Are You An It Contractor?

[Mr Yogi]

I don't work in IT - thankfully!

I'm a furniture maker and up to a year or so ago at least half my clients were IT contractors. I must have designed and built a dozen or more high spec home offices over a 3 or 4 year period for people just like you guys. Happy days!

I've not had an IT contractor as a client for 12 months now. I had a couple of people cancel on me last year as their contracts were not renewed and since then - nothing.

I'm still busy with work from other types of client; mainly well paid public sector workers such as doctors, coppers and teachers, but IT is obviously well fooked!

You have my sympathies. I am very glad I chose the very low-tech road. I'm India and China proof!

[Barb E Dahl]

Perfectly reasonable to take a low paid job to get yourself in the door but doing a job that requires skill, knowledge and training for less than you can get putting things in piles / boxes is ludicrous.

Surprisingly many traditionally 'low paid' jobs actually pay very well indeed. The key is the overtime. You could start on a low or the minimum wage but triple or even quadruple that amount through overtime.

Many office jobs often expect their workers to do longer hours for little or no reward. A friend who works for a big investment bank in the city, has to work 12 hour days. It's expected of them and they don't get paid extra for it!. If they refuse they soon make enemies and one way or another will lose their job. Admittedly he does get a good bonus once a year, but it's not guaranteed. Add to that the extra stress and lack of free time he now has.

What about our teachers and nurses? They'd be better off financially stacking shelves. All those unaccounted hours spent marking books, writing up reports, parents evenings, preparing lessons...

One would question who has more common sense, the shelf stacker's or the city workers.

[Mammon]

Agreed. Most the contractors I know started using offshore vehicles and went from paying a reasonable amount of tax to s0d all.

Alot of contractors used an offshore scheme that was shut down recently by HMRC using a new rule/law refered to as BN66.

These contractors have been slapped with retrospective tax going back up to seven years or so and penalities on top (ie six figure tax demands)

Alot of the guys dont have the money so its sell house or else BK for them.

They are anxiously awating a judicial review in the high court to see if BN66 is legal.

Glad i never used any of these schemes.

Edited August 19, 2009 by Mammon

[wickywackywoo]

Alot of contractors used an offshore scheme that was shut down recently by HMRC using a new rule/law refered to as BN66.

These contractors have been slapped with retrospective tax going back up to seven years or so and penalities on top (ie six figure tax demands)

Alot of the guys dont have the money so its sell house or else BK for them.

They are anxiously awating a judicial review in the high court to see if BN66 is legal.

Glad i never used any of these schemes.

Interesting. I never used any either, stuck with a limited co. I have several friends though who are still using the offshore route. I'd be very nervous about it if I was them.

[Barb E Dahl]

Bit off topic but today walking up London Bridge to work I saw a man holding a 1930' STYLE DEPRESSION CARD dressed in smart suit n tie etc

Qualified Accountant, needs a job, 078....

Wtf

Oh fantastic. A sign of things to come perhaps.

Takes some guts to advertise that you can't get a job!

[NotMyHouse]

Can you write?

Publishers like O'Reilly are always looking for professionals who know their stuff AND can write well. A typical advance is $5,000 - $10,000 for a book that takes 4 - 6 months to write in your 'spare' time. Royalties after that can be $20k/year for a decent title.

PHP, Java, C, C++, C# Objective C and SQL are all big right now.

I did that once- I co-wrote a book on a server product. It was three months of 18-hour days to get it written - I ended up writing 600 pages.

At one point, it was higher on Amazon (No. 75) than Bill Gates' latest.

As for income, forget it. It actually sold very well (over 20,000 copies IIRC) but the royalty rate was something like $1 for the first 10,000 and 50c a copy after that.

I did get an advance of a few thousand dollars, but you don't get paid any royalties until you have paid back your advance.

What it did do though was gain credibility for training gigs and for contract writing jobs working from home.

In summary, if you can do it in your "spare time", then fine. However, you won't be popular with your SO!

[Mammon]

Interesting. I never used any either, stuck with a limited co. I have several friends though who are still using the offshore route. I'd be very nervous about it if I was them.

Some schemes use offshore trusts and employee loans as a way around tax.

They promise you never have to pay the loan back.

Bu this is dodgy as you are dependant on the company to write the loan off.

Some have apparently been challenged by the IR and have proven that the money paid to contractor is a legit loan,

but they have also just proven they can legally demand the money back from the contractor and some apparently have!

[Granite]

Any chance someone could write a system to request blood tests and allow viewing, filing and actioning on results, which doesn't take 3 times as long as the old paper system?

