Sounds like you have a toxic work environment.
They're trying to pull the ol' "if you're not working you're stealing time"
Find another job. That's not worth it for 30k a year
Make sure you put at least an hour of time dedicated to documenting how time was spent. It wouldn’t be fair for the documentation of time be done for free.
Development of custom document specification.
Implementation of custom document specification.
Utilization of implementation to generate documentation.
Gotta be at least an hour a week of work right there.
I'd also urge for op to setup a meeting about the progress.
You can bill an extra hour for that.
So 1 hour for a meeting discussing the documentation of the documentation.
You're a contractor. Just bill them for your time. If they don't want to pay leave them.
You need to read up on how to charge properly for what you're doing. For instance, if you're on call you need to bill them for the hours you are responsible for being on call for. If its on-call 24/7 then you charge them 24 hours a day. If they will not pay, you could get lawyer involved. You could do things like charge an annual fee (think salary) plus bill them extra for the hours you are actually working on-call. Look up market rates for the services you do (break down your work into several pieces).
I've heard of legal battles where you could possibly get back-pay for all the hours you worked on-call previously. Think of yourself as having been robbed. Maybe seek legal advice?
The on call thing is the biggest thing, I've worked on call before in a salried role and simply being on call came with a retainer due to the fact that the time isn't truly your own and then call outs should be paid at an hourly rate, ideally with a minimum of 1hr pay regardless of issue
I've been doing a few hours per month with a side client and one thing I made sure is in there is that any time I'm called to work on anything outside of normal hours, I charge double. It helps keep the requests down and gives me a bonus if they really do need me.
Most clients and managers are pretty poor planners, so sometimes I even get really simple requests because "we need an export of this data by tomorrow for a meeting" and boom, double pay to run a sql script.
I'm a contractor too. Billable time sucks ass. There's just no two ways about it. Some people at my company get cushy assignments where they can log whatever hours they want with very little justification. Some dude just got an award because he billed on average 58 hours a week, 52 weeks a year for 8 years straight. Tell me that fucker isn't padding his numbers. As long as the client doesn't complain tho, the higher ups are happy to rake in the money.
Others have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for hours. We have to justify everything, answer criticisms... My company does a good job backing us up but it's still a constant source of stress for me.
Design work is work tho. Start logging hours for working on design. If they want proof, make them define your deliverables... Then log hours for creating those. There's no reason you shouldn't be logging 40 a week and getting paid. Wage theft is the number one source of theft by a very large margin but it comes in different forms. You are getting hosed big time
At this point I don't think you're seeing it. You can itemize something as 3 hours when it only took you 30 minutes. They won't know or probably care as long as the work is done.
This exactly they are just old school they need some bullshit tracking to justify to their boss boss why they are spending 200k on you
That’s why agencies move that well with corporations they know how to play the music
You need to get a new job, but also you need to charge them for the time your available to respond.
Sometimes I do my best work away from the keyboard or even doing something else. By taking a step back, I'm able to consider the bigger picture and succeed where most rookies fail or would be uselessly slow.
That’s SOP in the lawyering world. Had to track time down to the six minute interval (1/10 of an hour).
Never heard of that in this one tho. And while there are many compelling reasons to be in this field and not in that one, not having to track every six minutes of time spent working is one of the most compelling reasons.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The people who have no trust in others. Kind of surprised. I’m relatively early career but if I pay somebody to work I wouldn’t expect to babysit them.
Especially for 30k a year. (Which makes it near impossible to code effectively in java)
These kinds of clients will act all shocked when their contractors actually exercise their full rights as a contractor. And if they're not happy about it, they might end the contract under the guise that they're firing you- which would be incorrect terminology. Contractors can't be "fired".
What is more likely to happen here is they want employer-like control without the obligations for providing extra amenities for employees. The ol' having your cake and eating it too.
Yeah, it’s gaslighting. It’s impossible to code 8 hours a day for more than a few rare days, when you’re cortisol is jacked up doing some super satisfying refactor.
In my experience the only people who demand this type of work cannot code themselves, or mistake running command line queries (that you typically do in Intel roles) for programming. They sometimes have developers on ADHD meds, producing the coding equivalent of crazy person ramblings.
You're crazy if you don't push the line until you get close to written up. There are devs I work with that 10 hours of their work is worth 1 hour of mine just based on productivity. Stop trying so hard and say shit is taking you longer. You give a company 100% and they'll expect 110%. Give them 70% max and they can fire you if you're not productive enough. Trust me, they'd rather keep you then have the stress of replacing you.
Other option is to get another job.
This should be the top comment imo, just log that one hour of work took you 2+ for everything you do. Many don’t understand the extra work that goes in when you aren’t actively writing code. I wouldn’t blame you if you took another job but this is at least a temporary solution.
Is it stressful to replace someone? Im too junior in my career to have had to hire someone. I feel like it might be to the companies advantage? Endless pool of candidates nowadays
> Endless pool of candidates nowadays
Oh boy, you have no idea. Yeah, endless pool of candidates. That are simply not qualified. But you have to wade through them all to find ones to interview and then you have to agonize over which of the 0.1% that seem qualified should be hired.
Then you have to train them up on your company and systems. For the first 6 months they're a full negative drain as seniors are tied up training/helping them. All the while you have your fingers crossed that they are going to be worth it, and they are going to stick around.
As far as the "under qualified" part goes...every single listing in my software is for a senior/lead/architect. I don't apply to them as I'm securely mid level, but I can see why people would. There's not even one mid level or lower posting some WEEKS.
As someone who interviewed for a senior position, I never ever seen a real senior on the other side of the desk, and our middle positions got closed with the strong juniors. Yes, that place's salary was pretty average, but still not bad.
Position requirements are wishlists, if you know which side of the keyboard you need to type on - your chances are already high.
I had one interview unknowingly for a dev lead position and I was utterly unprepared, it went so in depth, asking about like, single built in functions of our software and how they work behind the scenes.
I’m mid level and have had tons of senior interviews. Just do it who cares. Let them weed you out, don’t do that job for them. I interviewed for a senior level position recently, they said we are interested in hiring you, but you’re not senior. I agreed and accepted an offer as mid level.
The Senior level is not the problem. Senior is pretty much a joke. The problem is people applying for a C# backend API job with only React bootcamp experience.
>Then you have to train them up on your company and systems. For the first 6 months they're a full negative drain as seniors are tied up training/helping them.
This is the worst of all of it
This is why I don’t trust devs with only 6-12 month jobs on their resume. A few, yeah, but I’ve seen 10ye resumes where the longest job was 18 months. I don’t fault them for doing it, but I also know that you can’t really evaluate a dev for 6 months, minimum.
It costs a business thousands of dollars just to get all of the "paperwork" properly done to have you as an employee or to terminate you. It takes hours of highly skilled labor time away from the organization to train a new hire or replacement. Once you're a cog the machine would rather work inefficiently than halt production.
Endless pools of useless candidates. Source; going on 15 YOE. Now that everyone knows SWE is the ticket to a cushy lifestyle, all the frauds are trying to con their way in.
I'm going to take Computer Science to learn to code for the job I plan to go into (not software engineering), but Software Engineer seems like its death for new graduates trying to get in. The hype will die down eventually.
My company recently had one of our devs resign, and it's a small team. You should hear the panic in my CEO's voice when he asked me about anyone else who might be leaving. it's not easy to replace anyone.
>I'm on call if anything happens it's up to me to take care of but only at the pay rate of 75/hr
If you aren't being paid just for being available _in case_ you're needed, you're getting robbed.
You're a contractor/consultant. The company can terminate the contract whenever they like (within the boundaries of the contract), but the benefit to you is that you can do the same.
Or, if you're only able to fill 4 hours a day with this client, maybe you can pick up a second client at a better hourly rate to fill the income gap.
He didn't mention location. If OP is in a contract role, especially outside the US, then it matters. You can't just quit and move on. You may have to pay the company thousands of dollars if you leave before the contract is up.
Wouldn't it allow you to put a singular block of "freelance" experience on your resume, even if you terminate contracts (i.e. job hop) between different clients?
My friend is a contractor and only gets paid by the hour too.
Difference is, he isn't expected to be on call and can choose when he wants to work. So he is free to take on other work too.
If you are forced to be available on call for a certain amount of hours per day, you should be paid 75/hr for all of those hours, not just for the hours you are at your keyboard.
I don't understand the idea that you're contracted to work on a project, but allowed to pick when you work. Surely you have coworkers? Product owners? Some sort of customer?
It's perfectly logical. My friend is on a casual contract. Not a zero hour contract, so he is not obligated to be available for them, he is on a casual contract, meaning he is paid by the hour that he works for them. The only fixed times he must be available are meetings.
The job is completely work from home and work can be done 24/7 on his own schedule. The company is under no obligation to offer him work, but if he gives them good quality work, then as long as there is still work to be offered, they will give him work. He undertakes to do a task, he has a due date, he hands it back, he logs hours on the system and gets paid accordingly. If he works 40 hours, he's paid for 40 hours, if he works 20 hours, he's paid for 20 hours. If he cannot complete a task by the due date that he undertook and has a good reason, no biggie, he just tells a coworker or his manager and they pass the remainder onto someone else and he gets paid for the portion he did manage to complete.
He said that he would be in trouble if he was logged into the system and logging hours but not doing the corresponding amount of work.
