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What all do I need to consider if I switch over to contract work? 31 years old in PA for health insurance, single. A recruiter hit me up with a one year contract and the hourly rate is.... wow. Also it’s a year long. My long term goal has been to eventually contract on my own and eventually start my own consulting firm. Was planning on waiting a few more years until I really jumped in but if it falls into my lap like this then why not?
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Sep 12, 2019 01:28
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Presumably you mean working for a contract agency on a W2? I didn't care for being a contractor. While it was nice to bill overtime the health insurance was pretty bad, and you miss out on a lot of the benefits of not being a contractor. Like paid holidays. Some companies are nice and will pay you anyway but they by no means have to. PTO is usually bad to nonexistent. Probably no other smaller bennies, like a transit card or whatever.
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Sep 12, 2019 01:43
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yeah it’ll be W2. that means they still pay half of payroll tax right?
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Sep 12, 2019 01:48
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Yeah it's no different than a W2 anywhere else really. It was also pretty nice being able to bill time when people would ask me stuff during off hours. Or the odd emergency or crunch time comes up. I did get jerked around on a contract extension, which has happened to me twice and to every other contractor I know who has done a "contract to hire" role. Don't be surprised if they decide to keep you a contractor for several full contracts worth before they get around to actually hiring you if you're considering one that would convert you. If you do non-renewing or contracts with an end date, a nice plus is you get a new chance to say that high salary number to a recruiter every year or so.
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Sep 12, 2019 02:01
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Yeah this isn’t contract to hire so no jerking. One year contract and then we go from there.
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Sep 12, 2019 02:07
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cool one of the problems seemed unsolvable because i couldn't access a type's members in the stupid browser ide thing i loving hate these web-based code exercises
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Sep 12, 2019 02:16
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Just got emailed a position asking for "3+ years object orientation experience"
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Sep 12, 2019 02:24
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Chopstick Dystopia posted:Just got emailed a position asking for "3+ years object orientation experience" i don’t think you could make it more obvious that this was written by HR
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Sep 12, 2019 02:29
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Rex-Goliath posted:yeah it’ll be W2. that means they still pay half of payroll tax right? w2 contracting doesn't mean it's through an agency that pays you a salary, it only refers to the tax matter for a 1099 contracting gig, you will need your own llc set up. for a w2 contract, the employer will continue to pay payroll tax for you. but you won't get insurance, benefits, retirement, etc. Rex-Goliath posted:What all do I need to consider if I switch over to contract work? 31 years old in PA for health insurance, single. A recruiter hit me up with a one year contract and the hourly rate is.... wow. Also it’s a year long. as a rule of thumb, you want your hourly rate to be at least 2x your hourly pay as a salaried employee taxes, downtime, time put into selling yourself... contracting is hard. Rex-Goliath posted:My long term goal has been to eventually contract on my own and eventually start my own consulting firm. Was planning on waiting a few more years until I really jumped in but if it falls into my lap like this then why not? so the hard part in consulting isn't finding one job... it's getting jobs lined up back to back, and matching staff to jobs so htat you don't do all the work yourself. it is one endless sales gig. if you are relying on recruiters, and not connections, you are not moving towards a consulting firm. you're just exchanging job security for added pay, not changing anything about the nature of the employment relationship most of the successful consultants i know started as either salesmen or sales engineers. technical skill is kinda ... not the point
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Sep 12, 2019 02:31
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yeah i’ve been a consultant since i graduated school. it’s the only gig i know. but i’ve always been working under a larger company. however lately i’ve been getting much better at selling myself and not only running contracts on my own but seeking out additional opportunities in these large companies to keep my contract rolling forwards, which my bosses have greatly appreciated. the tech i specialize in is snowballing and the market has not only been growing but the talent pool hasn’t. it’s massively in demand and i feel like if there was a point where the stars were aligned where i could fly solo for a bit and stack bills nows the time to do it. idk. don’t even know if i’m ready for this. it’s a big jump to make but the potential upside is huge
