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From: Robert on 2 Aug 2008 22:08 On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 12:10:15 +0000 (UTC), docdwarf(a)panix.com () wrote: >In article <ati794tbvu02k92t3od5t0u6g6culuscob(a)4ax.com>, >Robert <no(a)e.mail> wrote: >>>>>And why on earth did you - as a professional contractor - accept such an >>>>>assignment? >>>> >>>>They didn't ASK whether I wanted to do it. They said get it done or else. >>> >>>See above. In my experience it was either a hollow threat or a place I >>>did not want to work. >> >>It was not a hollow threat. Either you rise to the occasion or you're >>unemployed. > >Managing to turn someone else's lack of planning or foresight into your >own emergency is not what I would call 'rising to the occasion', Mr >Wagner... it is what I would call 'paying for your own Vaseline'. See >above, in my experience it was either a hollow threat or a place I did not >want to work. Lack of planning creates OPPORTUNITIES for contractors. The owner of my contracvting company says we should always be on the lookout "someone whose cart is stuck in a ditch." We will offer to pull it out. When I was a manager, for 20 years, I never used a contractor and was puzzled why anyone would pay twice as much for a programmer. Now, having been a contractor for ten years, I've seen a variety of reasons; 1. Employees are spending nearly all their time in meetings, don't have time to do actual work. 2. Employees don't want to do grunge work like testing. 3. Company politics makes hiring contractors easier than using employees. Hiring freeze. 4. Need sacrificial goats for the annual 10% cut. Aside: the word decimate came from the Roman Legion practice of punishing an army unit by killing every tenth man. It doesn't mean destroy; it means reduce by 10%. 5. Kickbacks. 6. Add real expertise to low-skilled team of outsourcers. Rescue them when they don't know what to do. 7. The manager has no authority to hire employees, can employ only 'vendors.' 8. The HR department is so inept that it cannot find competent people. 9. Management is under pressure to reduce employees. Contractors don't count. >>>>>Three weeks of consultant fees totally wasted by the client! I see things >>>>>like this and it drives me nuts: just like with lawyers, you get a couple of >>>>>bad apples and we ("real" consultants) ALL look bad. >>>> >>>>Sounds like bad management. >>> >>>I've been a consultant/contractor/hired gun for a few decades now, Mr >>>Wagner, and I've yet to get a gig at a place which had what I would call >>>'good management'... the nature of my work, perhaps, in the same way that >>>physicians frequently see a lot more sick people than healthy ones. >> >>I concur. > >''We agree on something? One of us must be wrong!', he cried, Wildely.' All the above are symptoms of mismanagement. >>>>If I refused to do taks for which I'm not qualified, I'd be looking for >>>>a new job every month or two. >>> >>>Sometimes, Mr Wagner, it works out that one winds up having what one is >>>willing to accept. >> >>"People get and deserve what they settle for." > >Leaving out the 'sometimes it works out that' might be seen as changing >the statement substantially. "People get what they settle for" is a quotation from Telma and Louise. They don't got to show you no wimpy qualifier like "sometimes it works out that." >>>Our experiences, of course, may be different... I've >>>been asked to do stuff ('we need it yesterday!') for which I did not have >>>appropriate experience and my response has been 'I have stated, >>>unambiguously and explicitly, that this does not fall within my existing >>>skill-set; in order to get it done I will need (time/resources). If those >>>cannot be made available for me then I must, in all good conscience, >>>refuse the task just as a plumber would have to refuse a job-order for >>>rewiring a generator.' >>> >>>Word gets around. >> >>Word gets around that you're a crochety old guy, which is the kiss of >>death outside the >>mainframe world. > >Mr Wagner, you've made assertions about various 'worlds' in the past which >have been shown to have a curious relationship - or lack thereof - with >what others have experienced. I relate my experiences with Fortune 100 companies that are household names -- Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Sears, Sprint, etc. If your mileage varies, kindly identify the venues where you found more enlightenment. >>I work with people in their 20s and 30s who think old >>people are too slow >>and out of style. They'll fire you in a heartbeat. It takes an effort to >>wow them. > >Mr Wagner, rest assured that you're not the only one who manages to do >such things... or so my experience shows me. The VB task turned out be rewarding. It promoted the user (a department manager was the only user) to enter a month an year (by default it filled in last month), called an Oracle 'stored procedure' to extract one customer's (Blue Cross) purchases to a comma delimited file, then FTPd the file to the user's desktop. He sent it to the customer as an email attachment. Oracle has two kinds of procedure. A classical Stored Procedure is written in PL/SQL and stored in the database. An External Procedure is written in any language that compiles to an executable. Both are called the same way; the client has no way of knowing how the procedure was written. I wrote it in Cobol. It didn't work. It was loaded by Oracle (technically by The Listener, for security reasons) and started executing, but fell over on the first IO, even a DISPLAY statement. The reason was that Oracle loaded the program with default dlopen options of RTLD_NOW, RTLD_LOCAL, which means discard the symbol table. That's inappropriate with Micro Focus Cobol because it lazy loads its file system, extfh. A Micro Focus program must be loaded with RTLD_LAZY, RTLD_GLOBAL, which retains the symbol table for secondary loads. Apparently, I was the first person who every wrote an Oracle External Procedure in Micro Focus Cobol. The MF support manager I talked to had not heard of this problem. The solution was a C wrapper that did nothing but call dlopen to load the Cobol program with the right options. In retrospect, I wish I'd written it in Cobol. I wonder whether ANYone else has encountered this problem. If not, it means Cobol is mortibund for serious development on Unix.
