Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.
So in essence you apply for regular employment and when you get turned down you pitch your consulting service?
On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well, but with kid on the way I am worried I won't be able to find clients...
> On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well...
Not getting paid? Are you trying to break into an industry with an unpaid internship or is this a hack-a-thon side project?
I don't understand how structuring an independent contractor offering will get you paid by the same folks who aren't paying you at the moment.
Underpaid, it was unfortunate autocorrect that slipped, sorry. I am dev with 10y of working experience. I considered freelancing before, got onto toptal and similar pages but got no good offers (net money would be better but with incorporation/sole prop. I would lose health and retirement benefits) - the moment they hear where I am from the offer is cut down or passed to someone else...
@fxtentacle - I'm currently planning on starting a consulting company for my area of expertise (data engineering), can I reach out to you and learn the 101 of doing something like this?
I'd say just ask the questions because 1. I don't have all the answers and 2. if it's a group discussion we have a higher chance of learning something new
That’s part of the reason behind hiring consultants - both strategy consultants who are brought in for their subject matter expertise and staff augmentation “consultants”.
On the other hand, I’m more than willing to accept my 35% lower compensation to have a full time job than I know I could make if I went independent.
I show up differently in their accounting ledger, and because investors scrutinise that, management will optimise for it. Instead of employee cost (which is usually tightly controlled) I now show up as an external service next to extortionate cloud bills (where nobody knows or cares what they pay for anyway) somewhere 2 levels deep in COGS. Being the cheapest service provider looks a lot better on paper than being the most expensive employee.
And in Europe consultants are much, much easier to fire (especially if the minimum standard of performance is "more capable than our existing staff" or the problem is for an indeterminate amount of time)
Most companies are status-based, not value-based. The primary goal is to maintain status differentials. Pay is one of many tools used to enforce status hierarchies.
As an external consultant you are - to some extent - outside the hierarchy, so the usual rules don't apply.
When companies get really big and dysunctional they start to treat their customers as if they're the bottom of the hierarchy. Which is how you get all finds of corporate outrages.
Guess it's different over in the states, but my boss said the cost to the company is roughly 2x the salary. This includes taxes (not income tax), pension and such.
I am in Portugal. Here your real wages are tiny compared to the company expenses.
To start: everyone pays 34.75% of mandatory social contribution, even if you are on minimum wage. Government tricks people saying the contribution is "only" 11% but charges the other 23.75% from the employer.
So if a company pays 1000 eur to "you" (remember a chunk goes straight to government and skips you, but they are still spending that to pay you) you get 652.5 euro. Or 65% roughly. And that is only the social contribution part.
The average income tax for a tech worker is around 20%. Thus you get instead 500 euro flat.
Thus a Portuguese company to hire a tech worker would literally spend the double of your taxless wages just to hire you and pay the income taxes and social contribution. Then if you factor all other potential expenses things get even sillier.
I am purely looking at gross salary. As that’s the only measure of interest for the company. How much of that you loose to the state, that’s your problem. /s
Contractors can be billed to a project, it’s much easier to pass with the finance dept than justifying why one new hire should get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets.
Contractors are easier to hire and much easier to fire than permanent employees. I've had both good and absolutely terrible experience with QoR of contractors, but IMO the biggest problem is the loss of institutional knowledge when the contract ends. No amount of reports makes up for the warm body in the room that can say, "actually, the reason for this is ...".
> get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets.
some enterprising manager realizes this, makes up a new job title (that sound important) to justify the 4x salary, and thus lead to job title inflation as other people sees such a title earning high.
That is, if the company hires you, they hire you (in theory) forever. But if they contract with you, that's usually for the duration of the contract - a few months. A higher rate but for a short time is easier to justify than a slightly lower, but still high, rate forever.
I do any kind of research and software development. But the most profitable tasks tend to be finding a new angle for how you can automate something.
In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment.
Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.
I wish you a ton of success, we need a lot of streamlining and digitalisation here! I hope you’ll do some good work for the government next as there’s so much red tape and antiquated methods.
>Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.
Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more.
Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity.
I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use.
God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.
Nice. Your work eliminates jobs and transfers their salary to the business owner! Seems more like bean counting than tech.
Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.
You are correct and I have considered this because in general I, too, dislike the trend of profits being focused on ever fewer owners.
However, what is the better option here?
A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs.
B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs.
My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.
That's a good point, but I would argue that lack of digitalisation is a real bottleneck for industries.
Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand.
Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.
There are only so many PCBs and cupcakes that the world needs. Consolidation displaces competitors and their employees/jobs.
My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.
The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes.
I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it.
Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with.
Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.
Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.