Bad Ideas and Poor Choices

It’s not just me and it didn’t just start; it just took me awhile to notice.

I spent two years as a contractor at a major pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, MA. Life sciences, pharma, biotech, huddle together in and around Kendall Square weaving between the MIT buildings like offshoot vines. Biotech was booming, COVID was endemic (that’s what comes after pandemic and do let it raise the hair on the back of your neck), and the sudden influx of cash available for clinical trials was like Christmas morning if Santa unloaded the entire sack on your living room floor.

It was also mother fucking insane. Small companies grew faster than the infrastructure could keep up, and it was a contractor’s paradise.

I should explain my use of the word ‘contractor’. I am, or I was, a small business with a single employee. Me. I provided ‘professional services’, specifically the project or program management of financial software implementations. I am, or was, specifically, a Technical Project Manager (TPM) which is very different than a Project Manager. A TPM must have an intrinsic understanding of the system in question, how it works, why it works, who needs it, what they’ll do with it (hopefully), where the data comes from, how it gets from there to here and what happens to it during its travels etc. To be clear, we do what the PM does as well, but we are far better compensated and harder to find.

Billing is something called ‘Corp to Corp’ which means no more 1099s contracted directly by the company, and very clear contracts. This differs from the quasi-employee ‘contracted’ in place of an actual employee. This is very convenient if you’re not sure how much expansion and contraction is going to happen, and a subcontractor’s contract can be cancelled at will.

I, Mr. James Joyce, existed as JamesJoyce LLC for about ten years. Client to client to client. It was wonderful, spectacular, often mind-numbing, and with the exception of three short-term engagements between 2019 and 2020, the most fun I’ve had since I hit the tech industry in 1997.

I’ve been around awhile.

Let’s come back to ‘cancelled at will’. Contractors, services, or temps, I guess, fly under the radar of employment stats. That means if there is a massive influx of either sort, you don’t see it in job growth. It’s as if those contracted resources never existed. That’s OK. What’s not OK is the flip side when industries tank and the contractors go away and the job market still looks more or less stable.

There are enough of us to make a significant difference. We don’t collect unemployment; we just sort of vanish.

But that’s OK (or it should be if we really do treat ourselves like the small businesses we are). An independent contractor should have six months of liquid assets with which to pay oneself unemployment benefits. It’s called bench time. I don’t have a new client and I’m on the bench until I find one. Not unusual. During bench time, the cost of being a small business continues. The cost of medical insurance is based on the prior year’s gross earnings. Not net, gross. A contractor pays for everything, which is why our bill rates and our gross seem to confound people.

For example, Contractor Toby bills out at $35 per hour. Contractor Toby bills 40 hours a week because he is capped per his contract, even if more hours are required (they generally are). Assuming Contractor Toby takes two weeks off (he pays himself for those days), his annual gross is $70,000. Sounds OK, right? Depending on what you do and where you live, that might look pretty good. In truth, Contractor Toby’s net is less than half of that. Imagine being taxed at 52%. That’s not what’s happening. It looks more like this:

As you can see, Contractor Toby is in the hole Year 1. After Year 1, Contractor Toby will have six months of unemployment insurance, and his net income will be approximately $25,900. And that number might be OK except that an employee doing Contractor Toby’s job would likely have a corporate contribution to medical insurance, hopefully more than half; he would not have to carry General Liability and Workers Comp insurance; there might be a 401k matching program; and his company would be required to pay half of his Medicare and Social Security taxes. The other thing Contractor Toby would have, assuming he was an employee, would most likely be a higher salary. Industry standards suggest, depending on the industry I suppose, that a contract that nets $30,000 would likely pay $35,000 – $45,000 to an employee.

Contractor Toby is taking a hit, but he might be OK with that for a lot of reasons.

I used a low number for a reason. And that is a low number. That number, for a family of four, is just over the National Poverty Line. I checked. You can too.

Until the end of 2024, TPMs billed hourly between $110 and $175 per hour. Stop choking on your cheerios, we are worth that and often worth more.

Until the end of 2024, PMs billed hourly between $60 and $110 per hour. Also, worth it.

In comparison, Engineers, Developers, System Architects (the people who build the systems the TPM is managing) billed between $150 and $400 per hour. If you’re choking on your cheerios (again), these are the people building the systems that consolidate the numbers that publicly traded companies are required to submit the SEC and Wallstreet (see, Enron, 2000 something or other). And they’d damn well better be PERFECT.