From: Robert on 2 Aug 2008 23:09 On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 13:55:11 +1200, "Pete Dashwood" <dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote: > > >"Robert" <no(a)e.mail> wrote in message >news:22p99452rh1df8lr0hf1o6psbgvsu3id4g(a)4ax.com... >> On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 11:49:33 -0500, "Michael Mattias" >> <mmattias(a)talsystems.com> wrote: >> >>><docdwarf(a)panix.com> wrote in message >>>news:g71v9a$pjv$1(a)reader1.panix.com... >>>> My experience, Mr Mattias, is that what is called a 'consultant' at one >>>> organisation is called a 'contractor' at another and a 'temporary >>>> resource' at a third... the last term I found to have a kind of chilling >>>> dehumanisation to it. >>> >>>What's in a name? >>> >>>That which we call a rose .... etc >>> >>>The use and misuse of the words "contractor" and "consultant" is one of my >>>longtime personal "issues." >>> >>>In general my complaint is with the latter being used to describe the >>>function of the former. >> >> Contractor is a misnomer, because it implies a contractual obligation for >> duration of >> employment. There is no such guarantee, all contracts say "employment at >> will," which >> means the employer can terminate at any time for any reason or no reason. >> >> Contracts are terminated prematurely all the time. IBM is notorious for >> doing it. I signed >> an eight month contract (and a six month apartment lease) that was >> terminated with no >> notice after two months. IBM didn't lose their outsource contract with the >> client not was >> the project cancelled. Some faceless bureaucrat, probably in another city, >> realized they >> weren't hitting a profit target, so (s)he axed 100 contractors in one day. >> >> > >Why would you sign a contract that allows them to do that? Escape clauses >are fine, but there has to be cash in lieu of notice. > >Why don't you negotiate your own contract with the agency and let them worry >about IBM terminating it? Are experienced contractors so thick on the ground >they can afford to treat people like that? If so, then maybe you should be >looking at a different way to make a living. In my experience, getting a contractor job requires: ... Talking to 20 recruiters, convincing them you have ALL the requirements. ... Interviewing with 5 clients. At the end of the process, which can take 2 weeks to 5 months, I always get three 'offers' the same day, a Friday. 1. A solid offer, the one I accept. 2. A more interesting assignment that's 'definitely interested' but the decision maker is on vacation, or so they say. Or the contracting company is too greedy to pay enough. 3. Another that wants me but is having internal political problems. >In the days when I was contracting as a programmer/analyst I tried to build >a good working relationship with one agency. It worked very well.They would >have another contract waiting as soon as the current one was finished, if I >didn't want to extend. They met me at the airport when I arrived back in the >U.K. from visits home between contracts, and ensured I had accommodation for >the first week or so until it was decided where I'd be working. In other >words, they took good care of me and, as a result, I did not circulate my CV >to other agaencies. (In fact, I ended up becoming a partner in the >agency...). The agency was eventually sold and all concerned came out of it >pretty well. By then I had established enough credibility not to really need >an agency to get work and I was moving more towards management anyway. It was like that in the US during the 90s. No longer. I've worked for the same contracting company twice, but never consecutively. Every time a project ends, I'm starting from scratch. >These days I'm pretty happy working from home with occasional visits to >client sites, but I believe I will still take on the odd on-site Project >Management type role for assignments that look particularly interesing >(difficult...). In these cases I have a standard contract that is fair to >both parties and no-one has refused to sign it yet. It does not provide for >immediate termination without recompense (except in the unimaginable case of >me running berserk or otherwise misbehaving, or conducting myself >improperly.) and it does offer a money back guarantee of satisfaction. So >far, I have never had to pay out, although I came close once... :-) > >As long as you accept having a gun held to your head, then people will be >tempted to hold guns to your head. > >I've been a free lance since 1975 and I've NEVER had the kind of treatment >you describe. I treat people fairly, do not despise and denigrate managers, >or programmers, or analysts, or anybody