Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?

I know this doesn&#x27;t directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me.<p>1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating.<p>2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, &quot;I know you have this, so just do it.&quot; If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don&#x27;t work), they don&#x27;t let the bus hit me. We figure out a solution and then we present that together.<p>3. A good team. I highly respect every single member of my team. We all know each others strengths, weaknesses and areas of interest. I&#x27;m never embarrassed to ask any of them for help and I&#x27;m often asked for help&#x2F;advice&#x2F;opinion.<p>4. I have the freedom to learn about projects other teams are working on so I can understand how those projects might affect the project I work on. I can also go work on those teams for a while if I choose to. Those teams are made up of good people who don&#x27;t mind sharing information.<p>5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There&#x27;s no excuse for that. None.<p>Does the company have warts. Yup. But the above makes those warts tolerable.<p>[0] I&#x27;ll take interesting work over tech stack <i>any day</i>. I don&#x27;t give a rat&#x27;s ass about language wars. Pick something suitable and let&#x27;s get to making something great.

Relatively few engineers actually want to do contract work. The day rates look high, but they have to pay self-employment taxes and health insurance, as well as charge more to cover inevitable gaps between contracts.<p>It seems unlikely that the existence of contract work is preventing senior engineers from joining your company. To be blunt, it’s more likely that you’re simply not paying enough to be competitive or you’re not an attractive place to work.<p>Without knowing more details about your specific situation, the obvious change would be to simply offer more compensation. Higher compensation can make an unattractive job more attractive.

I&#x27;m a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own:<p>- My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don&#x27;t know. I&#x27;m afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads.<p>- I don&#x27;t care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I&#x27;m going to be happy doing the work that I do.<p>- Agile is a time stuck and time waster. Proudly advertising it as your Modus Operandi is a sure way to get your cold-email dumped in the trash.<p>- If you&#x27;re approaching me claiming you&#x27;ve seen my work, you better not mention a technology I haven&#x27;t used in a decade. I don&#x27;t care, personally, if you&#x27;ve done your research on me, but don&#x27;t act like you have if you haven&#x27;t.<p>- My #1 priority at this point in my career is being comfortable - in work and out of work. Showing that the company cares about that - work life balance, good pat, etc. - is a little thing but helps a lot in recruiting people like me.<p>- I&#x27;m probably not with your product or service&#x27;s target demographic (yes, even if it&#x27;s some fancy SaaS). Don&#x27;t knock me if I&#x27;m not. Most senior engineers I know of don&#x27;t like SaaS products and tend to keep things fairly vanilla to retain control over the system. We&#x27;re probably not going to use your service in our personal lives, and that&#x27;s okay.<p>- Working remotely, especially these days, is almost a must. I want to be with family, especially now that we&#x27;re making some life altering changes to catch up after the pandemic (moving, new jobs, getting married, etc.)<p>- Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we&#x27;re interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.<p>- A lot of us are tired of the industry. Going to be real. If you can figure out that problem, you&#x27;ll be fighting us off with bats.

I don&#x27;t know your context, but here are some thoughts on what I&#x27;ve seen&#x2F;experienced:<p>Allow remote work -- European rates are much lower than Silicon Valley rates even now, and I imagine the same might be true for other parts of the world.<p>Flexible working hours -- as a parent with kids, my current contracting arrangement for about 25 hours per week works quite well, and it&#x27;s unattractive to me to return to a regular 40-hours (let alone 50-60 hours).<p>Paid time off -- I believe in the US it is still common for people to only get like 2-3 weeks off, or get &quot;unlimited time off&quot; deals that, apparently, often come down to the same thing because of social pressure. For comparison, here in the Netherlands, 5 weeks is table stakes, and I take at least 6.<p>Interesting tech stack -- in the Rust world that I participate in, there is a lot of discussion about the lack of jobs (especially outside the blockchain industry), so if you can offer something that is more novel, that might help.<p>All of this assumes that you can&#x27;t easily change your organization&#x27;s mission or product, which of course might be another way to attract folks.

I switched from consulting to a company. In short contracting is a headache if what you care about is doing good tech work.<p>Rates in the contract world represent a lot of overhead and headaches you experience there:<p>1. Payment risk: chances someone doesn’t pay you is surprisingly high. A lot of time is just spent chasing down your money.<p>2. Poor payment terms: being able to bill after 30 days of work is actually seen as generous. More and more you see 45, 60 or even 90 day terms. And clients are always playing dumb cash flow games<p>3. Invoicing and tracking time is not fun: There’s a lot of overhead following some clients invoicing rules and time tracking. Then you can get questioned non stop about why you spent hours on this or that.<p>4. Employer tax: in the US if you’re self employed you pay the employers share of Medicare and social security.<p>5. Health insurance: in the US you need to purchase your own private health care. This can be quite a lot if you have a family. I know outside the US, in some places, private health insurance can also be needed for other reasons.<p>6. Sales and marketing overhead: the work to attract clients and close deals is pretty substantial and out of your pocket.<p>7. Relationship work: you are always paranoid about the relationship with the client. You’re first to go if money gets tight for them. And often clients don’t communicate their grievances with vendors, they just fire them. The trust building to get good feedback is very substantial.<p>8. Project management: in my experience clients aren’t good at managing contractors work. You have to take a bunch of this work on yourself to help organize the work and show transparently what’s getting done. If you have any subcontractors or work on a larger team, this gets substantial and clients don’t always understand why you bill for it (though we always did).

