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Comment by rc-1140 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but C2H sounds like a great idea to you because you have the luxury of having already earned FAANG money on your side. You'd have to pay me considerable money for me to consider taking a C2H role so I could cover health insurance across the usual suspects (general health, dental, vision, specialists just in case). Like many people outside of this website (and enough here), I don't have the luxury of FAANG money and I live in the United States, so I need health coverage either through my employer or on my own provided I have enough money to offset it.

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This is one of the reasons I've always found it paradoxical that people in the US seem to think that universal healthcare would depress the labour market.

Up here in Canada not all procedures are insured, Pharma, Vision & Dental are the big three that most either pay out of pocket or purchase extended insurance for - though there are generally pretty good provincial programs to help with the costs of those. However, nobody is walking around in Canada concerned that they may get fired and then be bankrupted by a heart attack.

Companies absolutely do still bear a significant per-employee cost to support provincial healthcare and residents do need to pay a pretty light fee into a pool (with options available for financial assistance).

The end result is that companies do end up bearing pretty heavy burdens on a per-employee basis - but employees don't end up with as much of a burden forcing them to remain in undesireable employment positions, though some guaranteed income would really free up employees to have a more equal amount of power in the job market.

I’ll point out that untangling health insurance from employment does not necessarily require a “Medicare for all”-style universal care system. This is a subtext to your comment since you jumped there from the parent’s complaint about employment-based insurance.

> However, nobody is walking around in Canada concerned that they may get fired and then be bankrupted by a heart attack.

Mate when I (in the US) took a month off because I got COVID, my insurance tried to cancel. Fucking insane that we have to deal with this shit.

Many consultant/contractor firms esp for programmers provider insurance. Its usually not as good as a top tier company benefit package of course. The biggest issue for me is you're unlikely to get a 401k or tax-benefited investment vehicle, which means if you're making programmer money you can't even do a ROTH or a traditional IRA due to income restrictions. So make sure its a really good jump in pay due to that at minimum.

You can still make contributions to a Traditional IRA [0], you just won't be able to make deductions above a certain income if your employer offers a retirement plan [1].

[0] https://www.fidelity.com/retirement-ira/contribution-limits-... [1] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/ira-deduction-limits

In my experience, with C2H you typically earn more in the contract phase than you would with a base salary, which is helpful in covering benefits or out of pocket expenses. Maybe that's not always the case, but salaried employees usually earn 80% or less what their contract counterparts do.

And you kind of have to bomb the contract phase to not be given the offer, unless there are other circumstances at play (budgets, pandemics, etc). Hang with the team at lunch or after work if they do that, make code contributions asap, and be the kind of person any team would want to have.

C2H usually just makes it easier for them to drop you if you're (surprisingly) not a good fit - and after that kind of time and money investment, they definitely don't want to do that.

> Maybe that's not always the case, but salaried employees usually earn 80% or less what their contract counterparts do.

That's because the employer is covering significant costs on behalf of the employe. A fully-loaded FTE typically costs 30% to 40% more than they're base salary.

Contractors need to make more because they're covering all of those things themselves.

I agree, which is part of why C2H isn't as bad of a deal as the parent thread is implying

This is correct. Company pay much more per hour when you are on contract because they don't have to cover FICA, insurance, etc.

At my company we do contract to hire, but it's only about 4-8 hours of work. The intention isn't to replace your current job, it's to compensate you for doing extra work for our company while we interview you.

When I was hired I did about 1-2 hours of work for 3 days, after my normal job and was hired before even finishing the "project".

Not just health care, most people don't want to leave a steady paycheck for the possibility of no paycheck.

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