else... (even poor ones...instead, >try and encourage them to be better), and apply the fifteen points I posted >here a while back. As a result, even when working for managers half my age, >I have no problem with them. (I had one on a project a few years back who >said to me: "Y'know Pete, you're old enough to be my father..." I replied: >"Aren't you lucky to have someone that kind and wise, who you can trust, >working for you... ? :-)" We never had a problem. > >The world you describe is foreign to me. Maybe it is just America. You're describing a world that ended ten years ago .. at least in the US, probably in India and China as well. Contractors are called 'resources.' They have zero bargaining power. If they won't sign a 'standard contract,' there are a hundred Indian contractors who will. The company where I'm working now has 40,000 IT workers, half of whom are contractors. They can't possibly consider the talents of each individual. How would YOU manage a staff that large? You'd have to decide the fate of people you'd never met based on generalities.
From: Anonymous on 3 Aug 2008 04:56 In article <19v994510llhjjimheq9qclmmsp849j07s(a)4ax.com>, Robert <no(a)e.mail> wrote: >On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 12:10:15 +0000 (UTC), docdwarf(a)panix.com () wrote: > >>In article <ati794tbvu02k92t3od5t0u6g6culuscob(a)4ax.com>, >>Robert <no(a)e.mail> wrote: > >>>>>>And why on earth did you - as a professional contractor - accept such an >>>>>>assignment? >>>>> >>>>>They didn't ASK whether I wanted to do it. They said get it done or else. >>>> >>>>See above. In my experience it was either a hollow threat or a place I >>>>did not want to work. >>> >>>It was not a hollow threat. Either you rise to the occasion or you're >>>unemployed. >> >>Managing to turn someone else's lack of planning or foresight into your >>own emergency is not what I would call 'rising to the occasion', Mr >>Wagner... it is what I would call 'paying for your own Vaseline'. See >>above, in my experience it was either a hollow threat or a place I did not >>want to work. > >Lack of planning creates OPPORTUNITIES for contractors. Lack of dryness creates puddles, swimming-pools and oceans, Mr Wagner... not all situations are created equally. >The owner of my >contracvting >company says we should always be on the lookout "someone whose cart is >stuck in a ditch." >We will offer to pull it out. Such a generous fellow... it makes me wonder whe he last pulled over to assist a guy standing outside of a hood-raised car and holding a set of jumper-cables. > >When I was a manager, for 20 years, I never used a contractor and was >puzzled why anyone >would pay twice as much for a programmer. Now, having been a contractor >for ten years, >I've seen a variety of reasons; Not a bad start, Mr Wagner... you might want to include 'provide the appearance of support for a project that's intended to fail' and the 'try them before we buy them' contract-to-hire schemes. Oh, and there's also the odd project where the amount of work actually overwhelms the indigineous fauna, a system comversion or the adding of a new interface, where for a short time a bunch o' folks with previously un-needed skills are necessary, too... you see, the list keeps growing. >>>>>>Three weeks of consultant fees totally wasted by the client! I see things >>>>>>like this and it drives me nuts: just like with lawyers, you get a couple of >>>>>>bad apples and we ("real" consultants) ALL look bad. >>>>> >>>>>Sounds like bad management. >>>> >>>>I've been a consultant/contractor/hired gun for a few decades now, Mr >>>>Wagner, and I've yet to get a gig at a place which had what I would call >>>>'good management'... the nature of my work, perhaps, in the same way that >>>>physicians frequently see a lot more sick people than healthy ones. >>> >>>I concur. >> >>''We agree on something? One of us must be wrong!', he cried, Wildely.' > >All the above are symptoms of mismanagement. Ahhhhhh... management is not the head of the fish, is it? Given the old standby of 'The responsibility for allocation, co-ordination and motivation of personnel and corporate resources towards the accomplishment of a stated Executive goal is that of Management'... what about misExecution? I spent some time on-contract at a place a few years back... must have started there in '96 or so... that was in the fourth year of a six-year 'We'll Be Off The Mainframe and On To Client Server'. Things had gotten to a point where they realised that maybe it would be a good idea to get a few extra hands on board to deal with the mainframe enhancement/maintenance backlog caused by the Hard Freeze they instituted when the project began... .... oh, and