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Top Coders Tell Agents, "Show Me the Money!"
theodp writes "So, you're a 10x developer or a 25x programmer, but not getting paid like one? Keep your chin up! BusinessWeek reports that Silicon Valley is going Hollywood and top software developers can now get their very own agent through 10x Management, which bills itself as 'the talent agency for the technology industry.'"
residuals on the software I write?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...to sell my services as a professional Slashdot spam article submitter instead.
Want "Hollywood" money? How about programmers banding together and insisting on the protections that stop Hollywood management from moving every aspect of production to the cheapest outsourced labor: Unions. Writers, actors, makeup, costume, camera --- they've all got unions, so their jobs aren't competing with $9/hour H1-B labor.
These guys take the same cut as hollywood or sports agents do: 15%
Say you're a top flight programmer with an expected $150K+ salary... that's over $25K a year to the agent. Not a bad deal at all for them.
15% is a very reasonable cut to do basic business management and cold calling for freelancers. It is much better than what a lot of "recruiters" (aka pimps) take as a cut for their "consulting agencies", which can be as high as 80% of the hourly rate. Even using something like TriNet to handle most of the business stuff still doesn't compare because you still have to either find someone with business contacts or do all the calling yourself on unpaid time (which you then need to charge for later as part of your bill rate, or starve).
I really hope this practice starts putting some downward pressure on the pimps and time wasters who populate the IT recruiting market to start doing better work for a more reasonable rate. Nobody deserves 80% of a developer's pay just because they made a few phone calls. I would definitely consider working for or with a group of freelancers if someone was handling the business side at 15%.
I am a programmer in Sydney, Australia, and for a few years I have had a contract management company handling all my sourcing and negotiations. They get 2% and I make the final decisions on accepting the work. The demand for non permanent programmers to tackle one-off projects is huge here, especially from the financial sector. Conversely the supply of decent people to fill it is low.
I see that it's time to accept that technology means not everyone has to work. We create our own social model, we can change it. Why can't we accept a 20 hour work week for the same standard of living? What else is technology good for if not to help us?
You are joking, right? Translators face an increasingly tough market. Sure, there will always be some documents that need smooth, polished renderings into a foreign language. But the truth is, a lot of more informal texts that used to go through professional translators at decent wages are now just put through Google Translate for free. Machine translation is not perfect, but it's often considered good enough
I struggle with this trend with my own clients, who don't send their texts to me unless they feel they absolutely have to, and are pretty upfront about the fact that they'd rather gamble on some lost sales due to low-quality machine translation than pay the high rates professional translators demand.
seriously. Can we? You're not a star. You're not special. You're a cog, and you will be replaced by an Indian or Malaysian or some other *-ian that makes less than you do because they don't have indoor plumbing and clean air/water.
If you want a good life you need to start protecting it. That means Unions + a strong Federal Gov't (states are too weak to stand up to corps).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I would clearly deserve to be recognized as a Top Coder through representation by such an agent, if it weren't for those Dunning-Kruger assholes.
And that's supposed to be news?
Common practice for high-end/specialist freelancers here in northern europe at least.
I commonly work with one agent(who's also my lawyer), and sometimes with another agent, in a slightly different field. In fact, if you get a trustworthy agent, it's one of the best way to sort out the "grinders"(clients who try to pile on more and more work on a project), scammers and other undesirables.
In fact, those two agents and those of us who use their services have formed a guild of sorts, blacklisting bad clients, blacklisting devs who negatively impact the reputation of freelancers by being scammers or just failures, helping each other out in case of sickness, or just the need for a vacation, yet we still compete with each other in bids for projects etc, so yes, it requires blacklisting out the sociopaths that can't cooperate.
Might not work quite as well in the US though, US geeks seeming content with being exploited and seeing banding together in mutual defense as anathema......