I work at a big 4 (not tech, consulting&#x2F;accounting) company as a contractor. They recently offered me a FTE role. $40k less pay for 10-20 hours more a week; meaning they expect their FTEs to work 50-60 hours a week for 4&#x2F;5 of what they&#x27;d pay contractors to only work 40.<p>The work is interesting, I love my team and such, but cannot and will not give up 10-20 more hours to what amounts to just another job. There&#x27;s no incentive to convert, no justification to work 2500 hours a year for some lousy bonus.<p>Atleast I get to keep my contract, keep billing my rate and only work about 1960 hours this next year.<p>I&#x27;d say until companies get realastic about hours, expectations and salary it&#x27;s going to be difficult for them to convert people. I mean, your company makes lets say $100,000,000 in profit this year with what a 50% margin; probably higher with software. You can pay the contractor $200-$250 k this year, but only your staff $160k, or $190k once benefits and all that get factored in. Really? You can only pay $160k for perm and $200k for contractor? ?!? You&#x27;re a team of like 30, making like $100m<p>...<p>So if you&#x27;d like a Snr Eng here&#x27;s what I&#x27;d do:<p>1. Work life balance. Make it so I can do my job in 40 or less<p>2. Don&#x27;t take advantage of me<p>3. Don&#x27;t make false promises<p>4. Pay me really well<p>5. Give me generous time off and benefits<p>6. Let me work when and where I want<p>7. Don&#x27;t ask me to believe in the culture, or give a shit about the mission. I&#x27;m not here for the mission. I&#x27;m here to do my 40, make a lot of money and enjoy my time outside of my job.

As someone who spent years contracting, realize that for the most part you&#x27;re not competing on price. You&#x27;re competing on value. Day rates aren&#x27;t usually higher than the fully loaded cost of an employee - but they are higher than the salaried cost.<p>The flip side is that many people (myself included) frankly were tired of the abuse of full time, and not valuing our time. Contracting eliminated all of that - it was pay to play. You&#x27;d be shocked how the second you become a contractor (in the right org) you&#x27;re actually doing significantly more of the work you were hired to do - whether that&#x27;s coding, architecture, or stitching. But these come to mind immediately.<p>1. Provide interesting problems that need solving. Be specific about them.<p>2. Ship; one thing I&#x27;ve noticed repeatedly is that many organizations are &quot;allergic to shipping&quot;.<p>3. Go global. There&#x27;s a massive talent pool, and many people are more than happy to work &#x27;perm&#x27; from not your location.<p>Don&#x27;t make the mistake in thinking that a permanent employee is more engaged than a contractor. A professional is a professional regardless of contract type.

Full time work just doesn’t offer a competitive amount of holiday. I can contract 2&#x2F;3 to 3&#x2F;4 of the year and take the rest off to travel, work on my own projects, meet friends etc.<p>The money works out about the same but 25 days leave (or whatever the standard amount is) just doesn’t cut it for me. The older I get, the more I value time over money.

Everyone is well aware that any promise of company loyalty isn&#x27;t worth the time it takes to say it. To attract in-demand employees, you have to make every week count for them so if there is an acquisition or yet another useless management shuffle, they can walk away without regretting the time they invested. The easiest way to achieve this is to offer some amount of equity and&#x2F;or the exact weekly schedule and vacation time they are looking for.<p>The most excited I have seen engineers get is when I tell them my primary goal is to keep them out of meetings, away from process rabbit holes, and focused on programming and documentation. We have one weekly 30 minute meeting limited to the product team, and ad-hoc stand-ups if we are picking a long term path that affects the whole team. The acronym KPI is never mentioned. Our only measure of success is deployed features.<p>The toughest part here is usually dealing with management who think you can&#x27;t get anything done in 25-30 hours, or that having &quot;face time&quot; is worth sucking 10 hours out of someone&#x27;s life every week with a commute. Or even worse, they have mandatory &quot;all hands&quot; meetings or &quot;team building exercises&quot; as if their employees are children. (To anyone offended by that, try building a team of adults through hard work instead of the equivalent of circle time.) They cannot comprehend that a focused 5-6 hours a day is much more productive than trying to enforce 8x40x50 and pretending that every hour is similarly productive.

PART-TIME <i>and</i> REMOTE are the keywords you are looking for.<p>Also, stay away from Agile&#x2F;SCRUM bullshit. I personally stay away from companies who have &quot;Agile Coaches&quot; or &quot;SCRUM Masters&quot;.

Technical recruiter here.<p>For okay-paid fulltime roles, you won&#x27;t never attract people who are after the money. These people will always prefer juicy contracting rates to your small company salary.<p>You have to try to find people who care less about money and more about other perks like remote work, interesting tasks, a strong technical team, meaningful mission etc.<p>In Switzerland, which is my market, freelancers aren&#x27;t liked at all. Someone who freelanced for too long will have a hard time getting a full-time job; people think former freelancers won&#x27;t ever be loyal and leave once there is a better opportunity. (As with every prejudice, there is some truth to that.)

Try not to compete with FAANG.<p>Don&#x27;t make the interview process stressful. Allow people to work from anywhere. Allow flexible work and fully remote working. 4 day work weeks. Lots of things that can be done to entice the right people.

Offer a 4 day week. I&#x27;ve been searching for a role which fits this description since I left Uni and I finally found one<p>It amazes me that more companies don&#x27;t offer this benefit (even for a 20% cut in salary!) when the demand is so high<p>It annoyed me so much I decided to make a website listing Software jobs with a better work &#x2F; life balance:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;4dayweek.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;4dayweek.io&#x2F;</a>

Full time remote work. It shouldn&#x27;t be required but it should be allowed. I don&#x27;t have sympathy for companies who cant find good help because they want to limit themselves to developers in a 50 mile radius.

Better conditions.<p>- 100% remote so you can hire people of areas with lower life cost<p>- part-time, maybe you cannot match the FAANG&#x27;s salaries for full time but you can pay better for part-time<p>- exciting product&#x2F;tech

One reason for a senior engineer to move to consulting is that they are tired of being forced to prove that they know how to program every time they switch jobs.<p>Companies are far too risk averse when hiring, and the amount of hoops you have to jump through is getting more onerous every year.<p>I&#x27;m currently a full-time employee, but I&#x27;ve consulted for about a decade in total. Convincing someone to pay you 2 weeks up front for a contract is significantly less hassle than convincing someone to hire you full-time at a software company.