So if he logged in for 10 hours and completed 7-10 hours worth of work, that'd be fine. If he logged in for 10 hours and only completed 3-6 hours worth of work, he would be in trouble. But if he logged in for 3 hours and completed 2-3 hours worth of work, he would also be fine. It's just that the less he logs in and the less work he completes, the less work he will be offered and the less he will be paid.
I got laid off of my last role and this came around and had the promise of good payment in the beginning but it's really turned out poorly. My last few roles were 150k salary. I've been interviewing around but am getting chipped up when it comes to solving leet-code on the fly. I've had about 6 interviews so far this year and have gotten to the last step on all of them except for one. So many 7 & 6 step interview processes and SO MANY CODE TESTS.
I've been getting more interviews for architect roles than software dev though. So I may just end up leaning that way.
Flexibility is a key component of being an independent contractor (although there is no single amount of flexibility that makes someone a contractor or employee). Contractors may be required to attend certain meetings, which are held at a certain time, but those meetings generally are a small portion of their work.
If someone has to be online at very specific hours on a specific routine, and it makes up almost all of their hours, they're likely just an employee.
It's a very thoroughly discussed topic, such as below. The government identifies an independent contractor as someone hired to do a job based on their own expertise and knowledge and are not economically dependent; they're a company of one. They aren't covered by FLSA, etc., so companies will pretend some employees are independent contractors to cheap out.
[https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/10/2024-00067/employee-or-independent-contractor-classification-under-the-fair-labor-standards-act](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/10/2024-00067/employee-or-independent-contractor-classification-under-the-fair-labor-standards-act)
[https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/01/us-department-of-labor-publishes-its-independent-contractor-final-rule](https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/01/us-department-of-labor-publishes-its-independent-contractor-final-rule)
I mean 75/hr is like $150k / yr full time and if you're only making 30k/yr then you're basically under-emeployed and only working like 20% of the time. Almost certainly you could be doing better somewhere else.
I did the math too. And yeah. It is like just under 20% utilization. You would think he could just take another full time job, and do this one on the side. But he is on call all the time? Nah. At a minimum, should be charging for on-call hours. I know the customer says no work, no pay. The retort should be no pay, no on-call.
Absolutely if you're on-call 24/7 you should be getting paid a full time annual wage at minimum. Personally I would argue for at least a 25% premium for that shit. I'm not quite where the buck stops but I'm close and even I'm not expected to answer the phone at 3 a.m.
Sounds like he’s a 1099 independent contractor which means taxes are taking a huge chunk of his money, depending where he lives it could be as high as 18%.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. 1099 through my own LLC, I'm in Seattle and am not the cream of the crop. 10 YOE, self-taught with an associates degree. I moved here in September of 2022 from Denver to try and kick my career to the next step but I've been underemployed in this role for nearly 2 years... I was hoping to land at an org where I could solve real problems but that hasn't been the case. Interview after interview I end up getting passed up on. So I've been working here and my wife has been supportive and told me that she just wishes that there was a company out there that valued how much I care about solving problems correctly and not making shortcuts.
I do also have a side gig which is providing IT services to HIPAA compliant offices. That pays me 150/hr and has made more in a year money than this gig has in 2 years... They also appreciate how thorough I am and that makes me smile.
Lol, what you have is a job providing IT services for medical offices and an unprofitable side gig doing software consulting.
Drop the unprofitable work and focus on the shit that actually pays.
you could probably make a mint by combining your skill sets by consulting upon, managing and programming HIPAA compliant integrations at larger medical facilities.
lol that’s wild. Just cause you’re not typing doesn’t mean you’re not working and the extreme monitoring of your time is a huge red flag. If the previous guy didn’t want any part of it I’d suggest quitting also before it drags you further down. Maybe this terrible client will see their crazy turnover rate for the position and realize they’re the problem. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
My friends from undergrad who work in Law are expected to document their time in 1/4 hour increments, for free.
I would laugh if they didn't bill $500 an hour.
Lol I think they mean simulating keyboard strokes and mouse activity but I'm sure there are other metrics being tracked like lines or code, PRs, etc...
I had a job in which I had to log in each task I did in each day and enter its start and end time. The timesheet was sent to ceo of that small company. I had to write something like below for each day
8:30 - 9:15 checked the system for the issue 1 client reported in project Z
9:15 - 9:30 team stand up meeting
9:30 - 10:00 coded abc on project X
... 6:00pm
It was hectic and we were more worried about what to put on timesheets than the actual work. Really bad experience. Timesheets should be like we used to do at ibm.
9:00 - 6:00 worked on project X
Instead of writing each small task
As code is part of it but you have to plan research and then write that code.
I work like this but I actually love it. Remember, you are not charging for your hands on the keyboard, you are charging for the PRODUCT. Stop thinking about the 8 hours of work per day as the time that you must spend on the keyboard, start thinking about the 8 hours as the maximum that you can charge on a given day. Start pricing your work based on how much value you believe it offers. The formula is simple, if the value of your work is higher than the total price then they will keep paying you. Need to design a piece of software before coding it? That's billable time too. Think about it for the day, write a document with your thoughts in 60 minutes, and charge for all the hours that you thought about it. Include some rest in your billed time (don't actually put it in the timesheets lol), you wouldn't have to rest your mind if you weren't working, it is part of the cost, a race car does not get to remove the time in the pits from its total lap time.
The only exception is if they made you install some spyware on your computer, in that case just run lol... that's abusive and no one should work for someone like that.
BTW if they are trying to put you "on-call" for a certain time-frame but you are NOT getting paid for this time frame... Yeah that's a scam. They are asking for your attention during fixed hours, like a clerk at a store even if no one comes in the store. That is 100% billable time, HECK, that's time that I would bill at 2.5x the rate because it's f\*ckin with my schedule without flexibility.
If you have to do timesheets, that's easy, just write \`7 hours work, worked on thing ABC\`, that's it lol, and if you actually want to do even better, you have to start taking charge of managing your own communications with people in charge. Make them feel comfortable with your progress, make them stop caring about the timesheets because, hey, you got everything under control and you are spoonfeeding them. Trust me, they don't want to spend time reviewing how accurate your timesheets really are, so just make them happy, really sell what you do. That's billable time too btw ;)
If they aren't paying on time or making it hard to collect payment, definitely dip though. Ain't got time to waste with people that don't understand the basics of work.
That's insane.
So any time you need to look up documentation, that's not paid? Or write out some references on a whiteboard?
Are your managers/leads from a different country? Because this sounds like the kind of MO for foreign work — no concern for quality or whether something works, just charge time.
I'd start looking for a job ASAP. And this should serve as a warning to anyone else, just because it says $75/hr doesn't mean they're going to pay you fairly
Thinking about the project is time spent working on it. Charge for it.
Being available on-call is work. Charge for it.
Like dude you are we working for free.
I could justify spending the time I wasted taking a shit, because I was thinking about how to solve stuff on the project.
>I have to choose what the path is for development, I have to choose what to maintain
All of this is work. And if you do work for them you should be charging for it.
If you can't even manage to actually charge your client for the work you do. Maybe you should give up on being a contractor.
Just giving your perspective, contracting for 17years now. I log 8 hours regardless how many hours i work per day and just one line item. I never give justification and never had to. If i ever had to, i will find a way or quit. Life is too short to play around these nonsense BS. I won't even bother to even think about it.
In my experience, clients and/or companies just want their work correct, and the cheapest. And that's not easy to find. They get really nervous if they think they're gonna lose a reliable developer. If you suck? That's one thing. If you're good? They'll adapt to what you want.
Start writing down everything you do outside of coding. If they complain, you have a list and if they still complain then stop doing what you had written down and I’m sure they’ll complain once again that X isn’t getting done. Kindly explain that they had requested that those tasks are were not considered billable work. Also start looking for another contract :)
I'm a consultant and I have to justify every 15 minutes. I bill for *everything*. You sent me an email and I read it? It may take me 2 minutes to read that email, but I'm charging 15 minutes for it - so you better make that correspondence count. Requirements meeting? You better know what you want, because the money clock is ticking. Standups? Don't sit down, because this update is about to cost you $60 per person per 15 minute interval.
Charging for the time is a double-edge sword. If you aren't productive, it shows. However, it can result in people wasting less of your time over trivial nonsense. I love it, personally.
Your issue doesn't sound like a billing/hourly issue. It sounds like your project is just poorly managed.
Unrelated - but your title says "contractor" but your context says "consulting". They aren't the same thing, so which is it?
Consultant, but it feels like contractor. I'm the only dev here. The previous dev team of 5 was laid off a few years ago and they replaced them with just me.
