I've been a contractor rather than permanent employee for a good
chunk of my working life. I started working in the mid-1990s when the
business world had been clearly demonstrating that they had no loyalty
whatsoever to their staff, so I've always felt the same loyalty in
return. I've always been quite mercenary about it: I do good work and
act responsibly in my employers' interest no matter how they employ me.
For
a long time I used a spreadsheet to be able to convert between the
daily rate recruiters would quote and the equivalent annual salary,
factoring in the days you don't get paid as a contract: annual leave,
sick pay and public holidays. Superannuation is also taken out of your
day rate, so that's factored in too.
After being asked multiple times for copies of my spreadsheet and wanting to learn a new web framework, back in 2013 I created a little single-page app for the job, Contract or Permie? All zippy responsive design that resizes nicely on phones and everything!
Fast
forward many years and I'm always bumping into fellow contractors and
discovering they use it. I've let the thing languish a bit over the
years. It still uses quite clunky code, was hosted from an S3 bucket
without TLS so was insecure and had old, no longer working, Google
Analytics tagging hardcoded in it. Some of the assumptions, particularly
the mandatory superannuation rate, were outdated too.
I got a patch from Andrew Punch
in December last year fixing a couple of these problems and I've just
merged them in. Given I've accepted an external contribution, meaning
someone else had to wade through my clunky code, I figure I should open
source the damn thing and make the code public, so here it us.
While in there, I also tweaked a few things. It's not a secure site with support for HTTP/3 (thanks to Fastly making that super easy).
Future
plans: I might rewrite the whole thing in a new, modern framework. Open
to suggestions! While I'm in there I'll re-implement tagging using WalkerOS as I've been keen to play with it since meeting Alexander
in Copenhagen last year and having a long conversation about it. Maybe
even get super modern and do some automated tests, automated deployment?