Comment by ipsum2
4 years ago
How much work are you doing at these 10 companies? Are you writing code or just literally doing nothing?
4 years ago
How much work are you doing at these 10 companies? Are you writing code or just literally doing nothing?
Yes writing code, I provide enough actual progress that people must assume I'm either extremely methodical or woefully incompetent. I put in about an hour per job per day. I'm logged-in on slack/teams/etc and disable idle indicators. I use a virtual KVM to switch between laptops as needed. The biggest problem I run into is video meetings occurring at the same time, those I usually just disable video and blame it on internet problems.
Many of these positions are mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering where measuring progress can be difficult for even full-time contributors. I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
> I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
This line convinced me you know what you're talking about :).
I very much look forward to the podcast series.
You are my new hero.
I'm one of those mythical 10x developers, too.
Last year, I had a company beg me to start working with them, and I talked them up from $120,000 ($60/hour) of my current gig with a huge corp to $150,000 ($75/hour). I just never gave my notice at corp 1. I did so well at both, and both of my team leads and bosses said I was doing great.
So at the beginning of the year, I added another company, this time, another publicly traded corp @ a 52w high, but they didn't have anyone who had my skills so I was a Team of 1 and I would tell them something would take a month but it'd take 1-3 days. I'd spend about an hour on that job, a week, and everyone was happy. I'd just steadily drip drip drip commits I worked on, on say Monday, through the week and update the issue tracker. Maybe 20 minutes a day.
I was still playing 4-5 hours of video games, a day, and still finishing all of my work by noon, so I took a 4th job, and it pays the least and requires the most work, so I'm going to quit it in about 2 more sprints or so.
That took me down to ~2-3 hours of slacking off a day, but my meetings started seriously overlapping in the mornings, but I've got that figured out.
So today was weird. I did first interview at another company (#5) and the CEO came on the call and said I was hired immediately. Team of 1. No oversight. ($65/hour)
Early this morning, I got a call saying "The client wants to interview and hire you TODAY, if possible". So I interview with them. Huge corporation, corp-2-corp, $80/hour 1099. They interviewed me on the spot and rushed me an offer, gave me a $2000 hiring bonus if i could only give 1 week notice. Team of 1, no oversight. The stuff is easily automated.
Oh, I fully automated Job #2 and do in ~30 minutes what would have taken me about 3-4 hours by hand. That took me about 3 months to automate.
So just when i thought it was already nuts, a recruiter I had completely forgotten about called me up and said the client from 3 weeks ago had extended an offer for $80/hour, so that's job #7.
I added it up... That's $225/hour in just job offers I received and accepted today. That's $450,000/year if I can sustain it (highly doubtful!) and by July 15, if I can manage, that's $485/hour or roughly $970,000/year....
So take $970,000 / 52 = That's $18,654 per week... $37,307 per paycheck or $80,833 per month....
That's big boy money.
So far, all the corporations use sprints. In all but one (the cheapest paid) i'm more than fulfilling my work. I'm currently working about 6 hours a day but when I'm in startup mode, I consistently coded for 15+ hours/day, 6 days a week.
I've been making $255/hour for several months now... That's like $27,000/month after tax. I am saving entire paychecks from corps just to pay the IRS every quarter. I realized if I opened up an S-Corp and did corp to corp and paid myself a reasonable salary of $120,000/year, i'd save many tens of thousands, so now every new gig is nothing but corp-2-corp.
Funny thing? I'm working less intensely than when I was investing my heart and soul into a single project for way less than $150,000/year.