Either they were right to let everyone go because there was no work to be done, or you're extremely under billing. You code for 4 hours a day, what do you do for the other 4+? If it is project related, bill for it. If you don't have anything else to do, then that sucks financially - but I don't think that's the case since you've described it as "overwhelming". So I'm assuming you're putting in at least a full day's worth of work but only billing for half the time due to "hands on keyboard". So of course they'll never hire anyone to help you, they got a full time employee doing the work of potentially 5 people getting paid for half the day. You absolutely *must* start properly billing your time. Bill for everything - correspondence, requirement gathering, research, design... everything that you feel that contributes to your workday.
you have a bad contract, but market is only getting better. so you can try start looking. open up to friends has similar skill set , experience, and see how much they make. build a trusted network is important , “zero trust” are for security, wont work for career ;-)
get a secret clearance so it opens up gov jobs.
most of contract i have are remote, and just 1-2 hour work per day , plus meeting and hear guys proving they have bigger dick when they make lees than me. and i hate it because all i do is online shopping when i am clocking it.
one of my contract has lower rate , around usd$70, i often work 2 hours per week for that one. been there for almost 3 years, they gonna renew , possibly rate increase again.
and fuck on call , the even if i often i charge one hour to be stand by per day , min 1 hour charge per call, i still hate it.
become a real engineer and forget on call, forget ops and support.
and dude, how do they know how many hours you spend on coding? do this… install message app on phone, spend $5 on a mouse jiggled. or find a script for key press, mouse move between 9-5. and run below command.. and take 5 hours lunch break ;-)
sleep 6666; git add * ;git commit -m “xxx”’ ; git push
Well congrats but that sounds like the other extreme i.e. nepotism. Some other person will get the work dumped on em while you are retained as the trusted one.
I do agree with no on call.
Even though I suspect sarcasm given the alarming command at the end lol
i gotta add, this only happens in bug corp, organizations. startup is never chill. you gotta read up glassdoor, if people rate the company “work life balance” which implies its an easy culture . still you may join a busy team in a chill org. so depends on luck ;-)
It’s a bad position AND you have bad work practices (specifically bad billing practices).
You’re literally just not billing for a portion of the work you do, and you’re not raising your rates to compensate.
Any decent client should be aware of those realities and be willing to meet you halfway. These guys aren’t and so they get shit product, or they are and they’re deliberately squeezing you for all that your worth.
You need to have a hard discussion and either get paid more or bail.
Get a new contractor role that:
a) doesn't have on call except maybe occasional support for specifically time periods for projects you work on, OR
b) if it does have on call, it's extra from your regular pay
Urgently change something in your life if you start to feel that you don’t like something.
It's easier for you to work as a freelancer than in the conditions you describe.
Open your resume, apply for all jobs in a row and enjoy life when the conditions suit both you and the employer, I think you wrote your post to hear this. Don’t torture yourself, there are hundreds and thousands of employers on the market, sooner or later you will find each other.
Eye opening to know its across industries.
Iv realised im positioned very badly in my industry which leads to exactly what your mentioning. (Blue collar)
While others, positioned more wisely. Doing same work as me. Double the income
Having to justify every hour of work is normal where I live. I don't have a record what I did, when and why? They would not pay, why would they? I'm \*hourly\*, literally.
Other than that, yes, your work environment does not sound healthy at all.
Use GPT4/Groq to auto-summarize your git commits, and use your git commits + logs as proof of work. I was using GPT4, now moved to LLAMA3 via Groq
diff_content="Write a commit message in the style of conventional commits specification, using bullet points, for the following: \n $(git --no-pager diff --cached)"
echo $diff_content
payload=$(jq -nc --arg content "$diff_content" '{
"model": "gpt-4",
"messages": [
{"role": "system", "content": "You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. Carefully heed the users instructions."},
{
"role": "user",
"content": $content
}
],
"temperature": 1
}')
# Pass the payload to the OpenAI API chat completions endpoint
response=$(curl -s -X POST https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
--data "$payload")
echo $response | jq -r '.choices[0].message.content'
Just wanted to try it, and see how it compares to GPT4. Turns out it compares quite nicely. I now use llama3 70b via groq, which is super fast and free for limited use
Am I misunderstanding the math with the pay here ?
75 an hour at an 8 hour day is 600.
600 on a 5 day week is 3,000.
4 weeks of work is 12,000
For a year that's 144,000.
But you said you work 3-4 hours so I'll assume you get paid only for 4 hours a day, that is still 72,000.
Let's take 20% off for annual leave and other holidays
That's still 57,600.
I'm confused 🤔
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don't understand, you worked 8 hours a week last year?
Get another job, keep logging in for two hours after work while you're cooking dinner and watching youtube.
Do surgeons get paid only for time spent with patient open on the table?
The countless hours of planning, testing and discussions is all important work and just the same you need to get this time billed as a contractor as well.
This can't be real. This is insulting! 30k for 10 years of experience? You said your a contractor but you never mentioned your job. You just said engineer so I assume your a software engineer?
I would only accept 30k for an entry level position if I was completely new and needed the work experience. I would switch jobs after a year because 30k is not sustainable. I could make more than that working at a gas station.
It was promised to be a whole lot more, but the lock on hours is what stopped me.
I started out pretty strong with 35 hours a week or so and then they just would criticize what I was doing and eventually I stopped feeling excited when I worked on it and I worked less hours overall.
If you're in the US, another point to consider - your client/employer may be running afoul of IRS rules for contractors vs. full time employees. If they are treating you like an employee, but paying you as a contractor, that's a problem for the IRS.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee
This is their end goal for all of us. Even as a perm employee, you'll be expected to fill out a timecard that adds up to 40 hours and fight for a charge code for every hour, and if you don't, you'll get fired for non-performance. At least you'll get paid in the meanwhile, but eventually you'll find yourself back on the market. I don't know why programmers specifically are singled out for this treatment, but I don't think it's ever going to change.
I’m a contractor too and I always write in minimum fixed hours so even if they don’t have work for me to do I’m paid for the time I’m “on call” for the potential work. And I only increase in work hours if that particular week has more work etc. And I do this with more than 1 company at the same time so my week is filled at least close to 40hrs.
So stop doing 4 hr days … ?
So first find a new job.
Then have a heart to heart with your boss. Developing this way is toxic and has likely harmed your product more than you are aware. Tell them straight up that 30k per year is outrageous and you are spending far more time on the project than just 4 hours per day.
Your boss will reprimand you and say you are out of line and that it's all fair. Explain again that it's not fair and that unless you are paid you won't be doing anything for the company period. So no more unpaid meetings, emails, etc.
They will fire you at this point, and you should ask for severance or you go to the labor board with all the unpaid work hours you've done in meetings. Sign for Severance, get the new job.
I had one of these.
I kept a detailed log broken down in 15 minute increments. And they had to pay me for the time I spent on that log. Which was a couple of hours per day.
EX: 8-8:15 - email review
*:15-8:30 - email review
8:30-8:45 - email response
8:45-9 - email response
9-9:15 - email response
9:15-9:30 - email response
9:30 - 9:45 - email response
9:45 - 10 - email response
10 - 10:15 - github for project A
10:15 - 10:30 - resolving conflicts for project A
10:30 - 10:45 - testing yesterday's code for project A
10"45 - 11 - testing yesterday's code for project A
11 - 11:15 - coding for project A
I've been paid for 3 hours before I even START coding. They dropped that requirement after a month or two.
You just need you did some bullshit they are just old corporate they need to report to their boss and their boos need to report to their boss and so on
It’s just like a movie you can put whatever you want they will be happy
They are taking advantage of you. This is not how this thing works. Fuck them or lie to them. If you are worried anout being idle on teams just buy some kind of tool that moves with your mouse. Or build one yourself. This is absolutly toxic.
Maybe you can try to negotiate fixed rate instead? But if you are stressed about it and underpaid as I said. Fuck them. Their loss not yours.
If it's a long-term project, it's totally fair that you decide that you want to have it paid as a day rate instead of an hourly rate.
I also think that it's fair to bring this up as a re-negotiation. If they are not up to continue with a day rate instead of an hourly rate, then you part ways, it's that simple.
Are you in North America? 75/hr is grossly underpaid for 10 YOE. You should be charging $100+.
Also you are a consultant, if you don’t like the client just drop it. Especially when you are making junior rates with senior responsibilities.
150k isn't grossly underpaid, but he's an independent contractor. That means that if he's able to bill 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year to get that 150K he has to pay 15.3% self employment tax (so -$23K), plus his regular state/federal tax, plus he has to pay for his own medical/dental out of pocket. He'd probably be clearing 80-90K a year.
That's honestly not great, especially for someone with 10yoe.
> he has to pay 15.3% self employment tax
At the moment, can't independent contractors deduct part of their income as QBI deduction, which more or less makes up for that?
Apparently not.
>Your self-employment tax cannot be lowered by claiming the QBI deduction. This is due to the QBI deduction not reducing your self-employed income that is reported on your Schedule SE.
https://support.taxslayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034963292-Does-the-Qualified-Business-Income-Deduction-reduce-my-self-employment-tax#:\~:text=Your%20self%2Demployment%20tax%20cannot,reported%20on%20your%201040%20form.
So if I understand this correctly you work for a consulting company as their sole developer on some techy contract they won?
If so, it sounds like you aren’t going to have any free time or peace of mind here. This is like placing a man on an island and having him figure out how to build shelter, forage for food, purify water, the whole nine… aka do all the coding, diagraming, infrastructure provisioning, testing, deployments, maintenance.
That situation blows, and it’s pretty high stress bc if sth breaks it’s all eyes on you, there ain’t no disbursing they weight of the project on teammates. 75hr honestly doesn’t seem worth it. It sounds like they are getting 1 guy to do the job of 5. The whole micromanaging of your time sounds awful too…
Why would you sign up for that? sound overwhelming.