Headhunters with staggering levels of pretense have been around the software industry for as long as I can remember. These guys decided to try out a new label. Big deal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
i voluntarily worked a 20 hour workweek for years and absolutely loved it. for once in my life i finally achieved the elusive work-life balance. i never had a problem paying any bills and have more savings than ever.
unfortunately my boss eventually asked me to go back to full time and i did. the only better thing is the more money but once again i hate getting home at 6 or later and having little left of my day.
the only other negative thing about going part time is it's not like your workload cuts in half too. i had the same amount of work and less hours to do it, so some days were extremely stressful.
A 40-hour work week pays for our current standard of living. A 20-hour work week would reduce that standard of living.
There are some people, and a considerable number of them, for whom that doesn't really matter. Cheap house, cheap car, decent food, good computer, good internet. I don't need that many luxury goods. I just wish I had more time to make use of what I have.
More importantly, if people are becoming more efficient (since machines and computers can assist with or even take over some tasks that humans used to do), but don't work less, then we must find more to do. Finally and perhaps more interestingly, working less may make people more efficient, which should presumably increase the standard of living.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Well a few years ago I was working full time as a web developer, making 60k/year and working a 40 hr work week. I am over 50, and those jobs have disappeared because by that age you are expected to have management experience. I don't. I am not interested in management in fact. So, no more development. With the current economy up here in Canada, and the tendency of companies to outsource whatever the fuck they can, there are very few jobs available. I have loads of experience but I am self-taught. I am thus more or less screwed I fear.
I now drive pizzas, and work around 50+hours a week to make around 25k a year (but spend around 6k of that on gas etc). Its funny to see articles like this extolling programmer agents, because I am sure that both of those jobs up here in Canada are currently filled. If I Canadian company needs a developer, they hire them for the 1 project then kick them out unceremoniously. The only full time development positions I have seen locally seem to be developing for collection services/marketing companies and they pay very poorly for long hours.
A) reduce the work week gradually. 38 hours, then 36, you get the idea.
B) have basic healthcare provided, This means preventative care, ER visits, and some relatively well-known and general diseases. If you want cancer, chronic diseases, etc covered, you'll need to pay for supplemental insurance, just like today. This would significantly lower the bill on businesses hiring individuals
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
My ex was a translator and she was constantly complaining about the steady decrease in work because of machine translations being used. The machine results were crap, but they were free, so the businesses didn't care.
They've also taken a clue from Project Gutenberg, the last time I saw a rather major translation project (English -> foreign) it went like this:
1. Start with machine translation - it's faster to correct than start from scratch and their equivalent of OCR.
2. First round pass by third world worker who knows it as a foreign language
3. Second round pass by a native who will do QA until it's "good enough"
I've found you can also improve quality considerably "on the cheap" if you do reverse translation and try various synonyms and different sentence structures until what you get back double translated resembles what you originally wrote.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have a no nudity clause in my contract.
But I will do implied for union scale......
What an amazing coincidence! As your employer, we also have a no-nudity clause in your contract....
I'm genuinely curious to know whether that has ever been formally challenged.
I'm no expert on Australian law, but for employment law and tax purposes here in the UK, the actual working arrangements can be at least as relevant as any theoretical employment arrangement set out in a contract.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
...do what I did, go where the money is.
I would, but I'm not sure I could ever make enough working in the financial markets to buy back my soul...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I am happy at my company, but when I get C++ jobs that want to pay 50-60k I always email back and let them know that is a 125k job! do it.
It's a case of the Golden Child vs. the Goat. I've seen this stupidity in action for decades.
Take two coders of roughly the same skill. One has flash and a high reputation, the other is plain spoken and just says what works and what doesn't. Management gives them both a task that has an unexpected issue and delivery is delayed. When the Golden Child has trouble management goes "that was much harder then we thought, lucky we had our ace working on it, or things would have have been much worse." When The Goat is late it's "so-and-so is just average, it's not a surprise they can't get the job done in time."