I started a contract job three months ago, with the mutual intention that it will convert to a full-time job. I stayed at my previous job for nine years.<p>In general, I prefer to stay in a job a long time, 5+ years. We (my employer and I) chose to contract for risk management. I demanded a generous salary, and they wanted to test drive me. I was also <i>very</i> nervous about situations that lead to poor working conditions.<p>Specifically, what kept me in my old job so long was that, when there was a problem with working conditions, we usually resolved it. It wasn&#x27;t perfect, but it was &quot;good enough.&quot; When we had a tech stack that was difficult to work with, we refactored. Troublesome co-workers were given severance. Poor managers were shuffled out. Pay eventually got high. Poor processes were improved. (See last paragraph.) When my manager tried to push me to become a manager, we realized that I was better as a lead engineer.<p>In my current job, I was afraid that I&#x27;d show up and the stack would be impossible to work with. (Turns out that is true, the stack is impossible to work with.) <i>But what&#x27;s going to make me stay is that I&#x27;m allowed to refactor the stack to make it workable.</i> (I also have the freedom to fix the 4000 compiler warnings.) I&#x27;ll probably convert to a permanent employee.<p>(Note regarding processes:) Good processes are what make or break a company. When people complain about process; either they are unable to fix their processes, or they just don&#x27;t want to do their job. The biggest factor in my eventual success in my old job was, ironically, getting a manager who backed good process. Initially, we had a lot of problems with poorly-written bugs and support tickets. It required a good manager to push back on the organization to make sure that, once bugs and support escalations made it to me, the tickets were in a state where I could take them. (IE, we didn&#x27;t tolerate the &quot;duuuhhh, there&#x27;s a bug&quot; tickets without steps to reproduce, or the &quot;duuuuh, the customer has a problem, what do I do&quot; tickets without preliminary research.)

I&#x27;ve been exclusively contract my entire (15 year+) career. Contractors tend to be money oriented. The simple answer is, pay more.<p>As a Senior&#x2F;Lead software engineer, I get paid more contract, for the same work and there&#x27;s no shortage of it. That&#x27;s the market reality (in the UK at least).<p>If a perm position matched what I was making as a contractor, I&#x27;d consider it. The hit to the wallet is too great to consider anything else.<p>If I went perm i&#x27;d be looking at a 50% pay decrease after taxes in real-terms.

In Canada, there&#x27;s a large gap between full-time and contract rates but it&#x27;s nothing new - it&#x27;s been that way for at least 15 years.<p>Companies here address the gap through other forms of compensation like discretionary bonuses, more annual leave, employee stock purchase programs, RRSP contribution matching etc.

“Pay them more” is the answer to solving any job market shortage ever. There. You’re welcome.

Offer some form of training and development, which has often been woeful at some places I&#x27;ve worked and the opportunity to progress within the organisation. This would appeal to the kind of people that seek permanent employment.<p>Offer good holiday allowance and flexible working hours and location.<p>I&#x27;ve recently moved from contract to perm (UK). I accepted because with the holiday, pension and better job security I gained I could take a small loss in salary.

There are many things, but start with the basics: 1st) Tell the salary upfront; 2nd) tell the interview process (luckily it&#x27;s non-bullshit and not too long).<p>AFAICT there are many permanent senior engineers that are happy in their jobs and couldn&#x27;t care less about yet another job offer without salary info because it may seem like yet another clueless recruiter wants to lowball them and waste their time. And going through excruciating process to get 5% more is also not something that many people will do. But your offer might actually be better than what they expect, and it&#x27;s a good starting point.<p>Also, senior engineers might actually care more about work life balance and stability than crazy high contracting rates. (Of course depends on the person).

Start by not calling them Snr Engs. That makes it sound like you don&#x27;t value them and view them as a comodity that you can&#x27;t be arsed to write out completely. Not to mention, it won&#x27;t come up in a search when active, motivated candidates are looking for new opportunities.<p>This is not just a nitpick. If someone emailed me looking for a &quot;Snr Eng&quot;, the email is getting deleted and flagged as spam.

Senior&#x2F;lead SRE contractor here from the Netherlands, I can share my own motivation switching to a perm job: VISA. I&#x27;m planning to move to Canada with my family and for the right company I&#x27;m willing to go back to perm. Offering part-time, remote, extra vacation, bonuses also won&#x27;t hurt.

What might attract me, as a contractor who is considering going perm in a new country -<p>Maybe something to do with stock&#x2F;shares which become available over time, if that&#x27;s something you can do. Remote working, some flexibility in working patterns, a good amount of leave each year (30 days is good) - be a good company to work for, which is friendly to family and other non-work needs and sensitive to the balance.<p>A reasonable amount of freedom and influence on the tech stack always helps engineer satisfaction, though the senior engineer you&#x27;re looking for will likely want to keep things simple rather than chasing every new framework or language.<p>If you&#x27;re specifically trying to attract people away from contracting then something I hear a lot from my contractor friends (and something that is important to me too) - try to cut out the corporate crap. I don&#x27;t want to write an annual plan detailing my aims and commitments to the company. I don&#x27;t want to buy into your corporate vision. I want to do good work and deliver what you need, but I don&#x27;t want to spend half my life in pointless conversation with managers.

some slightly different things than i&#x27;m seeing in most of the other comments:<p>* respect during the interview process. i&#x27;ve had interviewers repeatedly fail to answer&#x2F;make calls for initial phone interviews, send emails about rescheduling a 9AM interview at 6AM, demand i sign NDAs during the interview, lie about what the interview process will consist of.<p>* comparable coworkers. if you&#x27;re going to hire me as an X level engineer, every other X level engineer i meet had better come across as being on my level. don&#x27;t call everyone a senior engineer when some folks are unqualified to operate a text editor. it shows that management doesn&#x27;t know who is competent and who isn&#x27;t, which has bad implications for raises and work assignment.

Have a really bold mission and focus on autonomy and culture.<p>Senior developers can work anywhere they want. Don’t make the job description about what they will do, but about the impact that will have.<p>We are hiring Staff and Sr. Engineers at ClearAngel and it’s easier because our mission is so clear and empowering: build the YC 99% of online founders.<p>The work we are doing will have ripple effects through the economy and through the lives of hundreds of founders.<p>I spend 90% of the interview talking about that and asking them about what they want.<p>Then I spend 10 mins on: oh yeah, we use Rails and Python, monolith moving to micro services etc.<p>Focus on the mission and the culture you will be bringing them into.<p>Oh and pay them top of market salary and give them meaningful options.