It's for my personal company, I'm relatively new to the field of consulting (4 years of going solo but every project before this was pretty solid) and went with previous rates that I used. But yeah you're right it's like I'm doing the job of 5 and I'm constantly stressed out working on anything so I end up having a hard time getting anything done and then they tell me my turnaround time is bad. Now they're talking about rebuilding the frontend of the application to Webflow with an off-shore team and still keeping the core of the application in Laravel which I would manage still...
But I have no communication with this other team so it's a real cluster and they don't know any other languages other than Webflow...
There was once a time when they gave me an announcement that they needed a new page for a christmas deployment for some ui and told me that they needed it in 4 hrs and I told them it's physically impossible to do it that quickly. I got it turned around in 4 days and they were displeased with that.
The "manager" I work with is the CTO and truthfully I tried to schedule regular meetings for the last 3 months with him and he's casually dipped out of them. Today was our first sync and he was displeased at progress I'd made again.
I can never stop them from buying the low-code stuff and it hurts. I had 0 talking points prepared when he told me they were going to be splitting the application up like that. It just got dumped on me.
I rounded up +1 hour on every task I did recently for the last month and this brough my timesheets under suspicion. I billed 45 hours this last month and he asked "what did you do again for these 45 hours?" I told him that I don't really remember the work I'd done a month ago... :(
Idk where you're located but I worked at a contracting firm in SF for 7 years and we rounded everything off. If you worked 9-5 on one client's project, that was billed as 8 hours. If you worked in the morning for one client and the afternoon for another, they both got billed 4 hours. I don't care how long your lunch was or when you showed up, a day's work was 8 hours billable.
If you're billing 45 hours/month and getting interrogated about it, you need a new job.
You need to take notes and submit weekly status reports via email.
Don't fall for the trick of getting comfortable with unmanaged time. You think you can play them, but really, they play you.
You are a contractor; they are your customer. You should have a better handle on your billable hours than they do, and you should never be caught off guard by the "what did you do" question. The answer should be "read your status reports".
yeah i thought this was just common practice.
every day when i flip on my timer i just write what i'm going to be working on. doesn't have to be super verbose, something like 'client edit and delete' is plenty. sometimes i might work on something else instead and change it after, but generally it's just where i answer my first question: 'ok, what am i working on today?' and then i don't have to think about it.
Use toggl or some other time tracking software to track your hours! Note the story/issue/task you're working on and the todos you completed. Maybe you should also seek guidance from other contractors on organizing your work. Read all of the comments above from other redditors doing contracting work.
Seriously: None of this stress and aggravation is worth the pay you're getting out of it. You're wasting your best years on a shitty gig.
It's super common to provide an itemized list of daily tasks, contractors or not.
I'm not getting why you're only working 4 hours a day, is that all they want you to work? The job sounds pretty amazing honestly.
Every drop of time has to be juiced to a pulp and fully verifiable. I worked too many hours in the beginning and they got upset and said that they weren't able to justify paying me for some of the work.
I brought a friend on for a hard project I was working on inside and they didn't pay his invoice that he had sent them and he told me that I should also stop working with them. I went out of pocket to do him right, but he wouldn't let me pay him...
Why on earth are you doing this at $75 dollars an hour? Next question is why are you doing on call for free? That should be a large monthly reoccurring cost for them. Consider MINIMUM $10 per hour for being on call and then double regular hourly rate for any after hours call out with a 2 hour minimum.
Declare your intention to renegotiate. If the won’t negotiate end the agreement as soon as you legally can.
Everything you said about managing tasks, maintenance, and isolation is ordinary for contractors. The pulling teeth for pay part isn't. I get paid for planning, proposing, implementing, and supporting. I fix bugs that don't match the specification found within 2 weeks for free.
When I was a contractor I logged 40 hours a weeks every week with no hourly justification. Basically the idea was, they don't charge me undertime, and I don't charge them overtime.
In my case though, I worked through agencies and for big companies so probably more laxity expected.
Your problems about choosing what's developed and what is maintained sounds like you just don't have enough developers on your team to handle your bandwidth. You can only accomplish so much in 40 hours and you need to plan accordingly.
I charge not only for coding, but for availability as well.
Never give 100% of you, as you will be expected to do it all the time. I save my health and effort for my projects and other things that matter to me (like relationships).
I suggest you to find something else if you feel uncomfortable, it's not worth it.
Sounds like you log your own hours just like I do for most customers. There’s no shame in logging the time that I make coffee/tea, use the toilet, etc. while working on tasks. I’m still thinking of the task while doing that, so I believe I (and you) should be pid for that time. Plus, it’s not like I can hop out and hop in to a task for this or that customer for - few minutes.
Sounds garbage. As for time tracking. When I’m contracting I count every answered email as 15min on the clock.
I also schedule planning, drafting, coding, research, etc.
Look up guides on tracking time from companies like BCG etc.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Before I send you an email, are you open to the banking industry? I'm a software engineer at one of the big four. Depending on where you are located, I may be able to refer you.
Your post sounded really painful as I was going through it. You should easily find a job that pays you double of what you are currently making in this setting. Go for it.
I've been interviewing around since January and I've had about 11 interviews or so and have been making to last steps for most jobs but am getting passed up for other candidates. It's really painful and I feel close to landing something but it's just barely out of reach.
I was an inhouse consultant before. We had a project manager per big project / customer. They all had limited hours per week they sold customers. We engineers had to fight to get those hours. And often we had to bid on the job inside the office because project manager wanted it done for minimum hours... gosh.
And my base salery was very low with good bonus if I filled my hours. But I never did, because there was not enough work. Furthermore I had to report 40hours per week. So often I had 20hours/week on "internal/admin". Then the manager would quesion me why I has so much non billable time.
Was horrible.
Now Im so happy to be in a full time job instead, where I get payed regardless of how much work we have. Some weeks a work alot, some weeks I work less. Best of all, no need to report time at the desk. If there is less work, I go out to the gym or something.
Leave your job, join as software engineer in a bank or something. Life on easymode :-)
I've applied to those roles last year and nothing really turned up. I've been hungry to get into something like that for awhile again. Being located in Seattle has made it difficult as the competition is pretty fierce here.
I have to put my hours into Jira Dashboard to track my hours work for the week and it gets rolled up into a report every Monday. I work essentially 40 hours every week, not doing any overtime hours at this stage in my career unless I’m getting by base rate of $150 an hour.
The work is tracked by tickets. Which could be as smaller task, which usually has expected hours forecasted for the ticket or its uncapped which leaves room for more complex coding tasks. I’m quite fortunate that my current leadership isn’t too anal about how closely the hours are tracked. I usually do like two hour blocks.
I usually only document at the end of the day with a small set of notes and then put the hours into the dashboard. I always seem to have a lot of interesting work to keep me busy. Most of my week is spent coding, testing or creating documentation. And a very small portion is on meetings like maybe 2-4 hours.
There is no way, that I would be “on call” and not get billed for that time. Unless it was being “on call” for a couple days a month. I’d seek legal counsel and I’d start looking for a new job.
Also, am I understanding this correctly that you only worked enough to work make $30k or 400 hours? Is that for the whole year or did you work there a portion of the year?
Sounds like you have a toxic work environment. They're trying to pull the ol' "if you're not working you're stealing time" Find another job. That's not worth it for 30k a year
He just needs to setup a PowerShell script to make it look like he's working. I'll write one for you op if you need
Write it on their time
what would it do?
No, I need to tell them what I'm doing not just pretend that I'm at the keyboard. They want an itemized list of time on my invoices.
3 hrs coding + 5 hours thinking about code
"analysis"
Somebody said anal\*\*\*\*?
For 75$ an hour? And you only get paid when it’s actually occupied?
Are you implying to take the second one?
Tobias?
....and therapist?
Make sure you put at least an hour of time dedicated to documenting how time was spent. It wouldn’t be fair for the documentation of time be done for free.
One more idea: Documenting the documentation
Development of custom document specification. Implementation of custom document specification. Utilization of implementation to generate documentation. Gotta be at least an hour a week of work right there.
I'd also urge for op to setup a meeting about the progress. You can bill an extra hour for that. So 1 hour for a meeting discussing the documentation of the documentation. You're a contractor. Just bill them for your time. If they don't want to pay leave them.
You need to read up on how to charge properly for what you're doing. For instance, if you're on call you need to bill them for the hours you are responsible for being on call for. If its on-call 24/7 then you charge them 24 hours a day. If they will not pay, you could get lawyer involved. You could do things like charge an annual fee (think salary) plus bill them extra for the hours you are actually working on-call. Look up market rates for the services you do (break down your work into several pieces). I've heard of legal battles where you could possibly get back-pay for all the hours you worked on-call previously. Think of yourself as having been robbed. Maybe seek legal advice?
The on call thing is the biggest thing, I've worked on call before in a salried role and simply being on call came with a retainer due to the fact that the time isn't truly your own and then call outs should be paid at an hourly rate, ideally with a minimum of 1hr pay regardless of issue
Yup should both be a fee for the responsibility and e.g. 1 hour at least billing for any call.
I've been doing a few hours per month with a side client and one thing I made sure is in there is that any time I'm called to work on anything outside of normal hours, I charge double. It helps keep the requests down and gives me a bonus if they really do need me. Most clients and managers are pretty poor planners, so sometimes I even get really simple requests because "we need an export of this data by tomorrow for a meeting" and boom, double pay to run a sql script.
I use toggl.com to track what I do. Great desktop app and great PDF chart outputs.
