Let’s play the “how desperate am I?” game.
Let’s say an employer wants me to work in Louisville, KY, for 6months to a year, at $40/hour, 40 hours/week, doing perl with SQL/Sybase stuff. As a contractor (hence, that $40/hour has to cover both employer and employee portions of tax bits, and all insurance costs). Let’s say it were starting about a week from monday. How desperate am I?
Specifying where, when, and how much (especially when “how much” is full time) is a pretty sure sign, as I understand it, that I would be entitled to employee, rather than contractor, status and benefits, but let’s set that aside for a moment.
Kentucky?!?!
Yeah, for 6 months (my original edit didn’t make it through before the browser crashed. Re-edited).
Long enough to haul me completely out of debt, and still leave me free in time for grad school, should I so choose. Maybe.
i don’t understand what the problem is then. out of debt and free for grad school … what’s the hold up?
Agreed. Is it cause it’s in Kentucky?
Ya don’t be a fucking moron and just go al-fucking-ready.
Don’t mind me… I quit smoking this week.. I have an excuse to be a bitch.
Aaaaanyway: for a year that’s $83,000. Considering you will be relocating, I’m MORE than certain a creative accountant around next years tax season can come up with a WORLD of deductions for you. *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*
And think of it this way… an entirely new town of people to rape and pillage who will all stare at you in amazement saying things like “You a city boy?” whilest holding pitchforks in your general direction.
I’m sure you’ll be able to afford the occassional flight out of town as well…
Best case scenario, get yourself out of debt in one shot and possibly get into an orgy with two or more biological brothers which both(all) respond to the name Bubba.
There is no question….
I sense (from a recent business trip to Kansas City, MO) that domestic software development is moving out of the bay area and back to its old status of being scattered throughout the country, with largely dev centers in the midwest.
Some guy at lexmark really wanted to hire me at one career fare (for an internship). I had never heard of lexmark, and just knew they were in kentucky and made printers. I told him I was CS and not EE, and probably a little bit too math-bent for his stuff. He told me he was hiring CS people, and got really excited about the math-bent.
I can’t remember why I turned him down. Oh well.
Relevance: Lexmark is in kentucky, I think Lexington Kentucky, but I could be wrong.
And there’s always been major CAD vendors in St Louis, MO.
I think the bay area is best known for making chips (historically) and not software.
And the software that is here used to be strongest in “stuff chip makers and computer manufacturers needed like OSes and driver software”
It’s all “just for now”
Not sure whether you’ve already decided but I wanted to add my 2 cents.
I’d say go for it.
Based on what I’ve read from you:
– you seem to be interested in doing PHP/SQL stuff
– you’ve had a bit of trouble finding relevant jobs or jobs that pay you more than McDs
– you probably aren’t thrilled to consider the idea of living Kentucky
– you wanna wait for something better to come along
I guess the good thing about the posting is that it’s a 6-month contract, rather than a permanent position. So even if you hate Kentucky, it’s only for 6-months.
By the end, you’ll get experience under your belt, which will no doubt reel-in more offers than you may currently be getting.
In my university program, I worked a total of six 4-month work-terms over the 5 year duration of the undergrad program. Trust me, some of my classmates worked in some pretty shitty places in Southwestern Ontario. But honestly, even in cities that weren’t too bad, many of us still felt the urgings to “move-on” after four months.
If anything, my classmates and I became indoctrinated into the nomadic life, hehe. It’s not all that bad. And in the end, it gave us all kick-ass resumes upon graduation.
Good luck!
Lousiville’s not bad
In fact, it’s the only place I’d live in Kentucky. I could *maybe* stand Lexington, but the Henry Clay stuff freaks me out.
Seriously though, I like Louisville – It has some of the charming Southern qualities, while still being metropolitan. It’s not in the boonies at all. In fact, the farm that my family owned for 80 years (until 1976) that was about 10 miles east of L’ville has been turned into equestrian estates, basically a glorified suburb for rich horsey folks now. So you’d have to drive pretty far out of the city and county before you found any Bubbas and pitchforks. 😛
If it’s only for 6 months or a year, why not? Once you get into grad school, you’ll possibly be moving again anyways.
Questions on the legal trivia
Specifying where, when, and how much (especially when “how much” is full time) is a pretty sure sign, as I understand it, that I would be entitled to employee, rather than contractor, status and benefits, but let’s set that aside for a moment.
Is that true? My understanding of this is somewhat hazy, but I’d thought that an employer can specify where, when, how much you do and still preserve your contractor status as long as your task definitions are still relatively abstract.
In other words: If someone hires me to go into his office and spend 40 hours a week programming, but my programming task is defined as “Write me a web-based contact list and let me know when you’re done,” you can still have contractor-status.
Conversely, if the employer also defines how I perform my task at an operational level…then it gets more murky.
Does that seem right, or especially wrong, to anyone w/more experience?
Re: Questions on the legal trivia
http://www.cehandbook.com/cehandbook/htmlpages/ceh_main.html
was the main source. I mean, hourly wages strikes me as one of the conditions that is wholly insufficient on its own, but does support a case or something like that.
Re: Questions on the legal trivia
http://www.cehandbook.com/cehandbook/htmlpages/ceh_main.html
was the main source. I mean, hourly wages strikes me as one of the conditions that is wholly insufficient on its own, but does support a case or something like that.
But…I can’t read.
*sniffle*
As a tangent: I have a list of a few dozen sites that I’d like to read, but I don’t have the time. What I really want is a homunculus that can give me executive summaries of web sites, at a high rate of speed.
And then another homunculus that can filter out the interesting executive summaries, and maybe present them in iambic pentameter.
And they’re invisible, and when I’m bored they smack people that I don’t like.