These are the people who have disappeared. The first sign of trouble was when the jobs simply vanished. Literally. Nothing was moving. That’s OK, it’s happened before, you just have to wait it out. The second sign of trouble were the bill rates and the job descriptions. Bill rates dropped in half and jobs were combined. Still capped at 40 hours. The most common opening for professional services in the tech industry looked like this:

Candidate is a System Architect and performs all duties of the Technical Project Manager.

That’s a really bad idea for a lot of reasons starting with conflict of interest and compliance, but that’s OK. What it is, is almost impossible unless the project timeline has been extended significantly in which case why didn’t you contract two positions and get your system up in under a year? It’s going to cost the same in the end but that’s what happened. Or, is happening. I guess.

Then this happened. I thought it was a joke. It was not:

Candidate is a TPM, contract position pays $18 – $20 an hour depending on experience.

I about peed myself until I realized people were applying.

Everything in the tech world is high stress. I’ll just leave it at that.

Maybe those people applied for that job in New Mexico (remote) for the same reason I did. I applied to find out if it was a joke or a typo. A very perky internal recruiter was delighted with my resume and wondered when I could start. I backed her up and asked about the bill rates and she said, “I’m sure we can get you $20.”

I said, “it was great speaking with you, I don’t believe we’re a match, so sorry. Have a great day.”

And THEN LinkedIn exploded. Three things are happening. LinkedIn is literally spamming us with jobs that don’t actually exist. Some of them do but 800 people (yes, 800, sometimes more) have already applied or the position is filled. Now I, and some of my colleagues, are receiving links to construction projects. Damn. That’s the first thing.

The second and third are these: People are losing their shit and posting their frustration in all caps (well, there goes your career) and people are retiring in their fifties. We don’t do that. We work well into our sixties or even seventies having socked away a tremendous amount of valuable information and our bill rates are still rising because of that. We are retiring because we cannot bring ourselves to submit another resume, speak with another recruiter, go through another seriously weird interview just to turn around and do it again the next day.

It’s not just Biotech. Biotech just happens to be where I sat last. I was at the Big Elevator Company, I was at the Can You Hear Me Now? Company, and that two letter massive industry conglomerate that used to be headquartered in Connecticut. I was a lot of places in a lot of very different industries, and you know what? The Professional Services (tech) Industry has TANKED. I think a lot of things have tanked, but I only really know the world I’ve been sitting in. I do know that my boss at the Biotech company, who used to have a staff of four actual employees, plus half of my time (I was with Treasury too, that was fun) to run a massive Financial Planning and Analysis department is now alone. He wants to quit. He wants to be anywhere else but anywhere else may not be any better.

As an aside, he is a Naturalized American Citizen from a Latin American country (means he has a brown face) with an advanced (his third) degree from Harvard. He is as at risk as any brown face of being disappeared. Not deported. There’s a paper trail on that shit and it used to follow the Rule of Law. Not deported. Disappeared. He needs to remain gainfully employed by a company that could and would make an awful lot of noise if he didn’t show up to work. That’s fucking trapped. Like a rat in a cage.

Moving on.

I’m not retiring. I’m quitting. Seriously. I quit. This is bullshit and I can actually survive without that income stream. Also, I’m a well-educated White Anglo Saxon with access to family money if I find myself up shit’s creek, and a river of lawyers. So. I can quit. I can turn my back and walk away from the labor force with impunity. I cannot believe I have reason to have typed those last couple of sentences.

I’m going to be sixty-two in April of 2026 at which point I will do something I swore I would never do and take Social Security as soon as I can. It would be nice if it didn’t vanish but that’s a problem for another day.

In the meantime, I have been living an intentionally simple life. I don’t need much and I’m very happy where I am. You can take me out of this house, on this mountain, feet first.

What I’ve lost are my retirement dreams. And that’s OK too. I’m not willing to spend the next seven years as a wage slave just so I can go to Tierra del Fuego. I wanted to travel North. I would have been delighted to spend a fair amount of time in Israel with my friends (co-workers from long ago) but I’m not sure what Israel’s going to look like anyway. I try not to think about the possible long-term ramifications of the current conflicts.

I’d like a lot of things, but you know what? I’d like my car to not die anytime soon because that would be bad. Manageable, I suppose, but seriously, not good.

Bonus: Why are the biotech companies floundering? Why have clinical trials on drugs (ya know, like cancer?) stalled? I’ll give you three guesses and the first fucking two don’t count. If you’re seriously anti-vax, get off my lawn right now!