Ask HN: How do you evaluate a job offer and the company offering it?
This is for contract work, which I exclusively do, so may not apply to employment. I&#x27;ve never done employment. Seems like a bad deal to me. Anyway, cliffnotes of my standard contract:<p>- I work remotely. Under no circumstances will I ever show up in person at your office or any other location that requires me to spend time away from places I want to be.<p>- I bill 2 weeks in advance. You chose to buy hours of my time and my compensation is tied to those hours. My compensation is not tied to any kind of result. If you are unhappy with the result, there is no way for you to sue me. If you decide to hire me and then waste my time with meetings and your IT department not being able to procure a simple ssh key, that is your problem, not mine.<p>- I understand that you have deadlines, but so do I. I need to be places and under no circumstances will I ever work more than 40 hours in a week as part of this contract. If you need more resources, we will have to talk about a separate contract.<p>- I do not care for your employees. You are hiring me because you need me to fix their mistakes, do not expect them to be happy about that. If you want to make it my job to be their nanny, I&#x27;m cool with that, but don&#x27;t expect them to suddenly drop the wilful incompetence.<p>- You get a weekly e-mail update which should suffice as far as communication is concerned. Anything beyond that has to be initiated by you and will consume time that I could spend working productively.<p>- I work with Python, exclusively (and some fun low level languages but nobody works with those anyway). I understand that back in 2013 someone decided that node.js was a great idea and now they left because it wasn&#x27;t all that great, but that&#x27;s not my problem. If you want it fixed, we can rebuild it in python. It will work phenomenally.<p>- I do absolutely not do any kind of User Interface work. I know people who do and can manage them for you. But I will not ever touch anything like that personally. Watching paint dry is at least an order of magnitude more entertaining.<p>- This is a contract negotiation, not a job interview. You can ask me technical questions if it makes you feel better about yourself, but time spent on such nonsense will be considered billable hours.<p>Those are the things that matter to me. Other things do not. I charge extra for boring work, like &quot;restFUL API&quot;. No its not difficult to instantiate a framework to write some endpoints.<p>Its perhaps not surprising that my list of priorities doesn&#x27;t touch on usual employment stuff. Its not employment, after all.