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Sep 12, 2019 02:45
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success is consulting management is defined by your ability to squeeze every drop of blood out of your people without them burning out or quitting. also those people are highly paid and could easily find other work (like you). it’s not a technical skill set - personally I’d want people management experience before i tried it. edit: this is in addition to the sales stuff as well which NBSD is spot on about. Trimson Grondag 3 fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Sep 12, 2019 |
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Sep 12, 2019 02:59
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Rex-Goliath posted:yeah i’ve been a consultant since i graduated school. it’s the only gig i know. but i’ve always been working under a larger company. however lately i’ve been getting much better at selling myself and not only running contracts on my own but seeking out additional opportunities in these large companies to keep my contract rolling forwards, which my bosses have greatly appreciated. success in consulting has almost nothing to do with tech the things that made you successful as an individual contractor don't have that much to do with the key skills in consulting
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Sep 12, 2019 03:00
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it is worth mentioning that the reason i no longer work in consulting is that i am not a great salesman
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Sep 12, 2019 03:01
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Trimson Grondag 3 posted:success is consulting management is defined by your ability to squeeze every drop of blood out of your people without them burning out or quitting. also those people are highly paid and could easily find other work (like you). it’s not a technical skill set - personally I’d want people management experience before i tried it. oh yeah absolutely that is a very long term goal. i'd be flying solo for a while before i started considering hiring on others the more i'm thinking about it the more i'm not liking it. i've seen enough of what my managers have to put up with / shield me from to know that it's not all glamour
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Sep 12, 2019 03:25
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Rex-Goliath posted:oh yeah absolutely that is a very long term goal. i'd be flying solo for a while before i started considering hiring on others it's ok to enjoy life as a contractor not everyone has to aspire to running a body shop
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Sep 12, 2019 03:43
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why is literally every job posting looking for goddamn nosql poo poo why yes i would love my business data to forever be consumed by a blazing operations trash fire that sounds like a wonderfully low-stress way to live my life. oh the business wants a new etl process or field added created cool cool guess i'll just go loving kill myself do these people even know why they want this trash other than some misguided desire to throw cool toys at developers for them to play with dios mio, suck it up and use an orm, databases really are one business orifice you don't want to be learning new and exciting corners of in the middle of a massive outage
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Sep 12, 2019 05:07
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Sapozhnik posted:why is literally every job posting looking for goddamn nosql poo poo why yes i would love my business data to forever be consumed by a blazing operations trash fire that sounds like a wonderfully low-stress way to live my life. oh the business wants a new etl process or field added created cool cool guess i'll just go loving kill myself nosql is no longer solely an alias for the trash fire that was circa-2010 MongoDB And for 90% of CRUD fart apps spinning up your document database of choice in Azure/AWS is much simpler than managing a SQL database. ThePeavstenator fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Sep 12, 2019 |
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Sep 12, 2019 06:11
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Sapozhnik posted:why is literally every job posting looking for goddamn nosql poo poo why yes i would love my business data to forever be consumed by a blazing operations trash fire that sounds like a wonderfully low-stress way to live my life. oh the business wants a new etl process or field added created cool cool guess i'll just go loving kill myself you kinda answered your own question the openings are endless because no one competent wants to touch the trash fire
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Sep 12, 2019 06:37
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What advice do people have for a full time engineer wanting to get into contracting? Honestly it's something I've been thinking about seriously for years but I've never really taken the jump. I've got several skillsets that I think I could really sell as specialist, AWS for one but also pretty drat good at general software engineering. I've been told it's good to have a specific thing you're good at, like data migration or what not, I just have no idea really where to start though.
