411–420 of 424 posts
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Where on earth do you get the 2x-3x? Industry average mark up for recruiting companies is 30% to cover employee costs with w2 contractors.
Who ? you mean the ghastly rip off body shops? I think you may have misunderstood what we are talking about real self-employed contractors vs FTE's The 2-3x salary is the actual cost to an employer of a FTE (full time employee).
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> They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company. The second the politics were shut down, a third of their employees walked out. That is a very inaccurate retelling of the story: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...
Uh, yeah, I've read the account of the Basecamp all-hands meeting a couple of times. I couldn't believe how childish the whole dispute was after the first reading, so I read it again. Rather than spending that morning strategizing about the next version of their software, what bugs needed fixing, how to increase sales, what features were working or not -- they argued over politics. I mean, no one was accused of doing…
Pretty sure someone saying "white supremacy isn't a problem" is implicitly racist.
You don't just state that and suddenly, there is no white supremacy or racism. It's the same people who declared racism was officially over in the US after Obama was elected. The last decade of racially biased policing says otherwise.
Part of the story also was the founders were annoyed the D&I team had asked the company to get rid of & stop maintaining their "Funny customer names" list which apparently was mostly African & Asian people.
That's be very helpful. Again, not "consulting" per se (and the baggage / shtick that goes along with it), just straight up 6-18 month contracting.
Thanks very much!
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You're assuming that agile is a "positive spin on the working environment". In 11 years of professional work, it's only ever been used as a weapon against the development team.
Spot on. Often it feels like a cult, but even more often is used as a micromanagement tool.
I also suspect that you do not actually work in a team. You probably work with other people that are loosely grouped together. I doubt you are actually working together on a common goal though, if you do not see value in standups for example. If there's no value in knowing what your team members are working on, you are not working closely together,you aren't helping each other etc.
I suspect you have a product owner that sees standup as a progress report to them and that tries to exert their micromanaging power through it. I also suspect that you don't have a Scrum master that protects the team from this rogue product owner.
I would take such a PO to the side and explain to him that if he doesn't stop this practice they will soon be disallowed from being in standup and that they have one chance to stay in standup and at least listen. Meaning unless asked a question by a team member they better keep their mouth shut.
Am I at least somewhat close?
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You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment. There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide…
"self-organize" - oh, sooner or later you're in for a treat. Agile coach: "Everybody go to the meeting room, you're going to self-organize. This is how you're going to do it...". I've not yet met an agile coach with the intelligence to parse what they're regurgitating. The only time I've seen agile work was pre-Agile when it had nothing to do with Agile.
He runs a self organization exercise!
You laugh now because you imagine it the way you described it.
Well actually the first thing he does is to appoint someone as 'the worst micro manager in the world' and asks them to sort participant's by number of years of experience with agile development. He times this with a stop watch.
When that's done he simply states that he wants participants to self organize standing next to each other sorted from one end to the other by number of years of experience in software development now. He then stands somewhere in the middle of the room himself and just starts repeating over and over "21 years, 21 years, 21 years,..."
Usually it takes a little while for people to 'get' what he's doing but he stoically just repeats his 2 words.
This is timed too of course. It's interesting how much less organized the second round seems when you are in the room watching this. But it's so much faster and gets the point across brilliantly if you ask me.
One reason for a senior engineer to move to consulting is that they are tired of being forced to prove that they know how to program every time they switch jobs. Companies are far too risk averse when hiring, and the amount of hoops you have to jump through is getting more onerous every year. I'm currently a full-time employee, but I've consulted for about a decade in total. Convincing someone to pay you 2 weeks up f…
Not sure this is true: "Companies are far too risk averse when hiring". The cost of hiring the wrong person is pretty high, doubly so in countries where it's hard to let them go later.
And in other countries where it’s harder to fire people, there is a almost always a probationary period were most protections don’t apply.
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I've had unlimited PTO at 4 companies and 3/4 were truly unlimited. I've taken an international trip for 14 days every year + 5-6 days off for 3 days weekends + any fat hoidays like taking off Christmas eve. I'm sure there are shit companies but it seems like most companies respect it. I feel like the onus is on the employee to ask off. Most people are just too afraid or too much of a workaholic to take off.
Uhhhhh... so you took under a month off? That's not a strong argument. If unlimited is actually unlimited then I would be taking 2 months a year at least.
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Contract is a instant no for me. I've done the math and haven't found them to be competitive long term after what the above commenter mentioned (and that's before all the headaches of actually getting paid). Most of my peers feel the same way.
Been contracting for decades. Wouldn't do it any other way. The critical thing is to get a pipeline of folks you know that send work your way. So rarely idle. That was done by working 15 years in the field in a variety of companies. I keep in contact with many old colleagues and remind them I've got bandwidth. I never made more money than I do contracting now. I've never had to 'chase down money' - never had a bad ch…
Technical recruiter here. For okay-paid fulltime roles, you won't never attract people who are after the money. These people will always prefer juicy contracting rates to your small company salary. You have to try to find people who care less about money and more about other perks like remote work, interesting tasks, a strong technical team, meaningful mission etc. In Switzerland, which is my market, freelancers aren…
In Germany, I've heard if you stay on the same job for more than a couple of years, people think you're not good enough to chase for next/better opportunities :)