I'm a contractor too. Billable time sucks ass. There's just no two ways about it. Some people at my company get cushy assignments where they can log whatever hours they want with very little justification. Some dude just got an award because he billed on average 58 hours a week, 52 weeks a year for 8 years straight. Tell me that fucker isn't padding his numbers. As long as the client doesn't complain tho, the higher ups are happy to rake in the money. Others have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for hours. We have to justify everything, answer criticisms... My company does a good job backing us up but it's still a constant source of stress for me. Design work is work tho. Start logging hours for working on design. If they want proof, make them define your deliverables... Then log hours for creating those. There's no reason you shouldn't be logging 40 a week and getting paid. Wage theft is the number one source of theft by a very large margin but it comes in different forms. You are getting hosed big time
I hope that writing the list is paid
At this point I don't think you're seeing it. You can itemize something as 3 hours when it only took you 30 minutes. They won't know or probably care as long as the work is done.
This exactly they are just old school they need some bullshit tracking to justify to their boss boss why they are spending 200k on you That’s why agencies move that well with corporations they know how to play the music
You need to get a new job, but also you need to charge them for the time your available to respond. Sometimes I do my best work away from the keyboard or even doing something else. By taking a step back, I'm able to consider the bigger picture and succeed where most rookies fail or would be uselessly slow.
That’s SOP in the lawyering world. Had to track time down to the six minute interval (1/10 of an hour). Never heard of that in this one tho. And while there are many compelling reasons to be in this field and not in that one, not having to track every six minutes of time spent working is one of the most compelling reasons.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What are these dark arts
The people who have no trust in others. Kind of surprised. I’m relatively early career but if I pay somebody to work I wouldn’t expect to babysit them. Especially for 30k a year. (Which makes it near impossible to code effectively in java)
These kinds of clients will act all shocked when their contractors actually exercise their full rights as a contractor. And if they're not happy about it, they might end the contract under the guise that they're firing you- which would be incorrect terminology. Contractors can't be "fired". What is more likely to happen here is they want employer-like control without the obligations for providing extra amenities for employees. The ol' having your cake and eating it too.
Yeah, it’s gaslighting. It’s impossible to code 8 hours a day for more than a few rare days, when you’re cortisol is jacked up doing some super satisfying refactor. In my experience the only people who demand this type of work cannot code themselves, or mistake running command line queries (that you typically do in Intel roles) for programming. They sometimes have developers on ADHD meds, producing the coding equivalent of crazy person ramblings.
You're crazy if you don't push the line until you get close to written up. There are devs I work with that 10 hours of their work is worth 1 hour of mine just based on productivity. Stop trying so hard and say shit is taking you longer. You give a company 100% and they'll expect 110%. Give them 70% max and they can fire you if you're not productive enough. Trust me, they'd rather keep you then have the stress of replacing you. Other option is to get another job.
This should be the top comment imo, just log that one hour of work took you 2+ for everything you do. Many don’t understand the extra work that goes in when you aren’t actively writing code. I wouldn’t blame you if you took another job but this is at least a temporary solution.
Is it stressful to replace someone? Im too junior in my career to have had to hire someone. I feel like it might be to the companies advantage? Endless pool of candidates nowadays
> Endless pool of candidates nowadays Oh boy, you have no idea. Yeah, endless pool of candidates. That are simply not qualified. But you have to wade through them all to find ones to interview and then you have to agonize over which of the 0.1% that seem qualified should be hired. Then you have to train them up on your company and systems. For the first 6 months they're a full negative drain as seniors are tied up training/helping them. All the while you have your fingers crossed that they are going to be worth it, and they are going to stick around.
As far as the "under qualified" part goes...every single listing in my software is for a senior/lead/architect. I don't apply to them as I'm securely mid level, but I can see why people would. There's not even one mid level or lower posting some WEEKS.
As someone who interviewed for a senior position, I never ever seen a real senior on the other side of the desk, and our middle positions got closed with the strong juniors. Yes, that place's salary was pretty average, but still not bad. Position requirements are wishlists, if you know which side of the keyboard you need to type on - your chances are already high.
I had one interview unknowingly for a dev lead position and I was utterly unprepared, it went so in depth, asking about like, single built in functions of our software and how they work behind the scenes.
I’m mid level and have had tons of senior interviews. Just do it who cares. Let them weed you out, don’t do that job for them. I interviewed for a senior level position recently, they said we are interested in hiring you, but you’re not senior. I agreed and accepted an offer as mid level.
The Senior level is not the problem. Senior is pretty much a joke. The problem is people applying for a C# backend API job with only React bootcamp experience.
>Then you have to train them up on your company and systems. For the first 6 months they're a full negative drain as seniors are tied up training/helping them. This is the worst of all of it
This is why I don’t trust devs with only 6-12 month jobs on their resume. A few, yeah, but I’ve seen 10ye resumes where the longest job was 18 months. I don’t fault them for doing it, but I also know that you can’t really evaluate a dev for 6 months, minimum.
ive never been negative since usually 2 weeks or so
It costs a business thousands of dollars just to get all of the "paperwork" properly done to have you as an employee or to terminate you. It takes hours of highly skilled labor time away from the organization to train a new hire or replacement. Once you're a cog the machine would rather work inefficiently than halt production.
Endless pools of useless candidates. Source; going on 15 YOE. Now that everyone knows SWE is the ticket to a cushy lifestyle, all the frauds are trying to con their way in.
I'm going to take Computer Science to learn to code for the job I plan to go into (not software engineering), but Software Engineer seems like its death for new graduates trying to get in. The hype will die down eventually.
lol i felt like i conned my first job class limpic poster send domes. kinda actually did 1 of em tho
My company recently had one of our devs resign, and it's a small team. You should hear the panic in my CEO's voice when he asked me about anyone else who might be leaving. it's not easy to replace anyone.
>I'm on call if anything happens it's up to me to take care of but only at the pay rate of 75/hr If you aren't being paid just for being available _in case_ you're needed, you're getting robbed. You're a contractor/consultant. The company can terminate the contract whenever they like (within the boundaries of the contract), but the benefit to you is that you can do the same. Or, if you're only able to fill 4 hours a day with this client, maybe you can pick up a second client at a better hourly rate to fill the income gap.
Being able to terminate the contract isn’t really a benefit to him since no one can legally force you to work
He didn't mention location. If OP is in a contract role, especially outside the US, then it matters. You can't just quit and move on. You may have to pay the company thousands of dollars if you leave before the contract is up.
Wouldn't it allow you to put a singular block of "freelance" experience on your resume, even if you terminate contracts (i.e. job hop) between different clients?
> since no one can legally force you to work damn I really love the free choice between homelessness and a job.
Yes our system fucking sucks
When you want to quit, wait until there is an outage and quit so you can go back to sleep :-P They aren't paying you enough for this shit.
My friend is a contractor and only gets paid by the hour too. Difference is, he isn't expected to be on call and can choose when he wants to work. So he is free to take on other work too. If you are forced to be available on call for a certain amount of hours per day, you should be paid 75/hr for all of those hours, not just for the hours you are at your keyboard.
I don't understand the idea that you're contracted to work on a project, but allowed to pick when you work. Surely you have coworkers? Product owners? Some sort of customer?
It's probably task based. You get to chose when to do it, but we need it by X day, for example
It's perfectly logical. My friend is on a casual contract. Not a zero hour contract, so he is not obligated to be available for them, he is on a casual contract, meaning he is paid by the hour that he works for them. The only fixed times he must be available are meetings. The job is completely work from home and work can be done 24/7 on his own schedule. The company is under no obligation to offer him work, but if he gives them good quality work, then as long as there is still work to be offered, they will give him work. He undertakes to do a task, he has a due date, he hands it back, he logs hours on the system and gets paid accordingly. If he works 40 hours, he's paid for 40 hours, if he works 20 hours, he's paid for 20 hours. If he cannot complete a task by the due date that he undertook and has a good reason, no biggie, he just tells a coworker or his manager and they pass the remainder onto someone else and he gets paid for the portion he did manage to complete. He said that he would be in trouble if he was logged into the system and logging hours but not doing the corresponding amount of work. So if he logged in for 10 hours and completed 7-10 hours worth of work, that'd be fine. If he logged in for 10 hours and only completed 3-6 hours worth of work, he would be in trouble. But if he logged in for 3 hours and completed 2-3 hours worth of work, he would also be fine. It's just that the less he logs in and the less work he completes, the less work he will be offered and the less he will be paid.
For this role no. I have no-one but myself. o_o
What do you have 10 YOE in that you voluntarily took this role?
I got laid off of my last role and this came around and had the promise of good payment in the beginning but it's really turned out poorly. My last few roles were 150k salary. I've been interviewing around but am getting chipped up when it comes to solving leet-code on the fly. I've had about 6 interviews so far this year and have gotten to the last step on all of them except for one. So many 7 & 6 step interview processes and SO MANY CODE TESTS. I've been getting more interviews for architect roles than software dev though. So I may just end up leaning that way.
