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0 pointsscarface748y ago0 comments

When I'm looking for a job, I usually have 3 or 4 strong prospects and looking back on my spreadsheets that I keep when I am looking, it usually takes about 2 weeks from the time I reach out to my network of recruiters and I have an offer (the shortest was 4 days from looking to having an offer from what was then a top 10 Fortune 500 company).

Why would I go through that trouble? I have 20+ years of experience that I can explain how I architected and developed from the website, to the middle tier, to the database to multiple VPCs on AWS and dev ops. I'm not going to do homework.

When I was first starting out I might, but living in a major metro area that's not on the west coast, there are more openings for senior devs/architects than people to fill them.

If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

danpalmer8y ago

Just to provide another perspective...

We have a take home test. It is an obviously fake problem, but we review it to the grade we would for our production code.

We don't find that candidates turn down taking the test - it's capped at 3 hours so that it can't take up lots of time. We do find that we have a low pass rate, and even among candidates with 10+ years experience, we still find candidates who write code that is just not good, and who haven't read the spec.

I'm not at all suggesting that you might be in this category, and if you can find jobs you want that don't require tests that's great.

However, there are people with plenty of experience, who can architect things brilliantly, and who can't write a ~300 line program in Python in a way that satisfies a spec or in a way that anyone would be able to maintain. That's important for many companies, and so I think tests can be one useful part of an interviewing process.

noahc8y ago· 2 in thread

> If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment.

What does that number look like? 10k a week?

scarface74OP8y ago

For a 1099 contract where I'm responsible for my own self employment taxes....

2080 - hours in a work year

-80 Paid Holidays

-120 Paid Time off

-120 Gap between employment (based on my history)

= 1760 work hours per year

FTE Salary * .028 (Employer Medicare Contribution) + $7967 (maximum social security amount - 128500*.062) = minimum salary

minimum salary/1720 hours = pay rate.

Take a reasonable salary for my market as $140,000, that is about $152000/1720 = $88.37/hour minimum.

Adjust the number based on market, skill set, and the amount of time you estimate between jobs. I'm also not taking into account health benefits that you would need to pay yourself because I'm covered under my wife, or 401K matching. I would add 4% to the hourly rate to cover 401K matching.

walshemj8y ago

A good rule of thumb is 3x the rate you would get as a full time employee this might not be enough in the US given the high cost of health cover for a self employed person.

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