Multiply your hourly rate by 2,080 and you get a number that looks like a salary. It isn't one. A $60/hr contract with no benefits, no PTO, and a six-month term is not the same offer as a $125,000 salaried role, even though the arithmetic lands in the same neighborhood. The conversion hides exactly the differences that matter for the decision you're actually making.
Most offer advice assumes you're comparing salaries: base, maybe a bonus, maybe equity, all annualized, all lined up in a spreadsheet column. That advice stops working the moment one of your offers isn't annualized, and a real search usually includes at least one that isn't.
Compare like to like
Hourly against hourly. Salary against salary. When you have to compare across types, do it explicitly, in writing, not by collapsing everything into one misleading number in your head.
The costs a salary quietly absorbs
A salary comes bundled with things you'd otherwise buy or self-insure. Health insurance: price out what a comparable plan actually costs you as a contractor, because that comes straight out of the rate. Paid time off: a salaried job pays you the weeks you don't work, a rate usually doesn't, and ten unpaid weeks a year is a real pay cut hiding inside a number that looks generous. Payroll tax, if you're 1099: an employer covers half of it for an employee; a contractor covers all of it, call it 7.65% of the rate that needs pricing in before any comparison to a W-2 number. Gaps between contracts: a salary pays every two weeks until you leave, a contract ends on a date and the next one doesn't always start the next day.
None of this means contract work is worse. It means the sticker rate isn't the real number. The real number is the rate minus everything a salary would have quietly covered.
Questions that actually matter here
For a contract or hourly offer: is this contract-to-hire or a fixed term, and what's actually happened to past contractors in this role? Who covers equipment and software licenses? What's the honest likelihood of extension, and who would you even ask to find out? Is the rate negotiable, or is an agency setting it and you're not really negotiating with the company at all?
For a salaried offer with meaningful variable pay, ask what percentage of the team hit target last cycle. Not what the target technically is. What actually happened.
Write it down before you compare anything
For each offer, on paper: the number, the type, what's included, what you'd have to cover yourself. Once that's written out you're comparing real situations instead of two numbers that only look comparable because they're both dollar figures.
That's the whole trick. Not converting one pay type into another. Refusing to let the shape of a number stand in for the comparison you actually need to make.