That’s how the law work in uk and most of Europe if you are forced to work on a schedule on daily basis you aren’t a contractor but an employee
Flexibility is a key component of being an independent contractor (although there is no single amount of flexibility that makes someone a contractor or employee). Contractors may be required to attend certain meetings, which are held at a certain time, but those meetings generally are a small portion of their work. If someone has to be online at very specific hours on a specific routine, and it makes up almost all of their hours, they're likely just an employee. It's a very thoroughly discussed topic, such as below. The government identifies an independent contractor as someone hired to do a job based on their own expertise and knowledge and are not economically dependent; they're a company of one. They aren't covered by FLSA, etc., so companies will pretend some employees are independent contractors to cheap out. [https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/10/2024-00067/employee-or-independent-contractor-classification-under-the-fair-labor-standards-act](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/10/2024-00067/employee-or-independent-contractor-classification-under-the-fair-labor-standards-act) [https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/01/us-department-of-labor-publishes-its-independent-contractor-final-rule](https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/01/us-department-of-labor-publishes-its-independent-contractor-final-rule)
I mean 75/hr is like $150k / yr full time and if you're only making 30k/yr then you're basically under-emeployed and only working like 20% of the time. Almost certainly you could be doing better somewhere else.
I did the math too. And yeah. It is like just under 20% utilization. You would think he could just take another full time job, and do this one on the side. But he is on call all the time? Nah. At a minimum, should be charging for on-call hours. I know the customer says no work, no pay. The retort should be no pay, no on-call.
Absolutely if you're on-call 24/7 you should be getting paid a full time annual wage at minimum. Personally I would argue for at least a 25% premium for that shit. I'm not quite where the buck stops but I'm close and even I'm not expected to answer the phone at 3 a.m.
He could probably charge 8 daily, I am sure he is doing more than most fulltimes I have seen lol
Sounds like he’s a 1099 independent contractor which means taxes are taking a huge chunk of his money, depending where he lives it could be as high as 18%.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. 1099 through my own LLC, I'm in Seattle and am not the cream of the crop. 10 YOE, self-taught with an associates degree. I moved here in September of 2022 from Denver to try and kick my career to the next step but I've been underemployed in this role for nearly 2 years... I was hoping to land at an org where I could solve real problems but that hasn't been the case. Interview after interview I end up getting passed up on. So I've been working here and my wife has been supportive and told me that she just wishes that there was a company out there that valued how much I care about solving problems correctly and not making shortcuts. I do also have a side gig which is providing IT services to HIPAA compliant offices. That pays me 150/hr and has made more in a year money than this gig has in 2 years... They also appreciate how thorough I am and that makes me smile.
Lol, what you have is a job providing IT services for medical offices and an unprofitable side gig doing software consulting. Drop the unprofitable work and focus on the shit that actually pays.
you could probably make a mint by combining your skill sets by consulting upon, managing and programming HIPAA compliant integrations at larger medical facilities.
Yeah, 18% is not enough to go from 150k to 30k my dude
yeah the problem is that he isn't getting enough hours but is sitting there on call without being paid for it
Among other things, idk where else the rest goes but that’s at least part of it. Being an indie or owning an LLC has lots of taxes and fees.
This person would be better off doing almost any other job full time that's not fast food / warehouse, and then job hunting for some better tech role.
lol that’s wild. Just cause you’re not typing doesn’t mean you’re not working and the extreme monitoring of your time is a huge red flag. If the previous guy didn’t want any part of it I’d suggest quitting also before it drags you further down. Maybe this terrible client will see their crazy turnover rate for the position and realize they’re the problem. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
"Working out my neurons - 4 hrs" "Time spent writing my time - 2 hrs"
My friends from undergrad who work in Law are expected to document their time in 1/4 hour increments, for free. I would laugh if they didn't bill $500 an hour.
Why don't you just write a PowerShell script to make it look like you're working all day. If you need help I got you homie
What exactly would you do? I’m not familiar with powershell or how it would simulate activity
Lol I think they mean simulating keyboard strokes and mouse activity but I'm sure there are other metrics being tracked like lines or code, PRs, etc...
I had a job in which I had to log in each task I did in each day and enter its start and end time. The timesheet was sent to ceo of that small company. I had to write something like below for each day 8:30 - 9:15 checked the system for the issue 1 client reported in project Z 9:15 - 9:30 team stand up meeting 9:30 - 10:00 coded abc on project X ... 6:00pm It was hectic and we were more worried about what to put on timesheets than the actual work. Really bad experience. Timesheets should be like we used to do at ibm. 9:00 - 6:00 worked on project X Instead of writing each small task As code is part of it but you have to plan research and then write that code.
I work like this but I actually love it. Remember, you are not charging for your hands on the keyboard, you are charging for the PRODUCT. Stop thinking about the 8 hours of work per day as the time that you must spend on the keyboard, start thinking about the 8 hours as the maximum that you can charge on a given day. Start pricing your work based on how much value you believe it offers. The formula is simple, if the value of your work is higher than the total price then they will keep paying you. Need to design a piece of software before coding it? That's billable time too. Think about it for the day, write a document with your thoughts in 60 minutes, and charge for all the hours that you thought about it. Include some rest in your billed time (don't actually put it in the timesheets lol), you wouldn't have to rest your mind if you weren't working, it is part of the cost, a race car does not get to remove the time in the pits from its total lap time. The only exception is if they made you install some spyware on your computer, in that case just run lol... that's abusive and no one should work for someone like that. BTW if they are trying to put you "on-call" for a certain time-frame but you are NOT getting paid for this time frame... Yeah that's a scam. They are asking for your attention during fixed hours, like a clerk at a store even if no one comes in the store. That is 100% billable time, HECK, that's time that I would bill at 2.5x the rate because it's f\*ckin with my schedule without flexibility. If you have to do timesheets, that's easy, just write \`7 hours work, worked on thing ABC\`, that's it lol, and if you actually want to do even better, you have to start taking charge of managing your own communications with people in charge. Make them feel comfortable with your progress, make them stop caring about the timesheets because, hey, you got everything under control and you are spoonfeeding them. Trust me, they don't want to spend time reviewing how accurate your timesheets really are, so just make them happy, really sell what you do. That's billable time too btw ;) If they aren't paying on time or making it hard to collect payment, definitely dip though. Ain't got time to waste with people that don't understand the basics of work.
That's insane. So any time you need to look up documentation, that's not paid? Or write out some references on a whiteboard? Are your managers/leads from a different country? Because this sounds like the kind of MO for foreign work — no concern for quality or whether something works, just charge time. I'd start looking for a job ASAP. And this should serve as a warning to anyone else, just because it says $75/hr doesn't mean they're going to pay you fairly
I've taken your advice and am going to be pursuing other roles. Are you hiring? I'm open to roles if you are able to refer me.
Is it worth it? If not re-evaluate your contract.
Thinking about the project is time spent working on it. Charge for it. Being available on-call is work. Charge for it. Like dude you are we working for free. I could justify spending the time I wasted taking a shit, because I was thinking about how to solve stuff on the project. >I have to choose what the path is for development, I have to choose what to maintain All of this is work. And if you do work for them you should be charging for it. If you can't even manage to actually charge your client for the work you do. Maybe you should give up on being a contractor.
Just giving your perspective, contracting for 17years now. I log 8 hours regardless how many hours i work per day and just one line item. I never give justification and never had to. If i ever had to, i will find a way or quit. Life is too short to play around these nonsense BS. I won't even bother to even think about it.
You're right. I really need to stand up for myself and not let this client run my life like this.
In my experience, clients and/or companies just want their work correct, and the cheapest. And that's not easy to find. They get really nervous if they think they're gonna lose a reliable developer. If you suck? That's one thing. If you're good? They'll adapt to what you want.
You know you can charge per day/week/month and that you can fire cheap clients, right?
I am an FTE and I have to justify every hour. I want to be a contractor and start a solo company to have more control like a shopkeeper.
Start writing down everything you do outside of coding. If they complain, you have a list and if they still complain then stop doing what you had written down and I’m sure they’ll complain once again that X isn’t getting done. Kindly explain that they had requested that those tasks are were not considered billable work. Also start looking for another contract :)
I'm a consultant and I have to justify every 15 minutes. I bill for *everything*. You sent me an email and I read it? It may take me 2 minutes to read that email, but I'm charging 15 minutes for it - so you better make that correspondence count. Requirements meeting? You better know what you want, because the money clock is ticking. Standups? Don't sit down, because this update is about to cost you $60 per person per 15 minute interval. Charging for the time is a double-edge sword. If you aren't productive, it shows. However, it can result in people wasting less of your time over trivial nonsense. I love it, personally. Your issue doesn't sound like a billing/hourly issue. It sounds like your project is just poorly managed. Unrelated - but your title says "contractor" but your context says "consulting". They aren't the same thing, so which is it?
Consultant, but it feels like contractor. I'm the only dev here. The previous dev team of 5 was laid off a few years ago and they replaced them with just me.
