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I was a COBOL programmer for Nordstrom in 1996. I worked 350 extra hours on a project and was thrown a $250 bone at the end for the work. It drove me into contracting. Immediately I made more (I was getting a $47k salary from Nordstrom and my contract rate was $27 an hour. Works out to slightly more, when you take into account the hit for holidays and vacation.

But within two years that bumped to $55 an hour and was at $125 an hour by the turn of the century. I’ll not be so specific with what transpired after that other than to say it came back down to around what it was before that spike, but now in KY I at least get time and a half for any overtime.

And the thing is, if I work a single extra hour, I log it and get paid time and a half for it. It’s what I love about contracting.

Of course, I’m almost 63 and have no health insurance (since the exact day Obamacare took effect), but it’s so expensive that the 8% rule keeps me from having to pay the penalty.

Meanwhile, I get hints at how much the employees around me make. It’s far less money, but they have all those nice intangible “benefits”. And yes, I’m being sarcastic.

Just give me the raw dollars and let me decide how much time I want to take off, insurance options, etc...

I like my work. My degree in Molecular Biology was followed by a year of grad school. Finished all my course work for my masters, then almost died from pneumonia. For amusement I added a First Class Radiotelephone license with Ship's RADAR endorsement, Extra Class amateur radio license, teaching credential and private pilot's license. Endless curiosity lead me down of the road of being a UNIX systems programmer (kernel and device drivers) and writing applications in C/C++/Java/Pascal/Assemby(6800,68000,8080,Z80,8085,PIC18F) and data communications protocols. I'm equally happy designing hardware or writing firmware/software. I have 16 people working for me right now doing a mission planning system for fixed and rotary wing aircraft. It's a C++/MFC/C#/XAML/OpenGL for 3D kind of work. Most of the staff are both programmers and licensed pilots, so we are working on something where we have real world experience. The SMEs include a Black Hawk pilot and a F/A 18 RIO. A previous generation of our software was seen in the Top Gun movie when the pilots did the replay debrief of their flight. That took racks of machines. We can do the same on a Windows PC today with an nVidia card.

I had an assignment at Wingcast (Ford/Qualcomm) trying to compete with OnStar. I put in 210 hours a month for 10 months to cover the work of 2 EE, 2 CS (C++/C) and 4 Java programmers. I designed the interfaces to the telematics control unit to emulate 4 models of Ford and one Nissan Infiniti. My lab staff constructed the prototypes, then I wrote the emulators. I also wrote all the backend software to run on a couple desktop machines. I could only handle 10 concurrent users. The other 600 people in the building were supposed to build the real backend for 250,000 customers. They missed the deadline and the venture was terminated.

I turned 60 in August. My first grandson arrived Tuesday of this week. My wife passed her system admin cert exam yesterday and will take her boss's job in February. We work hard and enjoy the fruits of that effort.