full-time roles.
I worked with him for a few years, and since then I’ve done most of my work independently, which I mostly find through the network I’ve built up. I have old clients getting in touch with me, people I’ve previously worked with (who may or may not have moved companies), and contractors I’ve previously worked with who know about opportunities at wherever they currently are.
The biggest barrier to working as an individual is the MSA, getting through the corporate procurement process as an individual who’s trying to get put on some large companies list of approved suppliers is very tedious. It can be tedious for both you and whoever is trying to hire you internally, and avoiding this is a fundamental part of the value proposition offered by the contracting firms. It’s the main reason that I still very occasionally do a contract through the firm that I used to work with. I don’t often find myself without a new contract to move to, but I do occasionally find myself roadblocked by due diligence processes (which take months to get through).
In any case, one of the reasons that I feel very comfortable with this working arrangement, even in bad economies, is that I have a long list of people who are happy with the work I’ve done for them in the past.
- my first charity work in africa gave me a lot of contacts that knew what I could do, and that I could take a plane to anywhere to do it
- IT training companies that I spammed to work as a subcontractors. It was easy because they don't check reference and really need a lot of people.
- People that I trained. I can't be hired for training by them because I want to keep a good relationship with IT training companies. But people I trained sometimes contact be for dev work.
I’ve been working mostly as a contractor for quite a long time now. This honestly is quite normal. I’ve done contract work through 2 financial crises now, and the longest I’ve been unintentionally out of work was two months, and otherwise I’ve managed to charge high hourly/daily rates the whole time.
I have seen a lot of my contractor friends go full-time during this pandemic though. When it first hit, the place that I was working at converted about 1200 contractors to full-time. The allure of job stability was too good to pass up.
But the risks were an illusion the whole time. There was a shortage of software engineers during the GFC, a shortage of software engineers for the 10 years after it, and there’s been a shortage of software engineers during the pandemic. It’s just gotten so bad recently that people who were previously more risk averse have started to notice it.