Now add in the cost and visibility of the 10x or 25x parachute in super coder who is so extra special they have an agent!!! No matter what happen management is going to conclude that they made a good investment in the high priced person. If they say otherwise then it would reflect badly on them. Any internal dissent by existing staff will be seen as sour grapes/incompetence. If there is a failure it will be laid at the feet of anyone but the Golden Child. No manager is ever going to admit they made that kind of mistake.
I wish I had understood this better earlier in my career. I could be sitting on my yacht right now if I had understood how much you can get for the right kind of hype.
Why is Snark Required?
I have never worked 40+ hour weeks for extended periods in my whole career, as an employee, freelance contractor/consultant, or running my own "real business". I think I can honestly say that my contribution was still valued everywhere I've ever worked, I've never suffered for not putting in a bunch of unpaid overtime on a regular basis just to be seen, and the businesses I started are doing OK so far. Of course, I was also lucky in the sense that the guys I worked for and with as an employee were all decent people and more interested in getting a good job done than stereotypical poor middle management.
Then again, if you're any good as a coder then you can choose not to work for silly people, at least not for long. It's just a shame how many professionals in the field don't realise that and allow themselves to be exploited for years until hopefully they learn better. Listening to an enthusiastic 25-year-old talking about how great it is that he works 60 hour weeks writing code because his employer brings in pizza if they're still there at 19:30 and buys lunch as well on weekends is like listening to a documentary about Stockholm syndrome.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That type of translation is fairly bad. Like, really bad.
You can't translate word by word even if by some insane miracle the grammatical integrity of the sentences remains intact.
Literal translations are shit. They do not take into account that you can't literally translate phrases but rather need to replace them with substitutes in your target language. Semantics of words also widely differ between languages. Words can have multiple holonymes and they can differ between source and target language and you need a lot of context. Since holonymy also tends to shift over time you will have to build an awefully huge database for semantic relations that also includes time period and cultural bias. The research has already been done, building the database can be automated to some extent but the most egregious words will have to be manually corrected.
Worst of all is translating from English into just about anything. That language is rife with words that are rich in the multiple holonym department. With the added fun of polysemes. It is also famous for its fair share of homographs. Then add in the cultural dimorphism of English(UK)/English(US). An Englishman calling you an ass might refer to you as a donkey. A US American calling you an ass will propably refer to a popular body part that's fond to be sat on. The former is noteworthy, the latter is punchworthy.
Witticisms and word play are hard to translate and need to be completely rewritten in the traget language. I've read a couple of good Terry Pratchett translations and even more really bad ones.
If I need manuals I will get a professional to write them. If I need a translation then I will hire the original writer to have a sit down with a professional translator. And I marvel at the prices they ask. They are like 10% of what they should ask.
20 minutes into the future
What union represents computer programmers? There were some weird fights here in La Jolla as to which union (or even whether any union at all) ought to represent the graduate-student-teachers (also known as TAs = graduate teaching assistants). The final result is at the UCSD website and is that the graduate students are members of the United Auto Workers union: Graduate students appointed as teaching assistants, associates, readers or tutors (ASE'S) are represented by the Association of Student Employees/UAW under a collective bargaining agreement with the university. All salary payments under these titles are subject to a deduction of 1.15 percent for union membership dues or a 0.92 percent agency fee deduction for students who choose not to become members of the union. The university/UAW Agreement can be retrieved electronically at http://ogsr.ucsd.edu/ase.htm
To many, coders are programmers
They aren't
Programmers program - from the inception phase all the way to the completion
Coders, on the other hand, only code, as instructed
That 10X management agency can't even differentiate the two
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's poetic in a way how just about the least valuable thing you could do for society is one of the most uniformly lucrative.
I once worked for a company where you had to put in years in the industry (and usually the company) before you got to the upper echelons of the "technical" (non-management) career chain.
Yes, you might get some shortcuts if your boss thought you were a "golden child" but before you made your way to the upper decks, you had to prove yourself over and over again with a lot higher of a success ratio than a "normal" person would have.
This pretty much stalled the careers of those whose gold was just a thin veneer before they hit the highest ranks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.