they were bought out, a year and a half later. > >>>>>If I refused to do taks for which I'm not qualified, I'd be looking for >>>>>a new job every month or two. >>>> >>>>Sometimes, Mr Wagner, it works out that one winds up having what one is >>>>willing to accept. >>> >>>"People get and deserve what they settle for." >> >>Leaving out the 'sometimes it works out that' might be seen as changing >>the statement substantially. > >"People get what they settle for" is a quotation from Telma and Louise. >They don't got to >show you no wimpy qualifier like "sometimes it works out that." If 'nothing is always (including this statement)' then a qualifier of 'sometimes' can be a succinct shorthand for 'under certain conditions and alignments of forces or planets'. If you want to live your live by the Deep Wisdom found in a movie about two women who commit suicide that's your call. > >>>>Our experiences, of course, may be different... I've >>>>been asked to do stuff ('we need it yesterday!') for which I did not have >>>>appropriate experience and my response has been 'I have stated, >>>>unambiguously and explicitly, that this does not fall within my existing >>>>skill-set; in order to get it done I will need (time/resources). [snip] >>>>Word gets around. >>> >>>Word gets around that you're a crochety old guy, which is the kiss of >>>death outside the >>>mainframe world. >> >>Mr Wagner, you've made assertions about various 'worlds' in the past which >>have been shown to have a curious relationship - or lack thereof - with >>what others have experienced. > >I relate my experiences with Fortune 100 companies that are household >names -- Wal-Mart, >Coca-Cola, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Sears, Sprint, etc. If your mileage >varies, kindly >identify the venues where you found more enlightenment. On the Internet nobody knows you're a weenie-boy running at 1200 baud on an Apple ][e... are you offering to play 'my resume's bigger than yours', Mr Wagner? Consider, if you will, how different experiences can be for different people working in different project area at each of the companies you've mentioned... it's possible that someone has had the exact same clients as you - or, of course, an equally Illustrious Set - and has come to conclusions not in accord with your own. (I interviewed at Merrill, years on back... somewhere in the Bowels of Jersey, as I recall; they demanded an arrangement they called a 'professional day' and I said that I hope they would be very happy with whoever they found to fill the slot... because it wasn't going to be me.) [snip] >>>I work with people in their 20s and 30s who think old >>>people are too slow >>>and out of style. They'll fire you in a heartbeat. It takes an effort to >>>wow them. >> >>Mr Wagner, rest assured that you're not the only one who manages to do >>such things... or so my experience shows me. > >The VB task turned out be rewarding. Not all tasks turn out that way, or so I've seen... even if every cloud has a silver lining there might not be enough metal to extract to pay for the damage the hailstrom has wrought on your crops. DD
From: Anonymous on 3 Aug 2008 09:59 In article <6fkhg0Fc0ck4U1(a)mid.individual.net>, Pete Dashwood <dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote: > > >"Robert" <no(a)e.mail> wrote in message >news:22p99452rh1df8lr0hf1o6psbgvsu3id4g(a)4ax.com... [snip] >> Contractor is a misnomer, because it implies a contractual obligation for >> duration of >> employment. There is no such guarantee, all contracts say "employment at >> will," which >> means the employer can terminate at any time for any reason or no reason. >> >> Contracts are terminated prematurely all the time. IBM is notorious for >> doing it. I signed >> an eight month contract (and a six month apartment lease) that was >> terminated with no >> notice after two months. IBM didn't lose their outsource contract with the >> client not was >> the project cancelled. Some faceless bureaucrat, probably in another city, >> realized they >> weren't hitting a profit target, so (s)he axed 100 contractors in one day. >> >> > >Why would you sign a contract that allows them to do that? Escape clauses >are fine, but there has to be cash in lieu of notice. One might think so, Mr Dashwood, and it might be done that way in other places... but in the USA I have never been offered a contract which says that I will get US$N if the other party decides to terminate early. A few years (decades?) back it used to be common for pimps to inclide a paragraph holding the consultant resonspible for any monies the pimp would have made if the consultant stopped working with the client before the client gave a 'Mother, May