Contracting to Perm Question

When you go permanent you typically get benefits like:

Bonuses

Insurance Health Life Disability

Social Security Pickup Employer pays more than half, you pay less than half

Educational Reimbursement

Vacation Days

Workmans Comp

Unemployment Insurance

These can add up to 10 to 20 percent of the cost of emplying you. In addition direct employees are typically not as productive as contract workers through no fault of their own. When employed you must attend a lot of useless meetings like: safety, 401k, departmental, etc. So if you are offered $20 in place of the $34 you were getting you probably aren't too far off.

You won't get anything close to contract rates as a wage. Why would the employer do that? They give you benefits, paid time off, some degree of security in exchange for lower wages.

The flip side is why would contractors work for the same amount as being an employee? They're guaranteed to be unemployed at some point and get no compensation beyond the money.

If you're a professional design engineer working for $34 on contract or $20 on salary you're grossly underpaid.

As a further side note ignore Cliff, he's an idiot. Most of this group has him filtered out.

Poor Cliff! I actually found his reply helpful. Anyway I actually make $24/hr and the contracting firm gets $38 from the company. I used cliff's salary search and if I read it right a Design Engineer median salary is $55k

Don't forget RockStarWally...he also holds the title for taking the most dumps in this newsgroup, and has never actually used Solidworks.