Technically only three additional lines, but with formatting a bit more.

Awesome!

Is that low? Doesn't that come out to about 135k/year?

For a w2 6 month contract the rule is essentially halve the rate. With the requirements listed I'd expect $100 to take over someone's project and deliver. You definitely can't multiply the rate by 2080 if you're doing short term contracting.

Ah, I missed that it was a 6mo contract.

I assume you meant 1099 - you're not really a contract employee if you're on a W-2. And from my experience, this "halve the rate" thing is not for individual contractors unless you're talking about short-term consulting, which a full-time 6 month contract position definitely isn't. A company can charge close to that (charge $100/HR for a 100K developer, though from what I can tell there's margin compression) but they can't pay their own contractors that much because they absorb the overhead, have to pay non-billing employees and due to their scale they can simplify the process of hiring a bunch of people and reduce liability for their clients in a way that an individual contractor simply cannot. Your overhead is not that high in gigs like this - it's very different from expert consultants who take on relatively short assignments or contractors who take on whole projects. These guys have to constantly drum up new business and maintain relationships - if you're working on 6-month contracts like this, you're not the one maintaining relationships - it's either some vendor or some guy the company has on their payroll to do exactly that. You still need more relative to a full-time gig because your overhead is still greater than a full-time job and you're missing out on benefits and stuff but it would be more like 20%-50%.

Not sure about the rest but all of the short term contracting around here is W2 through whatever shop got the client and I don't think its legal not to - its all "show up at foo company 40 hours a week and work on their machines they provide to you" so it can't be 1099.

if anyone is interested, coursera just had 2 decent-sounding courses start, think you can still join and audit for free if nothing else

1 is an introduction to machine learning (Machine Learning from Stanford - 11 weeks), the other is called Algorithmic Toolbox and it's offered by UCSD as a 5-week class.

In that case, you're an employee, not a contractor and the rate isn't gonna deviate far from your full-time rate. You'd be entitled to benefits, the company pays payroll tax and is liable in general for all kinds of employment-related stuff. Another way to think about this is that you're on the wrong side of halving the rate - you're getting a percentage of the market rate the company can charge their clients, after all their overhead and profit.

Have you done short term contracting through employment agencies? Any benefits (health care) you get will be awful, one was so bad they were required to send me a letter that said "our health care does not qualify as 'health care' per obamacare requirements". You'll get zero PTO. You can get fired/dropped with no warning, just "don't go in any more". That's obviously a selling point to the client of course, so I have no problem doubling my hourly rate if I'm going to take one of these jobs.

None of this is a selling point to the client - the client is abstracted away from all of this and that's why they are paying the vendor way more than they'd be paying you. The client does not have a relationship with you - for all they know, you're a full-time employee who gets cushy benefits and got reassigned to another client instead of being fired when it didn't work out with them. It doesn't matter because you have neither a relationship nor a contract with the client.

And it doesn't matter how poorly you're treated - you still cost more than a 1099 contractor and they are potentially more liable. Also better shops both have higher rates and treat their employees better - the reason that these employees get fired and dropped with no warning by the vendor isn't because they are paid well enough to take on this risk but because they are seen as commodity and the vendor is in the business of selling commodity labor. And that kind of business simply does not have the economics to pay a high rate, let alone double your full-time rate.

You can ask for whatever you want but the economics just don't work here unless you're extremely underpaid in your full-time job. If you want a serious career as a consultant/contractor, you need to do your own legwork and develop independent relationships - you can't just expect to answer job ads looking for contractors placed by those who did spend time and money cultivating these relationships and expect to double your rate.

This is true. Folks in this thread are kinda talking about 2 different things, both called contracting.

If a recruiter finds your resume and contracts you to a company, you'll make close to the same full time rate you would get if you found that full-time job yourself.

If you develop your own network of contacts and jobs, you can contract yourself out at a pretty high rate because you're basically cutting out the recruiter middleman.

In both cases you're called a contractor, but in only the second case will you be able to demand the big salary premium.

what are you basing this on? Around here $80-$120/hr contract jobs are not just a myth. They're not easy to find but I know they're out there.

There is simply no way this job that was posted will be filled at $65 by competent senior/lead people who can deliver a full functioning greenfield project. That is near what a full time employee with actual benefits and job security would make working privately, and they're not going to give that up for no raise, no security, no benefits, end date of 6 months. Don't think my stance is at all unreasonable here.

Does anyone have any experience or opinions on readthedocs.org? I'm looking for a place to put and host documentation.

135K-200K full-time jobs are not a myth either. I don't think people are offering $80-$120/hr contract jobs (assuming these are full-time contracts over 4-5 months) to those who would otherwise make 80K-120K a year.

