There is no "should". Most contract jobs are low risk - they might last for years and if you get fired, you can easily find a new one. Unless there is a major economic downturn, in which case even permanent employees will be downsized.
That's easily worth a 50% salary bump. It also often comes with tax advantages.
In the US 2x or (100%) is the equivalent to a direct hire salary. Since the employer taxes, social contributions, and paperwork filing is directly managed by the contractor now. You’ll have to be your own HR or hire someone to do it for you.
-- you can tax deduct a lot of things, of course, which include day-to-day travel, equipment (phone, internet, laptop), and much more. A part of rent. Let's not even talk about the SEP IRA you can use to further put away money for yourself and lower your tax burden. Unlike an employee 401k, you can decide to put a large chunk of your salary in an IRA at any time, including up until Apr 15 of the following tax year.
-- I'm about to find out, but the lower corporate tax may be a boon here
-- You work 40 hours, or whatever hours. Employees work INFINITE hours. Weekend work, on-call anyone?
I'm not sure what you mean by own HR. For healthcare, you can use the state marketplace or you can look into things like Freelancers Union. For paying tax, you have an accountant. For naughty behavior to report to HR, you have only yourself...
It depends on the market! If people pay 2-3X more, then yes. If you need to be a published author in tech or have previous experience as an MD in an investment bank, then it's a marginal niche market.
In most cases you can use the car port and just make a custom cable that bridges the two data pins together which tells the phone to use high current charging. The car’s port’s overcurrent protection will kick in if it’s an issue but I’ve got such a cable and so far I have yet to see any issues and I’ve used it for years with hundreds of different devices. No fire yet.
iOS devices will outright not charge if there’s just 5V on the port. Even the lowest charging current requires some sort of resistor arrangement.
Fortunately it seems like bridging the two data lines (essentially a 0 ohm resistor) is what’s needed to allow high-current charging (I think it’s 2 amps), so as long as your supply can withstand it (which pretty much every single device can, given that it’s tied to its own 5V rail which can supply many amps) you can just bridge the two pins together. Worst case scenario the overcurrent protection on the port will protect the source device.
Another problem with Bluetooth is that most devices cater to the lowest common denominator which means even though there are ways to make it better, most devices stick to older protocols to make sure it works with old, outdated garbage.
This niche itself doesn’t pay too well because prices are pushed down by so-called “developers” from third-world countries (they are bad, but clients don’t know any better and still end up going with them).
The product itself is crap, code quality is bad (PHP can be done right with good practices and modern frameworks like Laravel, but Wordpress is the total opposite of all that by design).
A Wordpress client ends up being a nightmare. Maintenance and support nightmare for you, not a good experience for the client because it always breaks and requires constant maintenance, etc.
Also a lot of Wordpress projects involve dealing with bad code from previous developers. I’m not saying that to shit on the previous developer - it’s just that shitty code is normal, accepted and expected in the Wordpress world, but is definitely not enjoyable to work with and will make you miserable.
Finally PHP clients are often bad. I recently turned down a client after arguing back and forth how upgrading their crappy Joomla site with 20+ plugins (most of which will need to be updated manually because the original developer is not around) and developing a custom theme from scratch will not take one days worth of work.
So I would recommend staying away from CMS projects completely. If a client needs a CMS just get them on a hosted solution like Squarespace so you don’t have to maintain the crappy CMS down the line.
Not my experience. Lots of marketing departments and agencies use WordPress. They have huge budgets with discretionary spending authority, unlike IT departments. Who cares if WordPress isn’t a “modern framework” or uses PHP? It pays the same as any other programming as long as you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel putting up mom & pop sites or submitting bids on Upwork.
I have Fortune 1000 clients running multiple WP sites put together by agencies that have no back-end integration or database skills in house, they outsource that. Pay is very good, same as any other back-end programming.
> Who cares if WordPress isn’t a “modern framework”
Developer experience? I'd rather spend my way working with Laravel than crap old PHP code written like it's in the 90's.
> It pays the same as any other programming as long as you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel putting up mom & pop sites
It's good that you manage to find good clients but this wasn't my experience. A lot of WP projects go to the lowest bidder which just doesn't happen with the technologies I work with and recommend.
