I just wanted to share this story about a friend I met. He had a job a few years ago that was paying $115k doing salesforce development work. He got into a group of other salesforce developers and found out that contract work pays more and you’re no longer limited to 1:1 employee to employer relationship. He picked up 5 contracts and worked them all — and was clearing like $80k/month doing so figuring average contract rates at like 40 hours week at $100/hour.
Now, he’s done working himself to the bone so he only has 3 contracts at a time (self imposed governor limit) — and he’s making about $10k/week this way.
I guess his point is that:
- Do W-2 work as a full time employee in order to buy time and figure out how to do work.
- Once you’ve developed a strong enough competency in the work, W-2 is no longer the best fit.
- Reorient yourself around contract work. The hardest thing is to get started and find work.
- Use recruiters to make step 3 easy.
- Know your limits, always be interviewing, always say yes.
You know who you are. At least, you think you do. Life serves as a constant reminder that you’re just not as sure as you thought you were. Funny thing this living business.
Take what you want if you wanna take it; you only have so much carrying capacity and sometimes it’s better to keep carrying what you’re carrying rather than set some of it down for something else. Those that are good at figuring out what is more worth carrying than their current load live the most entertaining lives I imagine. Thoughts? Idk. Seems legit.
Also, if you want my advice it is simple… getting a salesforce certification is a much better decision than getting a college degree. It is worth more. The market will pay you. You will learn valuable highly in demand skills. It’s not that exciting and is kind of boring and there may be faster ways to make money, I can’t speak to that, but this is a reliable way to build yourself and those you care about up.
The below rates —? $108k for salesforce developer? That’s a starting rate in my friend’s experience — you can get multiples of that doing multiple jobs.. and work at nearly double the rate with 5 years of experience