It probably already exists. Two friends of mine did their doctorates on seperate projects producing software for the NHS. The NHS approval board changed every year and completely changed the specs of what they wanted each time. Six years after completing their PhD's (and completing the software to the point the exam board were happy) both of them were still working on their software for free, not because it didn't work, but because the NHS refused to admit it did what they wanted, because they kept changing what they wanted it to do. The eventually both decided to drop it, and the (fully working) software will never be released.

I've had my share of development hell in the private sector, but what I've been told about how the NHS handles IT had me banging my head on the wall in sympathetic frustration.

[Dave Spart]

It's surprising the amount of contractors who do this, just to get their foot through the door. Fantastic at interviews - I give them that.

I finished a contract in the City earlier this year and want to go my own way now.

The full-time guy they got in to take up the reins from me? Graduated in law in 1984 but never went on to practice. He picked up snippets of C# and SQL here and there. No formal qualifications of any kind in mathematics, actuarial mathematics or computing of any kind. I don't think he even took maths or computing to A-level. He was absolutley clueless on Excel (worksheet functions, VBA and libraries). Had also no experience of UK pensions legisation whatsoever. I could understand a little if he showed absolute brilliance but it was clear he was an average Joe who'd talked himself into a poisoned chalice.

So what did they give him? Responsibility for maintaining their online actuarial pensions quotes system written by a qualified actuary which includes degree level and actuarial mathematics such as the Newton-Raphson method for solving the roots of polynomials (like Excel's goal-seek) - all written in SQL!

I wish him luck with that. He's going to need it.

Edited August 19, 2009 by Dave Spart

[Kyoto]

A scary thread for those of us who make our living in IT. IT has experienced it's own bubble, and we now have a combination of that bubble deflating at the same time as some other trends coming home to roost.

Having said this, I actually think there will be more 'IT contractors' in the future, though the traditional engineer / body for hire will be in slow decline. Instead, I think we will migrate towards selling IT + domain knowledge and trading off our value added rather than skillset.

"Networking is the key skill for the 21st century worker. As birth rates go down, life expectancy goes up and the business world continues to downsize to a core of permanent workers, more of us will find the 21st century a tough place to make a living. More of us will find ourselves working as freelancers or as part of 'fractional teams' that come together for a project and then disband. Fewer of us will retire on a pension - choosing instead to work on a portfolio of projects."

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=67423

It's going to be hugely competitive but also rewarding if you pick the right niche, secure the right customers, and serve them well.

[wickywackywoo]

I finished a contract in the City earlier this year and want to go my own way now.

The full-time guy they got in to take up the reins from me? Graduated in law in 1984 but never went on to practice. He picked up snippets of C# and SQL here and there. No formal qualifications of any kind in mathematics, actuarial mathematics or computing of any kind. I don't think he even took maths or computing to A-level. He was absolutley clueless on Excel (worksheet functions, VBA and libraries). Had also no experience of UK pensions legisation whatsoever. I could understand a little if he showed absolute brilliance but it was clear he was an average Joe who'd talked himself into a poisoned chalice.

So what did they give him? Responsibility for maintaining their online actuarial pensions quotes system written by a qualified actuary which includes degree level and actuarial mathematics such as the Newton-Raphson method for solving the roots of polynomials (like Excel's goal-seek) - all written in SQL!

I wish him luck with that. He's going to need it.

They may end up appreciating that you get what you pay for.

[Mammon]

A scary thread for those of us who make our living in IT. IT has experienced it's own bubble, and we now have a combination of that bubble deflating at the same time as some other trends coming home to roost.

Having said this, I actually think there will be more 'IT contractors' in the future, though the traditional engineer / body for hire will be in slow decline. Instead, I think we will migrate towards selling IT + domain knowledge and trading off our value added rather than skillset.

It's going to be hugely competitive but also rewarding if you pick the right niche, secure the right customers, and serve them well.

Actually the IT job bubble was in year 2000 due to date change + dot com bubble.

The IT boom that peaked in 2007 was not as big as the one in 2000, neither number of jobs or pay rates.

Pay rates in UK IT have been nominally stagnant for the last 9 years and in real terms are down almost 50%, and thats assuming you havent taken a nominal pay cut.

I quit IT in late 2006.

Full time market speculator now.

Pretty much retired at age 35.

Speculation provides more money than IT, assuming you can get over the near vertical learning curve, but the social isolation means its a sad life.

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

I finished a contract in the City earlier this year and want to go my own way now.