Lots and lots of equity. For the most part, money talks. But it doesn&#x27;t have to be guaranteed cash. You can offer a risky gamble instead. FAANG pays $1000, but instead you can offer a coin flip for $2200, or a snake-eyes dice-roll for $50k or something like that instead.<p>People will tell you all kinds of other things that simply do not matter as much for people who are not already wealthy. Good team, nice people, important mission, free lunch massages, etc. But give a person the choice between all those things and an extra $100k income, and I&#x27;m pretty sure you can guess what they&#x27;ll choose. At least most people.

Make a company that does not suck to work for.<p>A lot of companies talk big about wanting to make their company &quot;a great place to work&quot;. They talk about benefits, about inclusion, about a lot of ancillary things other than <i>the work</i>.<p>But when you start working on <i>work</i>, you find out there&#x27;s a hornet&#x27;s nest of beaurocracy, of office politics, departments run by finance rather than commitment to executing business needs effectively, lack of training, lack of industry standards, a sprawl of independent redundant silos, and a lot of people who seem to have no idea what the hell is going on. And of course they&#x27;ll put you on-call 24&#x2F;7 and force you to work overtime to meet unrealistic deadlines, without extra pay.<p>Most companies I&#x27;ve worked for, all of the engineers have known how shitty things are, and they&#x27;ve known how to fix it all. They tell their line-managers, and the line managers tell the middle managers, and the middle managers <i>don&#x27;t</i> tell the executives. Everything stays shitty because the engineers are the ones who have to deal with the shit and can&#x27;t do anything about it.<p>A contractor only has to deal with that shit in small bursts and can produce good work that somebody else can deal with actually running. It&#x27;s the best way to avoid the long-term nightmare of working in shitty permanent roles. <i>And</i> the pay is better. <i>And you can take a vacation!</i>

Over three decades in this business, done a lot of contract work (outside the US), currently FTE at a US company.<p>Other than all the micro-annoyances that a lot of my fellow posters already mentioned and the general &quot;we own your behind&quot; attitude that a lot of employers seem to exhibit towards their FTE employees, I think there are two really, really important points that a lot of companies haven&#x27;t figured out and the FAANGs have to an extent.<p>1. Have a proper career path for senior technical staff. That&#x27;s the part that most companies haven&#x27;t figured out. In the minds of the people who design the career paths in a lot of places, it&#x27;s apparently desirable to become a manager as soon as possible. Not to mention the &quot;why bother, they&#x27;re going to leave in a couple of year anyway&quot; approach, which is a self fulfilling prophecy.<p>2. Have problems that actually require a senior engineer, and let them get on with it with a minimum of red tape and political BS. Please note that I didn&#x27;t say _technical problems_, there is a lot a good senior engineer can do to improve your technical team by mentoring, process improvements, tooling improvements and so on. Most of us who&#x27;ve been in this industry this long love what we do (because otherwise we&#x27;d be off working as a bush pilot or something) and want to share our knowledge as we&#x27;ve now become the people who helped us in our careers when we were the more junior people.<p>3. Listen to your senior engineers. Yes, I know, I wrote &quot;two points&quot;. This one&#x27;s on the house :).

It&#x27;s a problematic category. You want a temperament and style match from someone who isn&#x27;t a bullshitter.<p>I&#x27;ve probably been at this too long and likely presume too much competency but I&#x27;ve found the skill continuum model to not have much utility in team formation.<p>People tend to be generally competent in a way that&#x27;s independent of how long they&#x27;ve been coding.<p>Fred Brooks claims 2 years is essentially the Pareto 80&#x2F;20 crux point here and I believe that agrees with other skills based practices. Martial arts progression, for instance, usually has some test to demonstrate general competence around 2 years or so. Many trade schools have about a 2 year program.<p>If the bulb is dim after 2 years the trajectory is likely not good for improvement and more importantly for large project delegation.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing this for over 20 years, been running teams for over 15, there&#x27;s been a lot of people I put hope into. They were probably mistakes to give work to.<p>It sounds like predestination and like I&#x27;m being a bastard. Truth is I don&#x27;t really follow the 2 year advice but it&#x27;s pretty clearly the reality. I just can&#x27;t be a calculating brute like that. It&#x27;s way too sociopathic for me.<p>So now that I&#x27;ve Nicoli Machiavelli&#x27;d myself:<p>Make sure they aren&#x27;t liars, stupid or arrogant and look strictly at their velocity of adaptation.

If you are not able to pay market rates (that match the big tech companies) this is the markets way of saying &quot;you should be denied access to this talent because it can be better utilized elsewhere&quot;<p>Pay up or go away, stop trying to find the secret to underpaying devs.<p>How much equity are you keeping? Probably a greedy amount. So many startups fail because they cant find devs while the founders are trying to keep a Zuck like share of the company based on some 10 year old Fred Wilson blog post.

&gt; impossible to match day rates pro-rata<p>You&#x27;re not expected to match day rates if you&#x27;re offering a permanent contract.<p>I usually advise people doing contract work to charge <i>at least double</i> what they would otherwise get in full-time employment, just to account for their additional costs and time spent on admin.<p>Compare permanent senior engineers rates with permanent senior engineers rates, rather than with day rates - it&#x27;s a completely different frame of reference.

Give people what freelancing&#x2F;contracting can&#x27;t:<p>I&#x27;m thinking, stability, time for their families, visibility over the next years, paid training, peace of mind, etc...