We're in agreement on this issue - the question is whether a proper markup is 20%-50% (probably less for a W2 position) or 100% like you're saying.

well sure but this specific thread was about a 6 month job paying $65/hr targeting someone who usually would get paid about $120-130k at a fulltime which is why it was ridiculous. So I'm lost in this conversation I think.

Awesome - thanks.

Working on it in C++ on Windows for now. I have already run into the version compatibility problems by muddling through some tutorials made for earlier versions than what I installed (oops). I installed 2.4.13 iirc, seems the newest is 3.0 but I am expecting more support material for 2.4.

I am surprised at how big of a mess the tutorials/docs/literature are. I may indeed ask you a few questions - really appreciate it.

My suggestion is the same as I suggest for openGL - make a small program that demonstrates exactly one thing. Make another small program that does that plus exactly one more small thing. Keep a series of these around and make sure you can always build them. Then, when your program isn't working, you can go back to the very basics and ensure to yourself that each individual part of what you're trying to do actually works.

Both openGL and CV have his problem which is, when stuff doesn't work, the only way you can tell usually is how something "looks", it's difficult to get good feedback on why. So you have to rely to some extent on having a good reference of exactly how the calls should look, what the building and linking should look like, and so forth.

I had amazing health insurance with Prosum. 90% of their employees are youngish-males. My portion of the premium was like $67.

Zero PTO is a bummer yes. At my company (the one I am a permanent employee at now) they were pretty lax about it though. They'd send everyone home at 2pm on holiday weekends. I was like "But I want to bill 8 hours today" The other contractors clued me in that everyone still bills 8 hours.

Basically everyone billed 40 hours unless they were literally on vacation. They didn't even have a rule barring you from going over 40 hours. But if you abused it eventually they'd come down on you.

We had one guy we hired as a contractor who was a good dev but clearly just decided he was going to milk the system until we let him go. He'd sneak out at like 2pm every day. He had set his monitor to not go to sleep and would leave stuff around so it looked like he was still there. And he was billing 50-60 hours/week.

I found out about because my boss came to us to ask if he was really working that much. Lol. Then one week he just didn't show up and still billed the whole week. My boss still paid it because he didn't want to hassle with fighting the employment agency, getting HR involved, whatever else. Not his money. Finally when his contract was up they didn't renew it. That dev sure learned his lesson!

We had another contractor who refused to work the last two weeks of his contract. His rationale was that if we weren't going to renew him he needed that time to look for another job. Again my boss just paid it because clawing back those two weeks from the contract would be too much hassle. The guy showed up a couple of days, bull****ted with people, and made calls from one of our little offices. It was almost a literal George Castanza situation.

Dunno if I told this story but my very first developer job was a 3 month contract. About 5 weeks in after I have delivered some stuff, I show up for our standup on Monday and say "OK what else can I work on" and am told "oh its a little slow we'll see what we can find" and 8 hours later I go home. Same thing Tuesday. That night I get a call from the recruiters who got me the job: "don't go in you're done". Still worth a 20% raise for these types of job? It took over a month to get my headphones back...

For some reason everyone in my department gets sent every trouble ticket that comes in. I have a filter to throw them away but they keep changing the wording of the subject or something causing it to fail. Anyway every now and then something entertaining comes along:

The job description to me looks closer to someone who makes 150K+ and even at 20%-50%, 130K fulltime would translate to something like 80-100 an hour. I don't have any problem with finding their job ad ridiculous, though you can more charitably interpret their demands (their bar may very well be suitably low). What I'm specifically arguing against is the idea that a contract position either does pay or should pay double the fulltime rate - this is simply not true in the common case we're talking about.

You were probably treated this way (and presumably paid poorly as well) because your market value was low and you were easily replaced. Looking beyond our industry, say, contract office jobs through temp agencies don't pay much better than full-time office jobs.

This is a counterproductive way of thinking about things - it's like some software developer arguing that he was treated really poorly flipping burgers at McDonald's in high school and would only do that for $200 an hour. Sure, whatever, you can name your price but that doesn't change that cooks at fast food restaurants simply don't get paid that much. Either you're willing to deal with the market or you're not.

How would I compare pay rates as a full time employee vs an hourly rate contracting.

Assumptions: consider ev of future promotions and paid time off balanced out by work flexibility and being able to write off business expenses. Assume that job security is not a factor.

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synapse,

if only that topic was ever discussed in here

It's crazy to contrast the fact that Noodle is encouraged to take a $10 / hour job that has no long term time line, but a few posts later $65 is not enough.