In your opinion and experience, what's best - working full-time and long-term for one company, or part-time short-term on many smaller projects or parts of projects? What do you think are the pros and cons of both?
I heard that being a consultant is more profitable and one would pick up more experience. Does that beat an 8 hours by 5 days (thanks to Jon Limjap for correction :)) job of coding in a cubicle?
I guess it would probably depend on your ability to adapt to new environment/work practices/organisational culture.
Personally, I tend to think being consultant is better (fewer actual work, closer to the executive, can recommand stuff that regular employees couldn't (like big turnover in a project for instance)).
I like finishing projects and then moving on to something different. Sometimes you can achieve this with a full-time job, but you can always achieve it as a consultant. The money is better as a consultant, but health insurance is pretty expensive.
I'd say if you're single, be a consultant. If you have a family, grow up and get a normal job.
I worked regular for fifteen years and consultant for four years now. It's really quite different. Earnings as consultant (not self-employed) are slightly higher and my career path has gotten steeper.
If you are above average in your technical and(!) soft skills, you probably want to try consultant, since you have a better chance of developing a broad skill set and a steeper career path. Try to avoid too large organizations. I have yet to find one that recognizes superior technical skill and acts accordingly.
As mentioned above, as a consultant your soft skills are really important. You cannot avoid being at least partly a sales person, you must be able to lead others without formal authority, you must have or develop good presentation skills and so on.
Hope that helps. Keep asking if you have more questions.
Consulting does often pay more, but I found it was higher stress and not as much fun. Because you tend to move between companies so often, you don't form as many friendships. And unless you specialize, the work you're doing tends to range from cutting edge to decades old legacy stuff. That makes it difficult to maintain skills and progress your career.
What I often suggest is to start out contracting for a couple of years to build up a proficiency with a specific skillset, consult for a few years to earn money and get a feel for the various work environments and projects available, and then move into a permanent/full-time position where you get benefits + training + frienships. Being permanent/full-time doesn't mean staying there forever, either. Average employment lengths seem to range from 1.5 to 4 years; as people increase in skills, they tend to either get promoted or find a new role with another company.
As a consultant you usually get paid better, but there tends to be less job stability (you need to be prepared to change clients, sometimes unexpectedly). But it's a great way to pick up diverse experience.
For me, the biggest downside to being a consultant was never having a true "sense of ownership" in my work. After completing an exciting project, I may never work on it again or share in its success in the market.
On the other hand, full-time employees with good stock options tend to feel more long-term passion about their work, since they have a stake in its future.
I've spent most of my life as a consultant and just recently got a regular job. Consulting paid better: I took a $7,000 per year pay cut to switch. (Though that's slightly misleading as I now get somewhat better benefits.) But in my experience, the idea that you get more variety and broader experience in consulting was the opposite of the truth. When a client hires a consultant, they want someone who knows the specific technologies they need now. If you're a C++ programmer and they have a Java project, they don't want you. They're not going to pay you to learn their environment. The shorter the contract, the more so. And most consulting companies don't want to pay you to learn something new. Every day that you're sitting in the office studying something is a day that you're not out there bringing in revenue. If they have to pay for the class on top of losing the revenue, forget it. I worked for many consulting companies over the years and I regularly asked if I couldn't get on this or that project so I could learn some new technology, and I was always told no, that they were going to hire people who already knew it. On the other hand, when you're full-time at a company, they at least sometimes see helping you learn new skills as an investment in the future, because they expect you to be around.
Working in a full time job would I think be advantageous to someone who's new (or newish) to software development. Besides the obvious benefits of fixed remuneration, there's also the chance to work with (and learn from) more experienced developers and free (or subsidised) training. There's so much in this industry that they don't (or can't) teach in school.
Depends on your personality. Some prefer the stability of working full-time for someone else, but me, I went freelance four years ago and haven't looked back.
Note, though, that I'm distinguishing "freelance" from the "consulting" mentioned in earlier answers. If you're consulting through headhunters who put you on a series of short-to-mid-term, full-time, on-site contracts, then you may as well be a full-timer, IMO. As a freelancer, I generally work off-site with projects in progress for 2-3 clients at a time and have several clients that I've never met in person, having hooked up with them either via referrals or online contact and set everything up by phone and/or email.
Being a freelance consultant is more work. You are responsible for looking after many tasks that otherwise are done by non-technical personnel, i.e. you need to organise much bigger part of your own work environment.
Whether you get better returns on your time and efforts as a full-time employee or freelancer depends on many factors, but most importantly if your output normally quantity and quality wise is above average within a company you could otherwise work for it is better to work for yourself.
Any company can be compared to a boat. Everyone is rowing. The resulting speed is average of effort made by all rowers, some have negative impact.
If you're more energetic rower you'd probably be better off on your own, in a small boat. It also gives you the benefit of being the captain, eventually you might find similarly or more energetic rowers to join your boat under your command.
