Have a family and esp these employees in high CoL cities? Very tough.
Speaking from experience. Been there done that.
"We'll have all this new innovation via new startups now!" is such a feel good sentiment to layoffs but in reality is nowhere close to a solution for the affected employees
Unless you’re truly special, The days of multi hundred thousand total comp packages are over - you’d better learn to live as though you’re on a ~175k salary, and if that’s too low, start taking steps on cutting NOW
See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering
One other advantage of contracting even in a staff aug arrangement: you have some protection against overwork in that (as long as your terms are hourly) you simply charge more if you worked more that week
Often this also leads to clients being more careful about having sane workloads
One thing that I don’t see brought up enough is the different kinds of engagements a freelance developer could target:
I suspect for many of us, the easiest to find would be what’s called “staff augmentation” - basically you get inserted into an existing team in some capacity, except you’re on a contract basis so not tied down, get to negotiate your terms, don’t get employee benefits etc etc
Such engagements are often quite stable and long term (some companies are even willing to make them open ended!)
The downside is that you have less leverage to set high rates (although I’ve been able to get pretty satisfactory ones), you don’t have as much flexibility because you’re expected to be a regular member of the team and work 9-5ish hours, and you don’t get to escape the corporate/teamwork setting as much (if that was what you were looking for going freelance)
The upside is that you have to find new clients way less often, but still have the freedom to switch around as often as you want if you get bored/want to hunt for better rates etc
Now what most ppl think of freelancing is doing a single project and then either finding another one with the client or needing to find another client (eg this is most of the work on upwork)
In my short consulting career I’ve not found such work (tho haven’t been looking either) and frankly am still nervous on whether I can deliver well in such a capacity without the support of anyone else as it may. And obviously you’ll have to hunt for clients way more often with such projects.
If you reply with your email I’m happy to answer any questions or help if I think I can
Especially the typos part. In Ruby and plain JS sometimes you feel you need unit tests even for the dead simple stuff cause there might be a typo in there... and such tests are an awful chore to write and much more efficiently caught by static typing
I can understand requiring the team to be present/online during a certain chunk of the day, so that meetings can be had and people are around if others need help or need to coordinate, but, time tracking for FTEs!? I can only see the most unemployable of Engineers putting up with that shit.
There is next to none long term thinking by the American govt or corporations, period. That’s expected from publicly traded companies, and when those companies run the country too, well...
Have a family and esp these employees in high CoL cities? Very tough.
Speaking from experience. Been there done that.
"We'll have all this new innovation via new startups now!" is such a feel good sentiment to layoffs but in reality is nowhere close to a solution for the affected employees