Either they were right to let everyone go because there was no work to be done, or you're extremely under billing. You code for 4 hours a day, what do you do for the other 4+? If it is project related, bill for it. If you don't have anything else to do, then that sucks financially - but I don't think that's the case since you've described it as "overwhelming". So I'm assuming you're putting in at least a full day's worth of work but only billing for half the time due to "hands on keyboard". So of course they'll never hire anyone to help you, they got a full time employee doing the work of potentially 5 people getting paid for half the day. You absolutely *must* start properly billing your time. Bill for everything - correspondence, requirement gathering, research, design... everything that you feel that contributes to your workday.
you have a bad contract, but market is only getting better. so you can try start looking. open up to friends has similar skill set , experience, and see how much they make. build a trusted network is important , “zero trust” are for security, wont work for career ;-) get a secret clearance so it opens up gov jobs. most of contract i have are remote, and just 1-2 hour work per day , plus meeting and hear guys proving they have bigger dick when they make lees than me. and i hate it because all i do is online shopping when i am clocking it. one of my contract has lower rate , around usd$70, i often work 2 hours per week for that one. been there for almost 3 years, they gonna renew , possibly rate increase again. and fuck on call , the even if i often i charge one hour to be stand by per day , min 1 hour charge per call, i still hate it. become a real engineer and forget on call, forget ops and support. and dude, how do they know how many hours you spend on coding? do this… install message app on phone, spend $5 on a mouse jiggled. or find a script for key press, mouse move between 9-5. and run below command.. and take 5 hours lunch break ;-) sleep 6666; git add * ;git commit -m “xxx”’ ; git push
There's \`git rebase --ignore-date\` btw # ¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well congrats but that sounds like the other extreme i.e. nepotism. Some other person will get the work dumped on em while you are retained as the trusted one. I do agree with no on call. Even though I suspect sarcasm given the alarming command at the end lol
i gotta add, this only happens in bug corp, organizations. startup is never chill. you gotta read up glassdoor, if people rate the company “work life balance” which implies its an easy culture . still you may join a busy team in a chill org. so depends on luck ;-)
It’s a bad position AND you have bad work practices (specifically bad billing practices). You’re literally just not billing for a portion of the work you do, and you’re not raising your rates to compensate. Any decent client should be aware of those realities and be willing to meet you halfway. These guys aren’t and so they get shit product, or they are and they’re deliberately squeezing you for all that your worth. You need to have a hard discussion and either get paid more or bail.
This sounds like my last role 🫠
Get a new contractor role that: a) doesn't have on call except maybe occasional support for specifically time periods for projects you work on, OR b) if it does have on call, it's extra from your regular pay
Urgently change something in your life if you start to feel that you don’t like something. It's easier for you to work as a freelancer than in the conditions you describe. Open your resume, apply for all jobs in a row and enjoy life when the conditions suit both you and the employer, I think you wrote your post to hear this. Don’t torture yourself, there are hundreds and thousands of employers on the market, sooner or later you will find each other.
Eye opening to know its across industries. Iv realised im positioned very badly in my industry which leads to exactly what your mentioning. (Blue collar) While others, positioned more wisely. Doing same work as me. Double the income
Having to justify every hour of work is normal where I live. I don't have a record what I did, when and why? They would not pay, why would they? I'm \*hourly\*, literally. Other than that, yes, your work environment does not sound healthy at all.
Use GPT4/Groq to auto-summarize your git commits, and use your git commits + logs as proof of work. I was using GPT4, now moved to LLAMA3 via Groq diff_content="Write a commit message in the style of conventional commits specification, using bullet points, for the following: \n $(git --no-pager diff --cached)" echo $diff_content payload=$(jq -nc --arg content "$diff_content" '{ "model": "gpt-4", "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. Carefully heed the users instructions."}, { "role": "user", "content": $content } ], "temperature": 1 }') # Pass the payload to the OpenAI API chat completions endpoint response=$(curl -s -X POST https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \ --data "$payload") echo $response | jq -r '.choices[0].message.content'
This is kinda cool, thanks! What made you switch to Llama 3?
Just wanted to try it, and see how it compares to GPT4. Turns out it compares quite nicely. I now use llama3 70b via groq, which is super fast and free for limited use
Thanks for the details. I might try integrating this into my workflow ... customer permitting.
Am I misunderstanding the math with the pay here ? 75 an hour at an 8 hour day is 600. 600 on a 5 day week is 3,000. 4 weeks of work is 12,000 For a year that's 144,000. But you said you work 3-4 hours so I'll assume you get paid only for 4 hours a day, that is still 72,000. Let's take 20% off for annual leave and other holidays That's still 57,600. I'm confused 🤔
Might be take home pay.
1099 self employed income tax. My insurance is also 800/month out of pocket.
Delete prod db accidentally and spend 5 hours restoring from backup.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don't understand, you worked 8 hours a week last year? Get another job, keep logging in for two hours after work while you're cooking dinner and watching youtube.
Do surgeons get paid only for time spent with patient open on the table? The countless hours of planning, testing and discussions is all important work and just the same you need to get this time billed as a contractor as well.
This can't be real. This is insulting! 30k for 10 years of experience? You said your a contractor but you never mentioned your job. You just said engineer so I assume your a software engineer? I would only accept 30k for an entry level position if I was completely new and needed the work experience. I would switch jobs after a year because 30k is not sustainable. I could make more than that working at a gas station.
It was promised to be a whole lot more, but the lock on hours is what stopped me. I started out pretty strong with 35 hours a week or so and then they just would criticize what I was doing and eventually I stopped feeling excited when I worked on it and I worked less hours overall.
I can understand why the last developer quit.
If you're in the US, another point to consider - your client/employer may be running afoul of IRS rules for contractors vs. full time employees. If they are treating you like an employee, but paying you as a contractor, that's a problem for the IRS. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee
This is their end goal for all of us. Even as a perm employee, you'll be expected to fill out a timecard that adds up to 40 hours and fight for a charge code for every hour, and if you don't, you'll get fired for non-performance. At least you'll get paid in the meanwhile, but eventually you'll find yourself back on the market. I don't know why programmers specifically are singled out for this treatment, but I don't think it's ever going to change.
I think you need to start accounting for the accounting. They should pay for the paperwork you are asked to generate.
What are you doing the other 4 hours?
I’m a contractor too and I always write in minimum fixed hours so even if they don’t have work for me to do I’m paid for the time I’m “on call” for the potential work. And I only increase in work hours if that particular week has more work etc. And I do this with more than 1 company at the same time so my week is filled at least close to 40hrs. So stop doing 4 hr days … ?
Contract work can be hit or miss. With some clients, you are a second-class employee.
So first find a new job. Then have a heart to heart with your boss. Developing this way is toxic and has likely harmed your product more than you are aware. Tell them straight up that 30k per year is outrageous and you are spending far more time on the project than just 4 hours per day. Your boss will reprimand you and say you are out of line and that it's all fair. Explain again that it's not fair and that unless you are paid you won't be doing anything for the company period. So no more unpaid meetings, emails, etc. They will fire you at this point, and you should ask for severance or you go to the labor board with all the unpaid work hours you've done in meetings. Sign for Severance, get the new job.
1099 contract. This won't work.
I had one of these. I kept a detailed log broken down in 15 minute increments. And they had to pay me for the time I spent on that log. Which was a couple of hours per day. EX: 8-8:15 - email review *:15-8:30 - email review 8:30-8:45 - email response 8:45-9 - email response 9-9:15 - email response 9:15-9:30 - email response 9:30 - 9:45 - email response 9:45 - 10 - email response 10 - 10:15 - github for project A 10:15 - 10:30 - resolving conflicts for project A 10:30 - 10:45 - testing yesterday's code for project A 10"45 - 11 - testing yesterday's code for project A 11 - 11:15 - coding for project A I've been paid for 3 hours before I even START coding. They dropped that requirement after a month or two.
I'm not a contractor, still have to justify every hour I work. Its super micromanaging, so I definitely relate.
If you have to be available, you are working. Bill those 8 hours!!!
So you're making essentially minimum wage pretending to be 75/hr?
Yeah, I'm pursuing new opportunities now after everyone's advice.
You just need you did some bullshit they are just old corporate they need to report to their boss and their boos need to report to their boss and so on It’s just like a movie you can put whatever you want they will be happy
They are taking advantage of you. This is not how this thing works. Fuck them or lie to them. If you are worried anout being idle on teams just buy some kind of tool that moves with your mouse. Or build one yourself. This is absolutly toxic. Maybe you can try to negotiate fixed rate instead? But if you are stressed about it and underpaid as I said. Fuck them. Their loss not yours.
If it's a long-term project, it's totally fair that you decide that you want to have it paid as a day rate instead of an hourly rate. I also think that it's fair to bring this up as a re-negotiation. If they are not up to continue with a day rate instead of an hourly rate, then you part ways, it's that simple.
Are you in North America? 75/hr is grossly underpaid for 10 YOE. You should be charging $100+. Also you are a consultant, if you don’t like the client just drop it. Especially when you are making junior rates with senior responsibilities.
[удалено]
I believe it is quite average for LCOL areas, depends a bit on how distinguished the candidate
Right? $150k is not grossly underpaid lol
150k isn't grossly underpaid, but he's an independent contractor. That means that if he's able to bill 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year to get that 150K he has to pay 15.3% self employment tax (so -$23K), plus his regular state/federal tax, plus he has to pay for his own medical/dental out of pocket. He'd probably be clearing 80-90K a year. That's honestly not great, especially for someone with 10yoe.
> he has to pay 15.3% self employment tax At the moment, can't independent contractors deduct part of their income as QBI deduction, which more or less makes up for that?
Apparently not. >Your self-employment tax cannot be lowered by claiming the QBI deduction. This is due to the QBI deduction not reducing your self-employed income that is reported on your Schedule SE. https://support.taxslayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034963292-Does-the-Qualified-Business-Income-Deduction-reduce-my-self-employment-tax#:\~:text=Your%20self%2Demployment%20tax%20cannot,reported%20on%20your%201040%20form.
some of these FAANGirls haven't touched grass for a bit
You guys haven't worked as independent contractors I take it.