So if you already make good money on WP then go ahead by any means, but I personally wouldn't recommend getting into it if you're starting out.
I have a little developer experience. Some old code is crap. Some new code is crap. Frameworks can help or make a bigger mess. In the context of solving business problems it makes little difference. Clients don’t care.
I didn’t get the impression the original poster was just starting out. Low-end Wordpress work is competitive and not well-paid, like all low-end work. Competition is always most fierce at the low end of any talent market. Plenty of complex, challenging, and good paying Wordpress projects out there.
By "developer experience" I meant the equivalent of "user experience", ie whether the codebase is enjoyable to work with.
> I didn’t get the impression the original poster was just starting out
IMO it would still require them to get familiar with Wordpress before being able to get the good jobs, which means he's going to be stuck with crap gigs for some time while he builds references.
I get your point about good code vs. bad code, but in my experience that doesn’t have much to do with legacy vs. modern frameworks. It has to do with the skills and aesthetics of the original developer. I work on framework-based code (Laravel, etc.) that I don’t find very enjoyable, and I work on procedural PHP from ten years ago that I find easy to work on.
Programmers who focus on their own enjoyment or priorities like working with the most recent tools and frameworks will turn up their nose at less appealing legacy work, and that’s why there’s so many companies unable to hire people to work on their business systems and web sites. To some developers an older code base is just a turd, to others it’s an opportunity. After working with a legacy system for a while and incrementally refactoring it, if my client decides to rewrite it they will talk to me rather than sending out RFPs. I have two ground-up rewrites in progress right now that started as legacy support work. Those clients didn’t write RFPs or ask anyone else to bid on the work.
I agree that learning Wordpress, or anything, takes time. Wordpress certainly has some bad design decisions (mainly caused by maintaining compatibility with a huge installed base), and some ugliness to work around, but on the other hand WP has a large and mature developer community, good documentation, and lots of tools and add-ons.
Disable voicemail. This should frankly be the default anyway - voicemail is a relic of the past. Nowadays we have SMS or email for those who want to leave a message.
Alternatively create your own voicemail (using Twilio or Asterisk or similar) and change the call divert settings to divert to your custom voicemail instead of the default one.
I disagree with some of them being unused. This page lists some units like “rack unit” (length) and “jiffies” (time). They are domain-specific but not unused by any means - physical servers are measured in these rack units (1U, 2U, etc) and jiffies is a common way to measure time in kernel development.
Good. A lot of meme accounts are just spam, reposting the same crap over and over again with no attribution or credit to the original author.
I also can’t feel bad for the people that lost their main source of income from this. If your main source of income is reposting shit (that you haven’t even created yourself) on the internet then that’s the main problem right there and this is a good wake-up call.
Nothing wrong with memes per se and there is a place for them (subreddits, Imgur, 9Gag, etc) but I feel like they are just noise as far as social media is concerned. I was definitely annoyed by the constant stream of them and other “funny” (but not really) content back when I had a Facebook account.
I wish social media platforms make an actual set of rules they enforce about only posting your own, original content instead of reposting shit. This is what I miss about forums - there’s always been a list of rules and a moderation team that dictates what’s appropriate and not and deletes inappropriate content. I was in fact surprised when I realised modern social media has none of that and you can pretty much get away with anything (even if it gets reported) as long as it doesn’t blow up in popularity
> The good news is that the vast majority of people with the necessary technical skills are not willing to commit mass murder.
This is the key point of the article. The truth is, you could build a drone capable of taking down an aircraft, or delivering explosives, or similarly nefarious thing even 10 years ago.
I looked into AeroQuad around 2009. The site seems to be dead now, but it was a community around building DIY drones. Everything needed to build a fully autonomous, remotely controlled (through mobile networking, so could be operated from anywhere in the world) drone was there already.
Similar to Pinterest, they pollute search results with pages that ask you to login or signup before you can view the content, despite offering the content to search engines without the login requirement.
I wish search engines would crack down on this and completely delist the entire domain if such behaviour is detected.
About the content itself, it’s often spam. There seems to be no moderation against people posting “answers” that promote their own solutions/companies which means a lot of answers about tech are simply “use <this> service which allows you to do <copy/paste of what you asked for>“.
