Ram Nagaraj wrote:What I would like to do is handle a part of employee benefits myself say paid time off, medical insurance, 401k etc instead of allowing my employer to handle that so that I can demand a better hourly rate.
You will find that for some of these (medical and 401K) there's no point to forgo this. You can simply not contribute to your 401K. For medical, while most places will give you a small amount of additional salary in lieu of benefits, you will discover that this is far less than how much the employer was contributing, and you are forced to use after-tax dollars to buy your own policy rather than pre-tax dollars when obtained via your employer.
As far as taxes are concerned I want employer to take care of that (say fed/state/city social, medicare etc...)
You have no choice, being on a W-2 basis. They will do this no matter what.
So keeping this in mind what is the billing rate one can expect for a senior developer position?
Where on the East Coast? NY or Boston are more expensive than Charlotte or Orlando.
Cheers!
Luke