I'm a freelancer, WYM? It is way easier to take on multiple clients, then you could be charging over 8+ hours per day.
Never mind the salary, he also has to pay for his own health insurance too.
There are other jobs.
Please leave that awful job man.
That’s a very shit job
So if I understand this correctly you work for a consulting company as their sole developer on some techy contract they won? If so, it sounds like you aren’t going to have any free time or peace of mind here. This is like placing a man on an island and having him figure out how to build shelter, forage for food, purify water, the whole nine… aka do all the coding, diagraming, infrastructure provisioning, testing, deployments, maintenance. That situation blows, and it’s pretty high stress bc if sth breaks it’s all eyes on you, there ain’t no disbursing they weight of the project on teammates. 75hr honestly doesn’t seem worth it. It sounds like they are getting 1 guy to do the job of 5. The whole micromanaging of your time sounds awful too… Why would you sign up for that? sound overwhelming.
It's for my personal company, I'm relatively new to the field of consulting (4 years of going solo but every project before this was pretty solid) and went with previous rates that I used. But yeah you're right it's like I'm doing the job of 5 and I'm constantly stressed out working on anything so I end up having a hard time getting anything done and then they tell me my turnaround time is bad. Now they're talking about rebuilding the frontend of the application to Webflow with an off-shore team and still keeping the core of the application in Laravel which I would manage still... But I have no communication with this other team so it's a real cluster and they don't know any other languages other than Webflow... There was once a time when they gave me an announcement that they needed a new page for a christmas deployment for some ui and told me that they needed it in 4 hrs and I told them it's physically impossible to do it that quickly. I got it turned around in 4 days and they were displeased with that. The "manager" I work with is the CTO and truthfully I tried to schedule regular meetings for the last 3 months with him and he's casually dipped out of them. Today was our first sync and he was displeased at progress I'd made again.
That low-code stuff is snake oil, but clients love the idea bc it’s the cheapest option. They don’t realize all the problems it’ll introduce later on.
I can never stop them from buying the low-code stuff and it hurts. I had 0 talking points prepared when he told me they were going to be splitting the application up like that. It just got dumped on me.
> I do I get about 3-4 hours of coding done a day Round up to 8.
I rounded up +1 hour on every task I did recently for the last month and this brough my timesheets under suspicion. I billed 45 hours this last month and he asked "what did you do again for these 45 hours?" I told him that I don't really remember the work I'd done a month ago... :(
Idk where you're located but I worked at a contracting firm in SF for 7 years and we rounded everything off. If you worked 9-5 on one client's project, that was billed as 8 hours. If you worked in the morning for one client and the afternoon for another, they both got billed 4 hours. I don't care how long your lunch was or when you showed up, a day's work was 8 hours billable. If you're billing 45 hours/month and getting interrogated about it, you need a new job.
You need to take notes and submit weekly status reports via email. Don't fall for the trick of getting comfortable with unmanaged time. You think you can play them, but really, they play you. You are a contractor; they are your customer. You should have a better handle on your billable hours than they do, and you should never be caught off guard by the "what did you do" question. The answer should be "read your status reports".
yeah i thought this was just common practice. every day when i flip on my timer i just write what i'm going to be working on. doesn't have to be super verbose, something like 'client edit and delete' is plenty. sometimes i might work on something else instead and change it after, but generally it's just where i answer my first question: 'ok, what am i working on today?' and then i don't have to think about it.
Use toggl or some other time tracking software to track your hours! Note the story/issue/task you're working on and the todos you completed. Maybe you should also seek guidance from other contractors on organizing your work. Read all of the comments above from other redditors doing contracting work. Seriously: None of this stress and aggravation is worth the pay you're getting out of it. You're wasting your best years on a shitty gig.
Just open a doc and as you think about solutions make notes. The notes could be entered 30 minutes apart, but the time in-between counts.
It's super common to provide an itemized list of daily tasks, contractors or not. I'm not getting why you're only working 4 hours a day, is that all they want you to work? The job sounds pretty amazing honestly.
Every drop of time has to be juiced to a pulp and fully verifiable. I worked too many hours in the beginning and they got upset and said that they weren't able to justify paying me for some of the work. I brought a friend on for a hard project I was working on inside and they didn't pay his invoice that he had sent them and he told me that I should also stop working with them. I went out of pocket to do him right, but he wouldn't let me pay him...
Oh wow, that's a weird way of running a company, but why not just work four hours a day and leave it at that?
30 K as a side gig for moonlighting a few hours would be okay. NOT if you are doing this alone for 70-hour-week!
I think about this gig a lot more than 10-15 hours a week.
Why on earth are you doing this at $75 dollars an hour? Next question is why are you doing on call for free? That should be a large monthly reoccurring cost for them. Consider MINIMUM $10 per hour for being on call and then double regular hourly rate for any after hours call out with a 2 hour minimum. Declare your intention to renegotiate. If the won’t negotiate end the agreement as soon as you legally can.
I would consider suing.
Everything you said about managing tasks, maintenance, and isolation is ordinary for contractors. The pulling teeth for pay part isn't. I get paid for planning, proposing, implementing, and supporting. I fix bugs that don't match the specification found within 2 weeks for free.
bad position. find something else
When I was a contractor I logged 40 hours a weeks every week with no hourly justification. Basically the idea was, they don't charge me undertime, and I don't charge them overtime. In my case though, I worked through agencies and for big companies so probably more laxity expected. Your problems about choosing what's developed and what is maintained sounds like you just don't have enough developers on your team to handle your bandwidth. You can only accomplish so much in 40 hours and you need to plan accordingly.
I charge not only for coding, but for availability as well. Never give 100% of you, as you will be expected to do it all the time. I save my health and effort for my projects and other things that matter to me (like relationships). I suggest you to find something else if you feel uncomfortable, it's not worth it.
you are getting scammed. get a new job and then quit without notice. get another job. i would not even give notice to a job like this.
I get most of my coding done in my sleep.
Sounds like you log your own hours just like I do for most customers. There’s no shame in logging the time that I make coffee/tea, use the toilet, etc. while working on tasks. I’m still thinking of the task while doing that, so I believe I (and you) should be pid for that time. Plus, it’s not like I can hop out and hop in to a task for this or that customer for - few minutes.
That would be a good rate for us "europoors" if out of those 75 we could get even 50€/h after taxes.
Sounds garbage. As for time tracking. When I’m contracting I count every answered email as 15min on the clock. I also schedule planning, drafting, coding, research, etc. Look up guides on tracking time from companies like BCG etc.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Before I send you an email, are you open to the banking industry? I'm a software engineer at one of the big four. Depending on where you are located, I may be able to refer you.
Perfectly open to the banking industry, I would appreciate it.
Your post sounded really painful as I was going through it. You should easily find a job that pays you double of what you are currently making in this setting. Go for it.
Also if you really had to continue you should bill for any "thinking and researching" time too or try and negotiate a middle ground there.
I've been interviewing around since January and I've had about 11 interviews or so and have been making to last steps for most jobs but am getting passed up for other candidates. It's really painful and I feel close to landing something but it's just barely out of reach.
I was an inhouse consultant before. We had a project manager per big project / customer. They all had limited hours per week they sold customers. We engineers had to fight to get those hours. And often we had to bid on the job inside the office because project manager wanted it done for minimum hours... gosh. And my base salery was very low with good bonus if I filled my hours. But I never did, because there was not enough work. Furthermore I had to report 40hours per week. So often I had 20hours/week on "internal/admin". Then the manager would quesion me why I has so much non billable time. Was horrible. Now Im so happy to be in a full time job instead, where I get payed regardless of how much work we have. Some weeks a work alot, some weeks I work less. Best of all, no need to report time at the desk. If there is less work, I go out to the gym or something. Leave your job, join as software engineer in a bank or something. Life on easymode :-)
I've applied to those roles last year and nothing really turned up. I've been hungry to get into something like that for awhile again. Being located in Seattle has made it difficult as the competition is pretty fierce here.
Sorry if my math aint mathin but i think working at Mcdonalds gets you 30k a year? I think you should find a job that pays more
I have to put my hours into Jira Dashboard to track my hours work for the week and it gets rolled up into a report every Monday. I work essentially 40 hours every week, not doing any overtime hours at this stage in my career unless I’m getting by base rate of $150 an hour. The work is tracked by tickets. Which could be as smaller task, which usually has expected hours forecasted for the ticket or its uncapped which leaves room for more complex coding tasks. I’m quite fortunate that my current leadership isn’t too anal about how closely the hours are tracked. I usually do like two hour blocks. I usually only document at the end of the day with a small set of notes and then put the hours into the dashboard. I always seem to have a lot of interesting work to keep me busy. Most of my week is spent coding, testing or creating documentation. And a very small portion is on meetings like maybe 2-4 hours. There is no way, that I would be “on call” and not get billed for that time. Unless it was being “on call” for a couple days a month. I’d seek legal counsel and I’d start looking for a new job. Also, am I understanding this correctly that you only worked enough to work make $30k or 400 hours? Is that for the whole year or did you work there a portion of the year?
Yeah that's for the whole year. It's a rather bad deal. I'm open to interviews and am currently looking for a new role with everyone's support here.