For a short-term engagement, that's not bad at all, but it's awfully high for a 4-year stint. I'd love to learn more about how you came into the position, what it entails, etc. Would you be willing to share here, or at least privately?

I can tell you in broad generalities ... there are some cities, especially ones with a large amount of companies who do oil and gas, where all of the companies mostly use consultants as the majority of their workforce. So almost all of the IT stuff is contracted out and overseen by employees.

The people who can sign contracts and who oversee things are generally employees. Everybody else is a contractor. There is no "us and them" mentality, since most people are in the same boat, so you tend to get treated with some respect. Everybody plays nicely, and if the company likes your work, there's a good chance they'll keep renewing your contract. It's not uncommon for a contractor/consultant to be in a position of recommending options and driving projects or to have been around for years.

It also has the benefit of being private sector and big money industries, which means when a decision is made, and the company accepts that the cost is necessary and beneficial, things actually get done.

Since it's a mobile, contractor work force, there's always opportunities, and sometimes you get a very strange sense of collegiality among companies as the people who are there have likely worked at several others and still have good ties, and periodically check in to see how the other guys are doing things. IT is there to enable to people who do the real work of the company, so you get a really good service/results oriented culture. If you're competent, play by the rules, and do your job well ... well, who doesn't like that?

In my case, due to a limited amount of people with experience with a specific piece of software, I actually live and work in a completely different city ... in fact, it's about a 4 hour flight. But, I've brought my expertise to the table, and people have responded well.

And since they've been happy with my work, I've gotten renewed several times and am one of the people who makes the technical decisions about the stuff we maintain.

But, everything from storage, to networking, to the sys-admins are contractor based workforce. And there's multiple companies all vying for the same workforce.

So, honest answer, do some looking, see if you can identify a large city with a lot of presence of the headquarters of oil and gas companies, and check if they have the same kind of mostly-contractor work force. There may be other industries which have similar effects on cities.

Maybe start looking in the Denver area. And, depending on your citizenship and mobility, maybe look a little North to something similar.

It's not true in all cities, but there are certainly a few where the consulting market is quite lucrative and stable.

I'd warn you, that Austin has it's own special kind of weirdness

LOL ... all these fancy city slickers with their fancy weird haircuts and their fancy weird rock and roll music driving their fancy weird imported cars. People had wires sticking out of their ears for some reason.

Why I saw guys not wearing plaid shirts, belt buckles or hats, and sipping on some kinda weird foamy coffee things ... and they was holdin' hands! Bubba was practically beside himself when he saw the girl with the blue hair and the safety pin through her nose.

I went into a Japanese bait shop, and the guy kept rolling it up with rice ... fish don't eat rice! I have no idea how I was supposed to catch a fish with two sticks.

Then I went to this Eye-talian place, and they kept grating something that smelled like my daddy's socks over my food.

I keed, I keed ... I know Texans usually carry guns.

Suddenly Austin sounds like an interesting place.

So people were just gambling that the stock price would go up.

And this has changed how exactly?

Does Facebook give dividends?

I'm sorry, but there's still a lot of evidence that people buy stocks on the assumption it's going to keep going up indefinitely, and not because of any sound fundamentals about the stock.

Which is why an IPO is usually a joke ... the big investors just buy it and flip it to make a killing, then after the first few days the guys left holding the bag are wondering how they're going to get their profits.

Pretty much exactly like when Red Hat and a bunch of others were going IPO.

Last time I visited a Nissan dealer, they just had Leaf brochures.

Surely you mean Leaflets? ;-)

Not really. Things you buy like cars, TVs, and groceries and the like don't triple, and they represent a good chunk of what you'll spend money on.

If you're spending more than half of your income on housing you're probably pretty screwed.

That $100K might be something you could have a similar standard of living as someone making $60K elsewhere, but I highly doubt it's ever something you can meet with $33K.

I think you're numbers are flawed.

If you are young looking to have lots of fun, Austin would be great. It's a little weird at times (too weird for me) but some folks like it.

LOL ... so, it's not unlike the rest of the world, but entirely unlike Texas?