I'... *that* resulted in a rather curious exchange between me and the headhumter when I did not feel the job was a Good Fit: Me: 'I can tell after a few weeks that this isn't going to work out; if you want I'll stay on for another two weeks to train my replacement but no longer than that.' PIMP: 'WHAT ARE YOU TALIKING ABOUT? THE CONTRACT SAYS IF THEY WANT YOU TO STAY, YOU STAY, AN' THEY AIN'T SAID FOR YOU TO GO YET!!! YOU LEAVE NOW AND YOU'RE GONNA OWE ME MOMEY MOMEY MONEY MONEY!!!' Me: 'Please... we can deal with this as Honorable Businessmen... or I can go into work tomorrow and tell - in perfectly acceptable, family-newspaper front-page English - the project leader what I think of his 'leadership' skills, the project manager what I think about his estimates, assignments and timelines for the work to be done and the project director what I think about his choice in subordinates, leadership-styles and secretaries... .... and you'll get a call about five minutes later, I'll get escorted out (dangerous threat that I am!) by Security and you will *never* place another body in that shop *ever* again. How would you rather this turn out?' > >Why don't you negotiate your own contract with the agency and let them worry >about IBM terminating it? In the Actors' World those are called 'play-or-pay' contracts... in other businesses they are, in my experience, reserved for instances not where a consultant negotiates with a client but where a lawyer for the party of the first part negotiates with the lawyer for the party of the second part. In short... it ain't done that way here. DD
From: Anonymous on 3 Aug 2008 10:20
In article <oh5a94djujajtek423m6e7rui63bfjsip3(a)4ax.com>, Robert <no(a)e.mail> wrote: > [snip] Mr Wagner and I seem to have remarkably similar experiences in this matter. >In my experience, getting a contractor job requires: > >.. Talking to 20 recruiters, convincing them you have ALL the requirements. First the recruiter must be caught, of course. One fires up one's email (it used to be a fax machine) and sends an updated copy of the brag-sheet to everyone there... .... and then waits a bit for the flurry of 'RECIPIENT NOT FOUND' or 'DOMAIN DOES NOT EXIST' replies. Agencies come and go with all the permanence of wildflowers after a desert rain. Then, after dealing with the 'pimples' (junior-level pimps) who have been assigned to 'New Contacts' ('Please, turn to page three and notice the date of that first technical certification... yes, that's right, the one that's before either of your parents were born. What were you asking about experience?') and the requests for 'Hairy Ears' interviews: P: 'We'd like you to come in and talk to you about what Sell-ur-Assco is all about.' M: 'No, you want me to come in so you can see if I know how to dress presentably or have hair coming out of my ears and then you can tick off another 'In Office Interview' on your weekly status report. Are you going to at least buy me lunch?' P: (nervous laugh) 'No, but we have a lovely coffee machine...' M: 'That's nice... I'll tell you what, when you have a real, live client to submit me to then arrange the interview with them in the afternoon; I'll stop by in the morning and sign the appropriate paperwork and you can look me over then.' > >.. Interviewing with 5 clients. > >At the end of the process, which can take 2 weeks to 5 months, I always >get three 'offers' >the same day, a Friday. That's interesting... I *never* get Good News on a Friday, in fact I have the category of 'Friday Afternoon Look Busy' call just for when the pimps are making such. I've found that, in general, if I am not on site and working within 48 hours of the client receiving the fax/email of my papers then the slot is dead. [snip] >It was like that in the US during the 90s. No longer. I've worked for >the same contracting >company twice, but never consecutively. Every time a project ends, I'm >starting from >scratch. I've never worked for the same company twice, even non-consecutively. I've had pimps beg and plead for me to hold off putting my papers on the streets for (a day, two days, until the next Wednesday status meeting, until the Account Reps' Group Meeting on the 15th, etc) but when I ask how much I'll be paid for keeping myself off the market they get awfully quiet. I call the pimp and say 'I was just told my contract's coming down at tne end of the day/week/month... do you have anyone like up who might need my skills?' The pimp is *always* surprised and *never* has anything... so they do their jobs (which is to find clients where I can work) and I do mine (which is find pimps who have clients where I can work). It's a bit of a race and I've never seen a pimp 'win' it. DD |