I&#x27;ve done both perm and contract work (lately the latter, by my choice), and here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve seen.<p>1) some people prefer stability, they are the ones who will prefer &quot;perm&quot;; make sure you&#x27;re offering actual stability. Frequent re-orgs, etc. will drive off the very people most likely to prefer permanent positions<p>2) there are good senior engineers who aren&#x27;t into a lot of people time, who will prefer not to do contract because of the salesmanship that is inevitably involved. If you&#x27;re requiring a lot of meetings, etc. you are driving off the &quot;I just want to work&quot; senior engineers who you might otherwise be able to keep.<p>3) offering interesting technical problems or attacking an important (to society) problem, is a non-salary method of attracting senior people who have probably had a job which lacked these in the past<p>4) by the time you&#x27;re senior you have done a fair amount of slogging through bad code; a greenfield project (where you get to make your own architectural decisions) is one way to attract a senior engineer<p>5) by the time you are a senior engineer you have figured out that what matters most is your direct supervisor; make sure yours are a pleasure to work for.

Because money isn&#x27;t the only thing that matters. Sure, money is great, but it&#x27;s not the sole determinant of happiness in my experience.<p>Other things that matter:<p>* being part of a team, pulling towards a goal.<p>* stability. Contracting is awesome, but often feast or famine.<p>* work life balance. Yes, as a contractor you control your working hours, but it can be hard to stop working at 5pm too.<p>* benefits (if in the USA, health care is huge and the plans with an employer are almost always better)<p>* ability to explore different areas. When you are a contractor, you are expected to be top notch at what you do. Often that means you don&#x27;t get to explore new things (except on your own time, which you should do). It&#x27;s nice to get paid to learn as an employee.<p>I think that contracting is great, but so is employment.<p>Just like when you are a startup you should compete on your own terms (your USP), if you are looking to keep senior developers, find out what you can offer (some of the above) which contracting cannot. (How? Ask senior devs in your market!)<p>Source: I&#x27;ve been a contractor and a full time employee, about a 50% split during my career.

There are many reasons to work for a company and money is not always #1. Maybe your product is exciting? Maybe your team, tech, industry?

What I don&#x27;t get is why are the rates so different?<p>Arguments like: uncertainty, getting clients is hard, certain overhead isn&#x27;t paid, not always having work are all valid reasons. However, they don&#x27;t seem to make sense for such a big difference. Based on those reasons, I&#x27;d suspect a 1.5x difference to be more reasonable, but in most cases it&#x27;s like 2x to 4x.

I think you&#x27;re asking the wrong question. Which is probably part of the problem. I know it is at most of the places I&#x27;ve ever had anything to do with.<p>No block of people is homogeneous, but a lot of the time companies think they can just have some kind of blanket policy and make everyone happy. In reality, especially if you&#x27;re a smaller company, I think what you need to have is empathy and flexibility.<p>Everyone you want to hire is different. Some are loners that want to travel, some have families, some want to go back to school while they work, some want to grow their wealth. Some just want to be around cool people and build interesting projects. But what none of them will ever be is the same.<p>If you want to attract and retain top talent then you need to have a conversation with that talent that includes questions like &quot;What will make you happy here?&quot; &quot;What can we do to accommodate your needs day-to-day and long-term?&quot;. And then actually help realize those needs.

Unless you can match the variety of work and the net value received by the engineer, you can&#x27;t.<p>But you&#x27;re not looking for the type of engineer that will succeed at consulting - these people will in general be more extroverted and will look at he risk&#x2F;ROI as a life-calculus. You&#x27;re looking for the less flamboyant and risk averse engineer.

For me (big tech senior), you&#x27;d have to get close to the money. I might take a 10% paycut, but probably not more than 20%. Equity can close the gap, but I can do risk based calculations, so it&#x27;ll need to be very strong. I also have great benefits, a pretty good work life balance (more thant 40h a week, but when and how much I want. Most big tech Srs I know do- we&#x27;ve been doing this long enough to know how much we want to work.<p>What could attract me out, for at least a bit less money? * More say on product definition * Interesting problem space * Leadership that I believe is genuinely happy to have me on the team, and wants to support me. And that I personally like. * Team members that I like, including ones that I can mentor * Clear ability to grow, including increasing rewards with appropriate impact. * A culture that is a great fit<p>And you&#x27;d have to woo more than just a blind linkedIN inMail. People want to be wanted.

You likely are underestimating the market rate for senior software engineers, this is a common problem for small companies that don&#x27;t have too much experience in what they are hiring for.<p>If you&#x27;re not willing to pay &gt;$175k, you&#x27;re not going to get good senior engineers.

It&#x27;s difficult problem, but don&#x27;t forget the day rate might sound high but it has got quite a few hidden costs bundled up in it: pension, holidays, down time, expenses and the various taxes.<p>To answer your question: different things appeal to different people. Other than the obvious of paying someone a boat load of money you could try promoting some of your companies &#x27;soft perks&#x27;, not the gimmicks like ping pongs tables and free drinks but things like: - real flexible working - extra vacation days - accommodating regarding personal vs work life<p>As others have said: - selling the work they&#x27;ll be doing - the technologies you use - how many users your products has - what your products applications are

One I see left out is good benefits. Having good health care, dental, etc. that isn&#x27;t what you get in a one-person package is a big plus for some employees, especially older ones. It was a big pain point when I was doing contract work. Although that was Toronto, so your mileage may very in the US.<p>I think ultimately though if you can&#x27;t compete on salary you&#x27;re looking at attracting a certain subset of engineers. There may be great engineers among them, but few of them will be paying down a large mortgage for instance. A lot of property markets just don&#x27;t allow people to take significantly lower salaries and you have to accept that and go after the engineers who can.

Not enough information. What&#x27;s your team size? How much prerequisite knowledge is your product?<p>Otherwise all I can give you is snark: Hire juniors &amp; call them senior engineers. Or hire a senior engineer to do everything &amp; don&#x27;t hire any juniors

Why are they leaving? Is it just the money? Are you sure?<p>Is there some other sweetener missing?<p>A recruiter friend of mine says she could probably steal half of most corporation&#x27;s engineers just by learning the non-financial pain points and addressing them. Businesses often have weird ideas about how nasty &#x2F; ruthless they can be. Usually though its little things not even on the nasty &#x2F; ruthless scale.<p>Direction&#x2F;Management style is often a big factor. Not to mention the work itself.<p>The other quirk was about the transition from junior to middle to senior. These are often mismanaged and that can sour others opinions.<p>The other obvious one is people leaving to get a pay rise is this is often the only way to get one.