I've never been to Texas, but this sounds like the rest of Texas is quite boring, and not someplace most of the rest of the world would enjoy.

Kind of like Deliverance or something.

As someone who has done a lot of contracting but has also done long stretches as a full-time employee, I would take less pay for a full-time position any day.

I'm in the middle ... I'm a consultant, which means I'm a full-time employee who is contracted out.

Which means the people who engage my services likely end up paying about 3x my salary to have me as a consultant.

Fortunately, I've been on the same contract for almost 4 years, which means I get the stability of being like an FTE.

I also work with people who are independent contractors. Judging by the number of times one of them has been to Vegas, Jamaica, and Hawaii since I've known him, he's doing pretty well. And, again, he's been around on the same contract for several years as well.

I guess if you get to be a contractor on what turns into a long-term gig, you can get the best of all possible outcomes. There are some markets where all of the companies are using consultants and contractors for most of the work, and those can be quite lucrative for the right people.

I'm sure anybody not currently making six figure salaries would still love to have one.

And since that includes an awful lot of people, I'm sure there isn't any collective sympathy that "six figures ain't what it used to be".

Because, really, neither is five figures.

IIRC, in the ol' days Samba did the same thing to Windows file and print sharing and, wasn't there an anecdote about MS also constantly changing their SMB protocol to block out Samba? Seems fair is fair.

Well, that was MS being their usual selves ... but that was being dickheads and arbitrarily changing the protocol. This was MS being dickheads and spoofing connections to a server.

I believe you can't stop me from reverse engineering a protocol between two servers that I control. But when you start messing about with servers someone else controls, nowadays that would be a criminal act.

I remember implementing something in 1993/1994 which read/wrote files on a FAT file system, straight out of a Microsoft published book in terms of how it was structured, completely from scratch in terms of the raw IO. When several years later they started suing people for using the FAT filesystem I remember thinking "but you've completely documented it, and it's pretty easy".

I don't have a problem with reverse engineering protocols, but manipulating specific servers is getting a little sketchy.

Which leaves you working with technologies nobody you know has any idea about, and no interest in getting.

Though, judging by your UID, you might still be using usenet. :-P

Honest people becoming dishonest doesn't scale either.

I don't know, it seems to be scaling remarkably well, unfortunately.

If implementing a protocol was illegal, Samba would be shut down because it implements the SMB file sharing protocol.

Implementing a protocol may not be illegal, but if I

used a network analyzer to fake out AOL's servers into letting Microsoft's client connect to AIM as well

you can bet your ass I'd be facing criminal charges.

This is about more than making something work with a protocol, it's about explicitly spoofing what you're doing to the servers in question.

Something about unauthorized access to a server and all that.

Not surprised. After all they wrote AOL.

Well, there was a time when someone believed AOL was worth enough to buy Time Warner with just stock.

Good times ... an era with some of the most graphic examples of the stock market losing track of how money and value actually works.

That more or less convinced me right then and there it was all a fairy tale, and the ABCP-caused meltdown of '08 has only reinforced that.

Let's face it, the stock market is a big Ponzi scheme which is often completely detached from reality.

Convince enough people that it makes sense for a company to be trading at a value equal to 100 years worth of income, or that junk debt is AAA rated ... and you can scoop up lots of money too.

If I did this, I would likely be facing criminal charges ... how is it that corporations can do this kind of stuff with impunity?

There seems to be a huge double standard in the way 'people' who are people are prosecuted under the law, versus how 'people' who are corporations are.

And once again, I will take the opportunity to say the problem is the notion that you have 'people' who are corporations.

Forget smoking, I'm waiting for the first reports of someone ending up in hospital because they tried to snort the stuff.

Sounds like they've already thought of that:

"To take precautions against this action, we've added volume to the powder so it would take more than a half of a cup of powder to get the equivalent of one drink up your nose. You would feel a lot of pain for very little gain."

I think snorting a half a cup of powder would take a pretty determined effort.

Then again, I have no idea of the volume of stuff that people snort now, never having decided to try something like that. For all I know, for some people, that's a normal Friday night. :-P