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Sep 12, 2019 06:37
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ThePeavstenator posted:nosql is no longer solely an alias for the trash fire that was circa-2010 MongoDB ok this is a hella shameful post on the face of it please get specific: what azure service is a satisfactory alternative to an actual database for your average CRUD app? (bearing in mind, "R" is part of "CRUD")
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Sep 12, 2019 06:39
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qhat posted:What advice do people have for a full time engineer wanting to get into contracting? Honestly it's something I've been thinking about seriously for years but I've never really taken the jump. I've got several skillsets that I think I could really sell as specialist, AWS for one but also pretty drat good at general software engineering. I've been told it's good to have a specific thing you're good at, like data migration or what not, I just have no idea really where to start though. set up a lovely corporate entity so you can take 1099 gigs be sure you know what private insurance exists in the state you live in never take a gig that is less than 2x the hourly rate of the salary you would otherwise demand i have hosed up two of these three things and it bit my rear end both times
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Sep 12, 2019 06:40
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:set up a lovely corporate entity so you can take 1099 gigs I live in BC so health insurance is 37.5 bucks for the remainder of 2019 and then it's free 😛
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Sep 12, 2019 06:41
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qhat posted:I live in BC so health insurance is 37.5 bucks for the remainder of 2019 and then it's free 😛 i don't know poo poo about contracting in canada dude
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Sep 12, 2019 06:48
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:ok this is a hella shameful post on the face of it At work I use Cosmos DB, and I've used Dynamo DB on the AWS side much less but it seems pretty comparable. I'm not saying don't use SQL, it's just that unless the app needs joins on data sets with many-to-many relationships you don't need to default to a SQL database.
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Sep 12, 2019 11:30
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yeah nosql tech has come a long ways and we’re at the point that i wouldn’t use a relational db unless i had a very good reason
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Sep 12, 2019 13:32
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you even can use forum approved postgres for nosql
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Sep 12, 2019 14:06
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nosql is fine if your data is worthless and the consequences of losing parts of it are negligible. so, yeah, it's fine for most applications.
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Sep 12, 2019 14:26
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i don't use mongo but it has "multi-document ACID transactions" now so i don't think that true anymore, unless it loses data for other reasons
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Sep 12, 2019 14:35
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i feel like cosmos, dynamo, cassandra, really deserve to be in a different category from mongodb when you're talking about nosql
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Sep 12, 2019 14:36
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hobbesmaster posted:i feel like cosmos, dynamo, cassandra, really deserve to be in a different category from mongodb when you're talking about nosql I've posted this a couple times but mongo these days is fine if it fits your use case of "I need to store an actual json document full of business garbage and it cannot go in the clod" it used to be the mongo case that "whoops we lost yer data sorry" was a possibility, but it's really not these days. I'd still rather use whatever dumb data store from AWS though.
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Sep 12, 2019 14:41
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Perplx posted:i don't use mongo but it has "multi-document ACID transactions" now so i don't think that true anymore, unless it loses data for other reasons no it's more general. you lose the ability of the data store to ensure data validity and shift that responsibility onto, in the best case, some half-assed suite of unit tests.
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Sep 12, 2019 14:53
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Fiedler posted:no it's more general. you lose the ability of the data store to ensure data validity and shift that responsibility onto, in the best case, some half-assed suite of unit tests. schema validation is a thing
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Sep 12, 2019 14:55
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Rex-Goliath posted:schema validation is a thing not in dynamodb or cosmosdb. and schema validation can't validate references to other named entities.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:00
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at that point aren't you just running a validation on a trigger anyways?
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Sep 12, 2019 15:18
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Rex-Goliath posted:at that point aren't you just running a validation on a trigger anyways? i don't understand your question. are you asking how an rdbms enforces referential integrity?
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Sep 12, 2019 15:23
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no i just think it's comparing apples and oranges
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Sep 12, 2019 15:57
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referential integrity: not just about bribery in sports
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Sep 12, 2019 16:02
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ThePeavstenator posted:At work I use Cosmos DB, and I've used Dynamo DB on the AWS side much less but it seems pretty comparable. ok so don't use sql "unless the app needs joins" that's one of the most moronic sentences i've ever seen committed to paper this is the kind of discussion that leads to people using mongodb
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Sep 12, 2019 20:59
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Feisty-Cadaver posted:I've posted this a couple times but mongo these days is fine if it fits your use case of "I need to store an actual json document full of business garbage and it cannot go in the clod" why would you stand up a separate service for this, though? postgres, ms sql, and oracle will all happily slurp up a json document for you, and then let you query the json and then once you need some actual database functionality, that is still there for you
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Sep 12, 2019 21:00
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hobbesmaster posted:i feel like cosmos, dynamo, cassandra, really deserve to be in a different category from mongodb when you're talking about nosql the main reason to use cassandra is not that it's "nosql" it's that you get very interesting scalability and consistency guarantees for extremely specific use cases the lovely query language and awful ddl is something you live with in exchange
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Sep 12, 2019 21:01
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