[Info-vax] Contract Opportunity: VMS Developer

[Scott Dorsey]

Kerry Main  <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> wrote:
>You need to have highly specialized skills that are relatively scarce in
>order to get 3+ times what a regular employee gets. In Canada, a typical FTE
>(full time employee) "loaded cost" (salary + benefits) is around CAD
>$90K-$125K.

If you don't have those skills, what are you doing being a consultant?  It is
not cost-effective to hire consultants for work where you can just hire an
employee.

You hire a consultant because you have a short-term need for an expert.  If
you are hiring a consultant for any other reason, you're wasting money.

>SAP types are not paid for being SAP "generalists". Their companies are paid
>$2K+ / day for these resources because they have specific expertise in a
>specific module of SAP. There are many, many modules in SAP which is often
>why companies hire "teams" of SAP programmers (I don't agree with SAP
>approach, but obviously many companies do).

Presumably these people are being hired by companies that already have skilled
SAP staff, just not people skilled in that module.  That's what consultants
are for.

I suspect that you could hire SAP generalists on contract as well, for less
money than specialists, but still for many times what an employee would cost.
But I really have no idea even what SAP is; I'm not in that business.

>OpenVMS programming skills are certainly not as readily available as Windows
>or Linux programming, hence one can argue OpenVMS programmers should be paid
>more, but at least here in Canada, there are few companies that will pay any
>of their general application developers on any platform a rate that works
>out to CAD $400K per year (USD $150/hr). 

You don't hire a consultant as a general applications developer, normally.
Maybe you hire a consultant to come in and write one piece of code for you
and then leave.  Maybe you hire a consultant to come in and fix some broken
code and then leave.  

>Fwiw, regardless of their location, I have seen a small trend in a number of
>companies to again start hiring senior programmers that really understand
>and have previous experience in the business models of the applications they
>are creating. 

That's easier said than done, unfortunately.  We have six or seven jobs open
here for xenomai folks....
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."