
Show HN: We Work Contract – London Web contract jobs with day rates - jwmoz
http://weworkcontract.com/
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pyb
I see a lot of these vacancies on Indeed, etc... In my experience, usually,
more than half of the reqs are fake, or misleading. These recruitment agencies
are harvesting CVs, to try to place candidates into companies that they don't
actually have a contract with.

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macca321
Yup. It would be nice if there was some way to review the listings, and share
info on the roles, but I guess it would be scuppered by the competitive nature
of going for the roles.

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TamDenholm
Looks like just a repost of a site like CWJobs.com, full of recruitment
companies. While thats fine, i'd love to see a site that offers contracts that
aren't through recruiters. I'd even pay for access to that. Something to think
of?

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gadders
A lot of banks (and I assume other large corporates) have an in-house contract
recruitment function now. I often thought of aggregating roles from those
people only.

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pyb
Where do they advertise ?

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gadders
I think on their own homepage career section.

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matt_wulfeck
Every time I see these types of articles I think about forming my own
consultancy and farming _myself_ out. If they're paying you $600 a day then I
assume they're making $900 a day.

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Roritharr
They do. I've seen Frontend Devs sit in Design Meetings for 1500$ a day
surfing reddit as their part of the process starts weeks or months later.

The Dev gets paid 800$ a day and makes a killing. The consultancy does also.
Not many people are responsible at the customers side of things so these types
of waste just continue indefinetly.

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kinai
_looking at the rates_...I am doing life wrong

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cpncrunch
Actually, I was just thinking that rates haven't really changed much in the
last 20 years. I was earning about 350GBP/day in London, and 300GBP/day in
Belfast around 2000, with only a couple of years experience. That was for non-
finance work. (Finance work paid 400-500GBP/day).

Now the rates are about the same (maybe 50GBP/day more at most), but the price
of housing (both to buy and rent) is 50% to 100% higher than back then.

Still, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to be a contractor.
Rates in USA and Canada are a lot lower for contract work, mainly because
there isn't as much contact work available.

Your best option is probably to live somewhere cheap on the outskirts of
London, contract for a few years, and save as much as you can. (Try not to buy
too many expensive toys :)

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mancerayder
"Still, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to be a contractor.
Rates in USA and Canada are a lot lower for contract work, mainly because
there isn't as much contact work available."

I don't know what the overall stats are, but it's safe to say that in the Bay
Area or NYC you can pretty strong rates, and by pretty strong I say in the
~800/day USD or higher range. That's similar to the 500/day GBP rates I saw in
London. But of course these numbers vary highly by industry and speciality. My
numbers are DevOps/SA senior roles.

I'm a contractor and not a big fanatic of day rates. Go hourly, if you can,
since 40 hour weeks are rare in today's world, so daily rates at places like
the large investment banks are 10+ hour days, frequently. I'd ask 100/hr at a
bare minimum for a senior role. You might not get a contract as quickly as
you'd get a full-time role, but the demand is there.

Back to the point you raised - there are a great many contract roles in the
U.S., but it's very hard to go corp to corp with the client. The recruiters /
consulting firms love to skim 40-60% overhead, and it's hard to market
yourself directly to clients without knowing people.

As another datapoint, I had a buddy in the UK who was contracting and there
was this scheme where he was being taxed at some absurd rate in the 25% range
due to being paid from a trust. No idea how common or known that is, but in
NYC my tax rate's in the 45% range (after expenses).

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smm2000
100/hr works out to around $200k/year using standard 2087 hours/year for full
time work. You can get better or comparable salary as FTE + benefits. It's not
much.

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mancerayder
Well sure, because in salaried jobs no one counts your hours. However, in my
experience in both finance and ad tech, you end up working more than 40 hours.
My IT buddies making 250k+ work 55-60 hour weeks, easy. It's not much better
in the UK, where I have also worked. When you do the math, the contractor is
ahead, because that 200k figure you cited is a 40 hour week.

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LDNmindthegap
The listing is web scraped from other sites (jobserve, cwjobs, etc), which is
a problem since most of them are fake. It would be great if there was an
actual site/company that had real jobs for the "HN crowd". Even if just a few.

Several months ago I've moved to London with the goal of finding contract work
but my experienced has been quite negative. But that is simply my case where
(1) I'm not a specialist and (2) have no UK experience.

I've realized that not all that glitters is gold. All that glitter also made
me commit the mistake of asking for market rate, which likely didn't help.

Many of the ads are fake and the recruiters just call you to try to get info
from you "how are you finding the job market? any interviews? with who? what
tech did they use?" Just politely answer "I'm sorry but that information is
confidential and I respect my business partners"

At this time I started searching for permanent roles, but have an obvious
preference for contract.

