>If you want to make $200/h+ and your a decent hacker, my advice would be to perfect selling yourself.
so... my understanding? your first line explains why this selling is so hard:
>Often it may go through several different agencies because one isn't on the preferred list and get marked up at every stage.
The thing is? if you are on that 'preferred list' you essentially have a licence to print money, because it's goddamn difficult to get on those lists. I've seen consulting companies that are run out of some guy's house with no assets sell for substantial money because they had somehow gotten on to a preferred vendor list at a large company. As you point out, at that point you get to act as a gatekeeper, and impose significant markup on all labour.
Selling is hard because most devs aren't used to it. That's why agents exists; they can often get you a higher rate even after their 20-40% cut.
Most companies have a preferred list of agencies/consultancies, but they are not obliged to use them. If they find the perfect person, they can hire them.
As a career contractor you need a really good agent, or ideally master the skills of a really good agent (ie sales). You need to build and maintain a network of previous managers who know how good you are, and actually call you for work. It takes time, but is by no means impossible for the average HN user.
>As a career contractor you need a really good agent, or ideally master the skills of a really good agent (ie sales). You need to build and maintain a network of previous managers who know how good you are, and actually call you for work. It takes time, but is by no means impossible for the average HN user.
I get managers I've contracted for in the past calling me, but they always make me go through a third party agency for the pay, so I think these preferred lists are more important than you think. (I have a corporation with 4 employees, 3 fullish-time, counting me, and the total revenue would make what I'm getting paid as a consultant look small, so I believe I'd be on the correct side of Section 1706.)
I have not heard of contractors in my industry having "agents" - I mean, sure, there are body shops that I can call or that will call me; is that what you mean? The body shops work for the clients, though, not the consultants.
They may make you go through a preferred agency for payroll/invoicing, but any fees they add should be passed back to the employer, not met by you. Typical enterprise/gov BS, needlessly adding 10-20% to the cost.
By agents I mean 'recruitment consultants', that's what they are called in London (along with pimps). Most people hate dealing with them, but they are a necessary evil.
>They may make you go through a preferred agency for payroll/invoicing, but any fees they add should be passed back to the employer, not met by you. Typical enterprise/gov BS, needlessly adding 10-20% to the cost.
The employer pays the agency, usually around 30% more than the agency pays me. You could say that the employer is paying that fee, sure, but that's like saying the employer is paying the 7.5% payroll tax that the employer has to pay if you are an employee and not a contractor. That's coming out of the pool of money the employer is willing to spend to get my labor, even though it's not going to me.
>By agents I mean 'recruitment consultants', that's what they are called in London (along with pimps). Most people hate dealing with them, but they are a necessary evil.
Someone who works for the consultant? I don't know of anything like that in America. As far as I can tell, in this industry and location, all of the middlemen are paid by the clients.
This is in addition to specialisation, not instead of. Not picking on you, but I feel sales and other 'soft skills' are severely undervalued by many otherwise talented hackers. After a certain point of technical competency, the ROI of learning right brain skills is much higher. Getting better at negotiation could quite easily get a 20% rate spike.
Letting someone else worry about selling you, is how a developer worth $2000/day only makes $600. The person 'selling you', is also 'closing you' at the lowest they can get away with.
Being 'marketable' is basically a sales task as well. You may well be a specialist in some domain, but so are another 100 people claiming to be so. In big enterprises especially, the job most often goes to the person with the best 'story', not the most qualified.
It's like anything else; you have limited time, and you need to choose your focus. I personally feel there is a lot of 'low hanging fruit' in marketing for many technical people; I think it is pretty important to have at least basic sales/marketing skills, and that going from zero to just a little bit can give you pretty big (financial) returns without a huge amount of effort. A lot of this is to just get used to asking for more, rather than just taking what you are offered.
But it's also important to remember where your focus really is, and to not go too far down the marketing rabbit hole; at least in my experience, the ROI on effort in that direction drops pretty fast once you get past that initial low-hanging fruit, just due to my lack of innate ability, and at least for me, it quickly starts looking like deception. Really, much of sales looks like fraud to me, so I go out of my way to avoid those parts of sales. No sense in playing close to the line when I can't see the line. But, one can aggressive while still being transparent and honest, and while it does bother me that being aggressive gets me more money, it's something I can live with for more money.
so... my understanding? your first line explains why this selling is so hard:
>Often it may go through several different agencies because one isn't on the preferred list and get marked up at every stage.
The thing is? if you are on that 'preferred list' you essentially have a licence to print money, because it's goddamn difficult to get on those lists. I've seen consulting companies that are run out of some guy's house with no assets sell for substantial money because they had somehow gotten on to a preferred vendor list at a large company. As you point out, at that point you get to act as a gatekeeper, and impose significant markup on all labour.