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Hit me up for tips if you're thinking of going contract. I've been in and out of the game for years and making more than double than I would as a perm.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Where are the good platforms for contract work?

Doesn't the US have an active contractor market like the UK? In the UK there are lots of job boards with a contract filter and many recruitment agents deal exclusively in contracts rather than perm roles. Is this different in the US?

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Generalist contractors, what is your hourly rate?

Best comment yet but zero replies. Would love to hear about how you jumped into 2m$ roles after working at FAANG. Is that still consulting?

eatYourFoodon Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

lulwut?

I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.

What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?

I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.

The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

Jesus Christ, this is the kind of thing you read in the newspaper where some crazy religious guy kidnaps his family on a remote ranch and rapes them all.

You’re torturing your family, wrapping them in a small bubble of a fantasy world.

This extreme level of religious living is outright child abuse.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

I worked with a pastor in the Philippines doing charity work a number of years ago, he outright said that his good deeds were all to spread and grow the religion, not because doing good deeds is a good thing to do. I did not like that one bit but it’s hard to argue against given these Filipinos really did need food parcels.

The Japanese mafia also give out charity to get people inside. Putin used to drive around rural regions handing out cash too.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

The Japanese mafia also give out charity to get people onside. Putin used to drive around rural regions handing out cash too.

In the UK, Jehovas witnesses come round to your house after the death of a loved one and they give you all kinds of nice messages and charity.

Growing a religion (or a movement) through bribery is an ancient practice.

eatYourFoodon Toyota 'reviewing' key fob remote start subscription plan after blowback

I assume you mean the Monte Carlo casino. A previous trip to Vegas made me realise American casinos are just fat people in flip flops.

eatYourFoodon Entire website in a single HTML file

Did you manage to sell Romulus to any gov customers? I built and sold a similar solution on top of SAP Hybris which we sold to several government departments around the world. It’s a very hard sell even with the worlds largest software sales organisation behind you.

eatYourFoodon The Politics of Wine in 18th-century England

Probably nothing but most decent French wines use a cork and I use stopper to close it if we're not finishing the bottle. I guess I could buy a fake cork instead but it's pretty much the same at that point.

My point was, it's not hard to seal an opened cork bottle

eatYourFoodon The Politics of Wine in 18th-century England

What's wrong with a simple metal wine stopper with rubber to block the neck of the bottle?

eatYourFoodon PR to Merge Multicore OCaml

> could learn a lot from studying this team.

How? Where?

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

> "fuck the clients, they deserve to get cheated".

Why use quotation marks for something I didn't say? Nothing I've said means "fuck the clients" unless you are maliciously taking the worst possible interpretation.

A change that takes a massive amount of time and effort isn't something I should do for free.

I'm more than happy to build a backlog, refine it, and build until there's a RC... so few enterprise clients want to subscribe to the perceived risk, they'd rather spend months specifying everything upfront to make some senior person happy whether that delivery methodology has been proven to work or not.

eatYourFoodon Internet Movie Firearms Database

Don't forget rust....

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

And the clients aren’t to blame? Some will force waterfall on you then change their minds on requirements, am I a charity that just gives work away for free when they change their mind?

Many large companies absolutely refuse agile delivery and require fixed scope and cost to get anything done.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

Lawyers are mostly pretty bad at pricing, let’s not use them as a benchmark for our industry.

But yes, you did some law work and they want you to charge hourly rather than based on value.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

If that’s the case, getting screwed is pretty common.

If my SAP implementation is going to save over 1 million per year in increased manufacturing efficiency, how should I price my services? The floor is set by the cheapest contractors in my market, the ceiling is how ever high I can negotiate.

The client will capture far more value than me over the lifetime of the product. I also don’t want to charge by the hour because there’s a conflict of interest and I want to detach hours worked from fees charged otherwise I’m just slaving away.

Hourly is for blue collar work, it’s not professional at my and your level.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

I agree with Alan Weiss, lawyers are unprofessional and mostly terrible at maximising income. They charge 1:1 hours to fees which is a bad deal for a professional.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

You can’t do hourly in London, the lowest you can go is a day rate, hours being 1:1 with fees is a great way to leave money on the table as a contractor. As a contractor you want to structure your deliverables on your terms so you can choose how the spend your time. Alan Weiss wrote a lot about this and his writings changed my life. Also, if you’re hourly in London you can’t claim to be independent and you’ll get smashed on tax as HMRC will treat you as a perm employee because your client controls your hours and activities.

How do clients get screwed with fixed fee? Clients should pay for value, not hours sat in a chair.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

It’s simple to play invoices to foreign consultants. I’ve been working for American clients for years, I’d never register anything in the US and have to deal with US authorities.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

Hourly is unprofessional and a conflict of interest with your client.

The worst deal I would sign is a day rate (no logging hours) but fixed scope/duration is far better.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

Working in London you also get 5 weeks holiday. Holiday policy surely is not the main to not invest in France.

Your comment is rooted in a tremendous amount of arrogance and ignorance.

eatYourFoodon How to Stand Out with Your Job Application as a Junior Software Developer

That’s called being an independent contractor. Twice the pay, move projects at the end of a contract etc. this is often done by more experienced candidates.

eatYourFoodon When HDMI 2.1 isn't HDMI 2.1 – the confusing world of the standard

How can I control screen brightness from my m1 max? Willing to pay for a solution.

eatYourFoodon Log4j: Between a rock and a hard place

Ideally you’d just remove the word ‘as’ for the most concise and correct sentence.

eatYourFoodon Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?

>> Since reqs > mvp can be hours, days, or at most weeks

"at most weeks".

I've seen MVP's take far longer than that and still be considered minimal. Minimal is contextual.

eatYourFoodon Crypto exchange BitMart confirms hack resulting in loss of $150M

It was a joke - it’s not like he’s going around taking the piss out of the losers here - it was a joke about big bountys on a software engineering / IT focussed message board.

Hack a crypto exchange - self paying bug bounty - it’s just a Joke.

Take a chill pill, the stick up your arse must be massive.

eatYourFoodon Crypto exchange BitMart confirms hack resulting in loss of $150M

Silly wager. Crypto is a wild punt, your wallet is not.

Calm down son, your emotions are getting the better of you.

eatYourFoodon Crypto exchange BitMart confirms hack resulting in loss of $150M

No I wouldn’t because they aren’t topical to a website devoted to talking about dev and tech. It’s a joke, sensitivity isn’t always a priority, you don’t have to like it.

eatYourFoodon Crypto exchange BitMart confirms hack resulting in loss of $150M

That’s not what ‘immutable ledger’ means. An equally weighted credit can balance out a debit on an immutable ledger. I think ledgers are generally supposed to be immutable.