As a Snr Eng in one of the FAANG, my _personal_ list:<p>- interesting problem domain (which does not necessarily mean trendy): this is about selling to others why the problem and your company matters<p>- equity&#x2F;career progression: (controversial comment incoming...) a strong Snr in a FAANG will most likely be a CTO&#x2F;VP type of leader in a startup, so provide generous equity<p>- freedom in terms of decision making: present (business) problems and let people go and tackle them, you don&#x27;t want to be micromanaging<p>- freedom in terms of work&#x2F;life balance: let people manage their schedules, being fully remote, location independent - stuff that most FAANGs will struggle to compete with

There has got to be a middle ground on pay. I&#x27;ve worked contract positions that transitioned to full-time. There is something wrong when a company tries to transition me to full-time at less than half my contract rate. I&#x27;m talking about total compensation: base pay, pto, bonus, equity, health insurance, even employment tax that they are legally obligated to pay. The sum of that was less than half my contract rate.<p>How can I be paid more than twice that for two years and then they claim they can&#x27;t afford to get anywhere close for a full-time position?

I accepted a role at a modest day rate and turned down offers from FAANGs. Why?<p>1. The project is entirely FOSS and in an interesting problem space<p>2. 100% remote work, with flexible time<p>3. There&#x27;s no scrum&#x2F;agile ceremonies and similar corporate stuff

BTW can someone provide a quick refresher as to this now allegedly lucrative contract market please? Like, what might be median rates for Senior Developer skills in a reasonably meaty domain (say data engineering, crypto, high-performance web) in say, Bay Area &#x2F; NYC respectively (I&#x27;m assuming there&#x27;s a differential here).<p>That&#x27;s be very helpful. Again, not &quot;consulting&quot; per se (and the baggage &#x2F; shtick that goes along with it), just straight up 6-18 month contracting.<p>Thanks very much!

The basic mechanism of capitalism is supply and demand.<p>When you write: &quot;it&#x27;s pretty much impossible to match day rates&quot;, you mean that your company doesn&#x27;t want to pay the market rate.<p>There is no secret strategy. You either pay market rates or hire less capable developers who will work for the rates you are willing to pay.

I’d like to see more companies offering flexible working schedules. 4-day workweeks or part time. Two months on, one month off.<p>FAANGS can’t match flexible work schedules.

There is no silver bullet answer. I&#x27;ve been hired and I know how does it feel when company wants to hire, and when they&#x27;re into teasing and time wasting game. FAANG might get away with recruitment false negatives but even their overconfidence has been overheating with personal clashes in recent years. In between there is a lot of space, and a lot of people looking.

For many contractors, it&#x27;s a lifestyle choice primarily. They often don&#x27;t want to deal with all the performance reviews and would rather &quot;be their own boss&quot;. Day rates aren&#x27;t always as lucrative as they sound when you consider time on the bench and tax rules such as IR35. Contractors I know would only take a perm gig in very desperate times

Do you really need top tier engineers?<p>Top tier firms pay lots of money for engineers because they expect them to have specialized knowledge, ability to deal with global scale, business intuition and communication skills to identify and drive large scale projects.<p>If your company can fully utilize all those skills, those engineers can easily bring in revenue at multiples of their cost.

There are a few options I can see:<p>The primary way is to pay more. Technical skills are in a (global) marketplace, and right now it is a sellers marketplace. If demand outstrips supply, this is the natural path.<p>That said, if you can’t match the pay of the top bidders, you need to provide an environment they can’t or won’t, and how you go about this is specific to individual target developers.<p>Some things I might consider being worth accepting a lower offer - the range of things others will consider are different, and I’ll be interested to read the other responses to this thread as they come up!<p>- Be up front about pay and benefits. The number of times I’ve seen “competitive market rates!!11!!” in an ad only to discover they are absolutely nothing of the sort is simply infuriating, and I won’t engage with any recruiter that won’t give an up front range, and concrete measures of how to be at the top end of it.<p>- Don’t use third-party recruiters. This is variable by country, but in the UK recruiters have a _terrible_ reputation. I’ve personally blocked over 100 of them by email and phone, and as a rule do not respond to them.<p>- Don’t do “dog and pony show” interviews. If I have to write code on a whiteboard, or even in an editor live on a call, or look at an extensive take-home test (anything more than a 15-30 minute task), I’m highly likely to pass for anything except an a top shelf package at a company I’m highly motivated to work for.<p>- Eliminate barriers to work being done. I can’t count the number of places I’ve seen where developers spend more time in irrelevant meetings designed to boost the sense of importance of a B team middle manager than pairing, or even getting individual tasks done.<p>- Have an altruistic mission, or at least one aligned with the ethics of the candidate. If your business reduces to “invade privacy to sell ads”, I’d be unlikely to be interested even at top end rates. If it’s something less sociopathic, it may be worth a second look even if the explicitly stated salary range is lower.<p>- Don’t attempt to control employee behaviour outside of working hours. This includes open source contributions without getting tied up with legal review, and over-reaching IP agreements.<p>- Don’t expect me to go to an office, and have top notch IT support for remote employees, whether that’s VPNs that work without screwing about, or a BeyondCorp-type model. Others may want to go to an office, and it’s important to support both models. The days of “you must be in the office weekdays from 9-5” are gone though.

I&#x27;m out of touch with current contract rates and salaries, but when I switched from contract to full time in 2012, I figured that a nominal pay cut was actually a 30% raise based on the full time perks: paid vacation&#x2F;holidays, 401K, stock purchase plan, paid healthcare (this was before Obama care) etc.

I&#x27;ve been freelancing for... 10 years, but still don&#x27;t see as many &#x27;contract&#x27; positions vs ads for full-time positions. Even many &#x27;contracts&#x27; are expecting fulltime, vs more flexible hours.<p>They exist, but perhaps are more prevalent in some countries or regions?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a senior candidate considering my company to mention or cite a consulting rate as a comp or a reason to not join.<p>I think I’m competing against FAAN[M]G full-time for these candidates and, until your question, never even thought to benchmark against day rates.