The full-time guy they got in to take up the reins from me? Graduated in law in 1984 but never went on to practice. He picked up snippets of C# and SQL here and there. No formal qualifications of any kind in mathematics, actuarial mathematics or computing of any kind. I don't think he even took maths or computing to A-level. He was absolutley clueless on Excel (worksheet functions, VBA and libraries). Had also no experience of UK pensions legisation whatsoever. I could understand a little if he showed absolute brilliance but it was clear he was an average Joe who'd talked himself into a poisoned chalice.

So what did they give him? Responsibility for maintaining their online actuarial pensions quotes system written by a qualified actuary which includes degree level and actuarial mathematics such as the Newton-Raphson method for solving the roots of polynomials (like Excel's goal-seek) - all written in SQL!

I wish him luck with that. He's going to need it.

That will be an expensive way to learn a few simple software engineering lessons then.

My first blag was a job at News International where I'd claimed to be proficient in VB. Bought a book over the weekend, learned a few basics, went in. And they asked me to produce a load of graphs from excel data. I scrabbled around the help files and figured it out. Eventually did some vb, but realised my limitations and did an MSc conversion in Comp Sci the year after.

If I was stuck for work now though I'd drop my price and try and contract doing something simple/easy in the city for a bit. Once they trust you they'll let you have a go on the "big machines" and you can then gain skills in that area. If you're not proactive then forget it though. I've been at my company 10 years and I still read O'Reilly manuals and tinker with various skunkworks projects. You have to run to keep up.

[markinspain]

Without wishing to go into details, if you paid the IR35 taxes, then you had a rubbish accountant and were not sufficiently motivated to avoid it. I hardly know anyone who paid it.

From what I saw it was a classic case of a step too far tax-wise, they succeeded in annoying the taxpayers (contractors) to such an extent that they all became rabid tax-avoiders, and the overall tax take dropped instead of rising.

I'm pleased you managed to avoid paying it, but as someone who was investigated by the IR before IR35, because contractors were seen as an easy target, I wasn't prepared to take the risk on some of the more colourful schemes. At the end of the day, everyone has to evaluate in every job whether the effort is worth the remuneration, and IR35 coupled with the travelling and lack of pension ( ), sickness cover, etc

made me decide to go permie; a mistake in the end, but that's another story!

[SNACR]

My two, not particularly technical observations with IT are:

1. The golden years may be over. Insofar as the widespread conversion of processes using traditional technology to information technology. Once everything's gone from paper to digital, for example, such a large project is unlikely to come along again. Asset tracking was a big project, as an example for us, everything's got a barcode on to track it. RFID will come along, but a lot of the guts of the exisitng system will probably remain.

2. IT is almost like a company supplying headed paper and invoices to companies, if businesses aren't doing any business they don't require so much of it. IT lives of other more traditional businesses and suffers accordingly.

[bpw]

Teachers and Nurses are well paid for what they do, they earn salaries comparable to engineers in the midlands for a 30 week job. Add in their gold plated pensions, good working environment, and modest educational levels and they are clearly in the pink.

As for stacking shelves - you reckon 6GBP per hour is better than teaching!!

(Teachers - if you want to compare working environments go take a look at oilmen working in the deserts of Saudi, or miners in South Africa)

".. about our teachers and nurses? They'd be better off financially stacking shelves. All those unaccounted hours spent marking books, writing up reports, parents evenings, preparing lessons... "

[Kyoto]

Actually the IT job bubble was in year 2000 due to date change + dot com bubble.

The IT boom that peaked in 2007 was not as big as the one in 2000, neither number of jobs or pay rates.

I think we've experienced a decade long bubble starting in 1999.

What are the average salaries after training? Maybe 35k+ for the average permie, 300+ per day for the average contractor. They are still big numbers in the wider economy.

It's madness really considering it isn't really rocket science, lots of people would like to do it, there are low barriers to entry, and as a profession, I don't see how we've added the business value relative to what we've cost.

I don't know if it's just because I've felt lucky to be working in an area I love, but IT salaries and conditions have always felt vulnerable to me, as though one day someone would wake up and realise what a big scam it was.

[webchat]

I did that once- I co-wrote a book on a server product. It was three months of 18-hour days to get it written - I ended up writing 600 pages.

At one point, it was higher on Amazon (No. 75) than Bill Gates' latest.

As for income, forget it. It actually sold very well (over 20,000 copies IIRC) but the royalty rate was something like $1 for the first 10,000 and 50c a copy after that.

I did get an advance of a few thousand dollars, but you don't get paid any royalties until you have paid back your advance.

What it did do though was gain credibility for training gigs and for contract writing jobs working from home.

In summary, if you can do it in your "spare time", then fine. However, you won't be popular with your SO!