Please also read about the difference between consulting and contracting as the freelancing (working as a "sole trader") doesn't always imply consulting, most of the time it is just contracting. It is also possible to consult as an employee of a larger organisation.
I think to some extent it depends on what you enjoy doing. Consulting and software engineering are very different fields, even if they share some similarities. For this response, consultant will denote someone who works at a consulting firm full time.
There are two big trade-offs that are worth talking about here:
Depth of Experience vs. Breadth of Experience
It has already been mentioned that one of the major perks (or downsides) to being a consultant is that you're constantly working on something new. Some projects may last a few months and some may last a few years, but, ultimately, you're going to be working on something new. For better or for worse, this means that good consultants are expected to know everything about a lot of different business processes for different industries. A lot of consultants are delivering services or internal applications, not shrink-wrap software.
In contrast, a professional software engineer is likely to be working on the same feature or set of features for years. This means that they have an intimate knowledge of that particular feature or features, but they may become rusty in other areas in the mean time.
Outsider vs. Insider
It probably doesn't sound like a big deal, but something about consulting that can be good and bad is the fact that consultants are outsiders to the businesses they're working at. Sure, it means you make new friends and work with new people, but it also means that sometimes you don't feel like you have a sense of "home." It also means that you might be expected to perform at a higher level than other employees and be able to answer questions that other people can't answer--after all, why else would they have hired you?
Hopefully this gives you a little bit of insight. Both career tracks are amazingly rewarding if you are passionate about them--sure, there might be some financial trade-off, but what's more important is what you want to do with your career. Let's be honest, most developers in any field are going to make enough money to pay the bills.
Went from a consultant to permanent employee after about 4 years (I was a full-time programmer for a few years before that though). It cost me about 33% of my monthly salary. I guess it depends on where you are in your life (and what you want, of course). As you get older, things like Retirement Annuity and Medical Aid benefits (not to mention annual leave) start to matter more than it did when you were younger. The big plus is that I now get paid leave, and all my training courses are now paid for by the company. Also, I don't have to complete silly timesheets anymore. A big minus is that I now get drawn into lots of corporate politics and bureaucracy.
I don't know about getting more experience as a consultant though. I suppose it depends on the kinds of contracts you sign up for. Some consultants will take on any contract just to get the work, even though they don't really have the skills to actually complete the project. This forces them to skill-up "on the job". I'd say most of what I know is 50/50 - 50% from self-training as a consultant and 50% as a full-time programmer doing R&D and training courses.
I tried the Freelance / Consultant thing for a while. Hated it. Working for myself was excellent, but the "background noise" stress really got to me after a while. Not only do you have to worry about all the stuff the HR department at a "real job" takes care of - retirement, health care, a bunch of new an exciting tax forms - but you also essentially have two full time jobs. The first being the actual technical work, and the second to scare up new clients. It was that second part that finally made me get a full time gig somewhere - I woke up one morning and realized I never wanted to hustle up a new client ever again.
It was also very feast or famine - you'd have weeks where you'd make 3+ grand for two afternoon's work, and then be essentially unemployed the rest of the week (especially when you first get rolling.) (And then the bill for your heath care comes, and you kiss your profit margin goodbye.)
All that being said, I know several people who love the freelance thing. I think you just need the right personality for it.
I prefer a combination where I'm working full-time but changing projects regularly enough to prevent both burnout and complacency. I'll get into something and start finding various faults and then need to shift gears at times to help keep the creative juices flowing.
Pros and cons of each:
Full-time and long-term for one company:
Pro: You can feel comfortable about not having to job search, paycheck can be regular, co-workers may stay the same for a longer period of time. Vacation and sick time may be available for allowing for paid time off.
Con: Potentially locked-in to whatever that company uses, limited raises in salary as the company may not review salary more than once a year. Locked-in to older technologies is also possible if the company isn't technically savvy, e.g. companies still programming sites in ASP.Net 1.1 or older which I have heard a few places that still do that.
Short-term and part-time for multiple companies:
Pro: Dynamic work environment could lead to excellent travel opportunities. New technologies may be used regularly. Legacy issues are potentially avoided by moving on from place to place so quickly. Salary could fluctuate upward from contract to contract. Potentially have a bigger network as you run into more and more people through the rotations you'd go through. Possibly earn extra money as you get paid hourly.
Con: May have to find work regularly, multiple employer W-2s and / or T4s to deal with.
In a way, it depends in part on your desire and ability to handle either extreme or somewhere in the middle where you'd stay for an intermediate-term and move from place to place.
I'm now a 10-year business owner that formerly consulted hourly and also worked full time. I now employ software consultants. So I've seen all sides of this issue.
Bottom line is this ... If you have the right personality, you can make a lot more money consulting in the long run.
What does that look like?
If all those are true, at the end of the road you'll be really glad you chose consulting.
Here's the cool thing, though. You can try it. If you and your spouse don't like it, you can always go back to full time work.