I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s a possibility for you but you can hire internationally if you are operating remote. You can find cheap, great talent from many places especially if you are paying in USD. For like 40k you can hire entire competent teams in Poland for example.

Fix HR and hiring committees first. The best usually don&#x27;t get past these folks, who e.g. demand PDF resumes, job titles, work references and have no idea how to read beyond buzzwords or how to evaluate github profiles.<p>Once you get past the silly, it&#x27;s usually easier.

1 - Don’t engage anyone who isn’t able to do the math on total comp. (Benefits, downtime, vacation, etc) If someone is optimizing on today’s paycheck you won’t win.<p>2 - Be generous with equity.<p>3 - Quantify career growth and progression.<p>4 - Sort for people who agree with your mission and want a long term impact.

Interesting question, as I just handed in my two weeks notice for my day job of nearly 20 years (so I guess I&#x27;m a senior engineer, but I suffer from imposter syndrome and think I still don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;m doing after all this time).<p>I&#x27;ll second the interesting work and keeping people busy, as the job was boring me to tears. Part of it is on me, as I was having problems giving 100%, and that&#x27;s unacceptable to me as a professional. But if I was being tasked, I don&#x27;t think it would be as much of an issue.<p>I&#x27;ll also second bare minimum raises. It&#x27;s not about the money, but rather that the Trinity study found that inflation averaged 3% YoY. If salary isn&#x27;t going up by at least that much, you&#x27;re cutting my pay every year.<p>While I can sling bits in just about anything and have system administrator experience to boot (running my personal domains and mail servers on the open Internet for decades), I have to insist that my personal development seat is Emacs running in Linux. Apart from the fact of it sucking less, I&#x27;m so experienced with them both, it&#x27;s a waste of my time to force me to use other tooling. I can (and have) cross-developed software for Windows, OSX and vxWorks (and soon to pickup Android and maybe iOS), but I&#x27;ve done it all from Emacs under Linux with no issues. I have no issues learning new SDKs, toolkits, frameworks, languages, etc, I just have 20+ years of Linux and Emacs experience under my belt, it&#x27;s one of my skillsets that is a feature.<p>And last, I&#x27;m never going to work in an office again if I can manage it. No, I don&#x27;t care how awesome your team or office is, I&#x27;m happier, healthier and more productive at home. Other tech firms have realized this[0], figure it out or I don&#x27;t want to work for you.<p>ETA: Ooh, another big factor is leave. I don&#x27;t need money, in fact I&#x27;m probably a bargain, but I want to work less hours, not more, and in my free time I rescue people off mountains. But this requires I be in a state of semi-on call, able to drop things at a moments notice to go rescue people. I always make up the time later (or take annual leave), but part of what I like about software development is the &quot;episodic&quot; nature, where I can cut to something else for a day or two, then come back to the project fresh.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;why-we-still-believe-in-working-remotely&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;why-we-still-believe-i...</a>

Focus on what FAANG can’t usually give — high signal&#x2F;noise ratio, feeling of being really important and appreciated, opportunities of making big impact, near zero bureaucracy, big stock options etc.<p>It’s basic marketing thing, no?<p>Differentiate if you cant compete directly.

If that is your strategy you have no chance of succeeding anyway. The only way you can beat these companies with deeper pockets is being able to offer something they can&#x27;t. It may be of higher monetary value or personal value.

Look for older people. I know I contracted my ass off while I needed to build my wealth, after that I changed to less demanding jobs and started caring about holidays &amp; colleags &amp; raises.

Why would you want full time permanent workers? In theory, you shouldn&#x27;t have to match FAANG rates since you should be hiring a different class of developer (who couldn&#x27;t make it at FAANG, like bad at LeetCode).

I&#x27;d consider leaving my faang level salary for more personal time. Give me a four day week or, even better, a three day week and you could have me for much lower than my current salary.

Ah that&#x27;s simple: just make sure that you have an incompetent government that will utterly destroy the contracting market, like they did in the UK. :&#x2F;

In the USA, good health care benefits would be a major way.

Look in Europe. We&#x27;re cheap. €100k is still quite good here. You can use companies like CXC global to make it easier to deal with taxes and the like.

Different countries, different cultures, different company values.<p>FAANG = tech. anything else -&gt; you&#x27;re a cost center. Become sales and they&#x27;ll appreciate you

Offer good benefits, a gentler pace of work, and security

Are you in the US? I don’t really know any highly paid contractors in the us .. maybe I’m in a bubble but I would guess that is &lt;5% of the market

- Meaningful work - nice, open-minded co-workers - good salary<p>is all you need.<p>Oh, and don&#x27;t handle us as a piece of shit, who just crank out code because we will leave.

2 cents anectoda:<p>I just out of my third contract period over the last 15 years.<p>I will never do contract again. It promotes bad working condition and less interesting work.

It’s all about the company vision and the candidate believing that they can play an important role in achieving that vision.

Try paying them market rates? If you can’t, offer equity.<p>Or try to sell them on your “vision” or some other BS and hope you find a sucker.

Pay more money.<p>Literally it’s that simple.<p>If you can’t match contract day rates, then your business model is not working in the current market.

Do you really need a senior engineer?

Not everyone can get into FAANGs, so you don&#x27;t necessarily need to match FAANG level rates.

Out of interest, what are the ballpark daily rates for the contract market in EU&#x2F;US ?

Where are people finding these high contract rates? I’d like to get out of full time employment and into contracting, but literally have no idea where to start. Relying on my own connections is useless and not sustainable, I’d like some serious work, not references to people who “need an app”.