You didn't have a very good contract I'm afraid. Royalty rates should increase over a certain sales level. One of my recent contracts is for 10% up to 2,500 copies and 12.5% thereafter because, after the initial batch, all production costs have been met so they can pay you more. As a co-author that would be 5% and 6.25%.

I'm now writing about 3 books a year as I have gone full time and it's not too bad a living, although the first year of full time we relied heavily on my wife's income, while waiting for the money to come in.

Edited August 19, 2009 by webchat

[Barb E Dahl]

Teachers and Nurses are well paid for what they do, they earn salaries comparable to engineers in the midlands for a 30 week job. Add in their gold plated pensions, good working environment, and modest educational levels and they are clearly in the pink.

As for stacking shelves - you reckon 6GBP per hour is better than teaching!!

Who said anything about £6 an hour? You should re-read the thread again dear.

As I previously mentioned you can earn a very decent living through a low paid job because the overtime on offer often triples or quadruples your wage.

Teachers DO NOT get paid overtime OR bonuses for all those unaccounted hours spent marking books, writing up reports, parents evenings, preparing lessons... etc.

I do hope I will not have to repeat myself again for those inept people who cannot read properly.

[Mr Yogi]

I don't know if it's just because I've felt lucky to be working in an area I love, but IT salaries and conditions have always felt vulnerable to me, as though one day someone would wake up and realise what a big scam it was.

IT people have managed to keep this veil of mystery over what it is they actually do. The rest of the world doesn't understand the technical aspects, and doesn't want to.

It has long been my suspicion however that if one were to scratch the surface, its not actually that difficult and we've all been taken for a ride.

When I think of some of the complete knobs I know who have managed to make a very good living in IT my suspicions are confirmed.

[AteMoose]

Who said anything about £6 an hour? You should re-read the thread again dear.

As I previously mentioned you can earn a very decent living through a low paid job because the overtime on offer often triples or quadruples your wage.

Teachers DO NOT get paid overtime OR bonuses for all those unaccounted hours spent marking books, writing up reports, parents evenings, preparing lessons... etc.

I do hope I will not have to repeat myself again for those inept people who cannot read properly.

but they do get extra long holidays and weekends off. Lots of people in IT are working the days, and some evenings, nights, and weekends for a standard wage. I know I work much more hours (I do between 55 -> 70 hours a week ) than a teacher friend of mine for a salary without overtime. I love what I do but this is a global world and customers are all over the world in different timezones, and weekends are needed to do stuff when systems arent in use.

Edited August 19, 2009 by moosetea

[tim123]

It's highly unlikely an employer would turn you down simply for not having a degree if you had x amount of years technical experience and successfully proved your competence at interview.

I know of one that will - a bog standard engineering company not some up its own **** consultancy.

(In fact they will turn you down if you don't have at least a 2-1 from a redbrick).

And there's no "if you perform well at the interview" because you go in the no pile before then!

tim

[SNACR]

Who said anything about £6 an hour? You should re-read the thread again dear.

As I previously mentioned you can earn a very decent living through a low paid job because the overtime on offer often triples or quadruples your wage.

Teachers DO NOT get paid overtime OR bonuses for all those unaccounted hours spent marking books, writing up reports, parents evenings, preparing lessons... etc.

I do hope I will not have to repeat myself again for those inept people who cannot read properly.

I've got truck drivers who are earning more than some of the salaries being quoted here for IT. They have no more stress than everyone else does driving to work.

A lot are stressed about the new driver's CPC because the EU/govt has decided on another occupation that people will need unecessary bits of paper for. I view it as discrimination against the academically disinclined. I think the govt's agenda is to try and big up old-fashioned jobs so it doesn't damage graduate's self esteem too much when they're forced to take them.

[wickywackywoo]

IT people have managed to keep this veil of mystery over what it is they actually do. The rest of the world doesn't understand the technical aspects, and doesn't want to.

It has long been my suspicion however that if one were to scratch the surface, its not actually that difficult and we've all been taken for a ride.

When I think of some of the complete knobs I know who have managed to make a very good living in IT my suspicions are confirmed.

I think you'll find it is pretty difficult to do it properly.

The people you know may well be kn0bs but that doesn't mean they can't do a fairly complex job.

[porca misèria]

I concentrate on web development topics including PHP, Apache, MySQL, JavaScript, Ajax and so on - they are all decent selling subject areas at the moment. In fact, while books in general are in decline, PHP books sold more last year than the year before. The next big growth area is Objective C due to the iPhone - books in that arena are doing very well.

Well, I probably know pretty-much every Apache author (certainly those who participate in the Apache community), and a fair number in surrounding areas including PHP and MySQL. I don't think any of us are making the kind of money you claim on our books.