Anyway, what I really wanted to ask is for any tips in landing a contract
based role. Or if it's hopeless for someone without "UK experience". I have a
CS degree, have 10 year of professional experience, but very broad tech. But
only the last 2 years are "devops" related which is what I'm interested. I
like developing tools and automating. I don't mind backend (and known a bit of
Django). I also have a keen interest in ML (recently finished coursera ML
MOOC).

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runako
Curious: why are rates in the UK frequently quoted as day rates (vs. hourly or
monthly)?

The custom in the US seems to be hourly, but in the UK, it seems day rates are
the norm. Curious as to whether this is just happenstance, or whether
something else is involved.

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gregn610
A daily rate is usually for a "professional day" and not prorated. If they're
paying £600 and up, you're going to be going 60+ hour weeks.

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ujjain
This is simply not true and just something permies make up.

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andy_ppp
Yes to be honest I've been treated far better and been able to make much
bigger changes within code and organisations as a contractor than I ever could
as a permanent person. The money is nice but it's just a bonus to being able
to build great things.

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cloudjacker
Same here, but my problem is that you don't have the opportunity to learn
things on contract jobs.

Company doesn't invest in your ability to learn and adapt, it only invests in
your ability to solve that specific problem. In my experience.

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robgough
No C# (or .NET) on there at all?

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JBReefer
I see a ton of C# work now, maybe your comment sparked a change!

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drinchev
Freelancing in Berlin since 2 years.

Seems like 400-500 pounds a day is the average rate.

In Berlin, normal freelance rate is ~ 50 eur/h and again it is way higher than
40-60k + 0.000N percentage of a startup.

A bit sad, because lots of companies are dying to hire good developers around
here, but seems that their only option to find them is either look for
freelancers or head hunters.

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jwmoz
Where do you go for euro contracts? I very rarely see them advertised.

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drinchev
You can start here :

[http://berlinstartupjobs.com/contracting-
positions/](http://berlinstartupjobs.com/contracting-positions/)

IT jobs are not filtered, though but they exist.

Another way is to approach companies and offer freelance service, of course
they prefer to hire you, but usually if you show qualities, they consider to
work with you as freelancer too.

Also headhunters are willing to find you a freelancing project.

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nlh
Just an FYI since I'm assuming this is a newly-launched site? "WeWork" is now
a pretty big/established co-working & real estate firm that plays in the tech
space, so they'll likely take issue with your domain name if this becomes big
enough.

<insert comments about feasibility of common-word trademarks, etc>

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rajington
Good advice. It doesn't matter whether it's right, no one wants the headache
of lawyers or a name change.

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meraku
Looks good, though no category for .NET? Would've thought that would be an in-
demand skill in London.

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ciaranm
This looks great. Is there any removal of positions that have been filled, or
is it just hit and hope?

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jwmoz
Atm just hit and hope but depending on users I can build deletion checks etc.

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ionwake
This of interest, thank you. Does this hook into job website APIs like monster
etc?

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jwmoz
Haven't checked monster but I will have a look now.

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matheusalmeida
The results displayed on the website correlate with my experience that C++ is
not a popular language in London specially for web [back-end] development.

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untog
I'm not sure you need to put a geographic bracket around that statement. I
very rarely see C++ for web development.

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sethd
You used to see it more often about 15+ years ago but even then it wasn't the
most popular choice.

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doorty
Any remote roles available?

I'm an American, currently in the UK time-zone. These JavaScript roles would
be ideal if I could work remotely.

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jwmoz
Try [http://weworkremotely.com](http://weworkremotely.com) (not affiliated).

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kremdela
Maybe a dumb (american) question, but in the UK, what is the average / minimum
length of these day rate contracts?

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rossriley
Most will be three months initially with an extension where required.
Obviously there's shorter ones available too, but 3 months seems to be the
most commonly quoted initial length.

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gadders
Yeah. Three months is usually the minimum for a contract. 6 months is more
common in my experience. And then there is the chance of renewals on top.

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codegeek
Interesting that most of the PHP jobs are paying much less than say Python or
Javascript.

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rossriley
The problem with the PHP market at the moment is that there's a split between
semi-skilled Wordpress / Joomla / Drupal development and more highly skilled
development work that would fall under the same rate as Python / Rails / Node
contract work.

If you are a skilled polyglot developer and want to seek out PHP contracts at
the senior end of the market you will be able to earn the same day rate as
with other languages, but there are also a lot of agencies that are hiring not
highly skilled developers to pump out cookie-cutter sites and so many of the
PHP jobs will be for this sort of work and thus pay a lower day rate.

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cloudjacker
got any of these for the united states?