Depends on which country US Contract Rates are derisory when compared to the UK

Is the contract market lucrative? I have never gotten the impression it was

I&#x27;m a senior engineer (~30 yrs experience in software dev right now) and I don&#x27;t really want to work for consulting&#x2F;contract market. Well, I mean if somebody offered me money beyond my wildest dreams (&quot;never have to work again&quot; kind of money) - maybe, but otherwise it&#x27;s too much annoying stuff that I&#x27;d have to deal with. Some side gigs are ok, but having a steady job makes my life much easier.<p>What I&#x27;d be looking in an employer is:<p>1. Interesting job. Should be doing something new or interesting that would excite me. Also some position where I can make my own decisions, not just mindlessly marching to the beat.<p>2. Sane management. Which can communicate, set strategy, facilitate communication between teams, deliver proper strategic prioritization and planning and make my technical jobs shuffling the bits around as easy and efficient as possible. Also some measure of trust that I know what I am doing, and if I don&#x27;t I&#x27;ll tell you.<p>3. A good team is very important. Excellent if I can learn from these people, good if I can rely on them to do their part, otherwise it becomes unworkable.<p>4. No death marches. I mean, I work odd hours and may jump in on weekends too, if I feel like, but that shouldn&#x27;t be expected of me. Not a single 22 yo without a family or life anymore.<p>5. No political bullshit. I don&#x27;t mean politics like Trump vs. Biden or whatever, though seeing that at the workplace would probably make me run fast and far, I mean things that don&#x27;t have much to do with business but a lot to do with manager&#x27;s egos and their perception of how their career should go. If I am caught in anything like that, it makes me very sad and looking for the exits.<p>6. Decent pay, of course, and customary benefits (including vacation time), but if it&#x27;s not on the level Google pays I&#x27;d understand, provided all the rest is good.

A question: where do I find those lucrative contracts :)

1. No agile<p>2. Managers with a decade of direct engineering experience<p>3. No PMs<p>4. 100% Remote<p>5. Solid tech stack<p>6. Interesting problem to solve

outsource; for 7k usd you can get very skilled people

Culture, community, and networks, not comp.

It depends how you define Sr Engineer, but I&#x27;d look for people who are less tolerant to volatility in their income stream and value consistently high pay over sometimes consistent extremely high pay. The nature of capitalism is such that is capitalizes on people with bills to pay, and influences them into having more bills to have to pay. So people with families, mortgages, expensive cars etc..

Looking through all the comments, it seems to me that there is a huge differnce between contracting in the US and contracting in Europe, and that that difference is why more European developers favour contracting than US developers do.<p>Contracting in Europe (especially in the UK and Ireland) is largely controlled by recruiting agencies, who act as middle men between companies and contractors. A contractor looking for a new contract deals with these agencies, not with the end company [usually].<p>In the US, a contractor is expected to find and manage clients themselves.<p>Perm salaries are also significantly lower in Europe, making day rate contracting incredibly lucrative for a senior dev who can charge top tier rates.<p>My own experience after working as a contractor for 9 years:<p>1. Money in my pocket is typically 50% more than it would be compared to a reasonably payed perm position.<p>2. All the perks offered from a perm job I can avail of via my own Ltd company at reduced cost: health insurance, pension contributions, tax efficient travel schemes, etc.<p>3. Six month contracts are almost always rolling contracts, as in, they are renewed every six months until I decide to leave. I always decide to leave eventually, the contract never ends and forces me to leave. Any gaps between contracts are there because I choose to have them.<p>4. Projects are ALWAYS more interesting. Business as usual, bug fixing teams, seem to be made up of perm devs who have years of domain knowledge. The greenfield projects tend to go to contractors or teams that are comprised of a lot of contractors, probably because less domain knowledge is required for new projects.<p>5. Learning on the job is part of contracting. If you don&#x27;t know X technology, you pick it up as you go along. With the odd very focused exception, I&#x27;ve found that there is no expectation that contractors be 10X or ninja developers.<p>6. Paperwork takes me about 10 hours per year -- that includes my company VAT returns, preparing docs to send my accountant once a year, and meeting that accountant once a year.<p>7. Expenses are a huge thing. New lap tops, phones, courses I want to do. All covered by my company as part of my job.<p>8. The biggest one as far as I&#x27;m concerned. Moving from contract to contract, seeing the different ways that teams build their products, picking up new technologies every year -- it all boosts your confidence as a developer. You&#x27;ve seen so many different ways of approaching problems and used so many variations of the tech that nothing phases you. Your confidence is huge.<p>9. No Leet code or drawn out interviews. I&#x27;ve never done a Leet or online test for a contract. I&#x27;ve rarely had more than a single interview to land a contract. I&#x27;ve never done a white board interview. The hiring process is just easy and simple, as it should be.<p>10. I write code all day. I specify in each contract that I&#x27;m not a team lead or a junior dev mentor. There&#x27;s no expectation in the companies that I work with that I assume team leadership roles.<p>11. A day has 7.5 working hours. That&#x27;s it. No expectation of overtime, or on-call. A day rate contractor works the 7.5 hour day and that&#x27;s it.<p>The above 11 points are all based on contracting in Europe. I have no doubt that American contractors would disagree or question each point, but that disagreement is probably geographic and based on the different way things work in the US.

You don’t have to match contract wages. There are benefits other than salary that contractors don’t have access to.<p>But let’s be honest. It’s a marketplace. The solution to hiring is more money. That’s how capitalism works.

I&#x27;m going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :)<p>I&#x27;m not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc.<p>Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I&#x27;ll make use of the in-office climbing wall sometimes. But if you lead with that pitch, you give me no confidence that your company will even be around that long, much less provide me with room to grow professionally and financially.<p>I want a company to sell me on its vision for success in the market that I would be participating in. I want my co-workers to be motivated by the success of the endeavor in which we&#x27;re all involved. I want an ESOP that will be valuable for my retirement.<p>Why do I want to work with a bunch of people who are mainly there for the freebies?<p>Look at what just happened to Basecamp. They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company. The second the politics were shut down, a third of their employees walked out. Imagine you&#x27;re a developer at that company, trying to ship some product or feature to meet some bonus metric - and the people you&#x27;re depending upon to do their part quit their jobs because they absolutely must argue politics during their work day.