101–110 of 457 posts
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It's a reasonable stance until the point where most of society is ran by for-profit companies. Then that mindset actively makes the world worse. Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
Your proposed solution?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a reasonable stance until the point where most of society is ran by for-profit companies. Then that mindset actively makes the world worse. Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
Your proposed solution?
Also, when you do a good job, ex-coworkers will often reach out to you to give you better opportunities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Honestly, having been to high trust places like Singapore for a decent amount of time - it's better to live in a low trust society. Singapore is easily one of the most boring, sad, depressing places on earth despite it being on paper a paradise according to education, health care, etc rates. High trust in society correlates strongly with being anti-innovative. Europe is going through another lost decade in a row beca…
As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank. Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise. One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team,…
That's because the bankers didn't realize they're not in the banking business anymore - they're in the IT business (which has a focus on tracking money).
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I decided to take the advice of my lawyers who specialized in the topic of government projects. Based on the budget someone could have easily gone to prison and it probably would have been me because it looked like I was billing 80-hours a week when it was just one of many projects and so I was actually billing ~20/wk. The $1M threshold wasn't an anecdote - at the time it really was the limit in project size for pris…
Ages ago, my girlfriend at the time worked for a company that routinely got SIBR (small business innovation research) grants. Such grants made up part of her total workload. The crazy thing was that if she worked for 10 hours on SBIR stuff, then worked 40 hours on her normal work stuff (so overtime), the SBIR billing would get scaled down to 8 hours (that is, 25% of 40 hours). There would be no way to bill 80 hours.…
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The military is like this. Higher Headquarters decides to contract out maintenance and logistical support for $aircraft_fleet. Uniformed maintainers go home in Friday and show up Monday making a lot more money to do the same job but without risk of getting posted or deployed. Contractor fees come out because of a different pot of money, so perverse incentives abound.
Don’t those uniformed maintainers get reassigned to other military jobs or are they allowed to work as a contractor while being active military?
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I've seen that in a large management consultancy company. Part of their risk management procedures (both for the company and in terms of some EU law) meant they couldn't keep contractors for longer than x years. They'd have to convert to employee or separate for 12 months. Bit that doesn't really work in knowledge systems. Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has, and their depa…
> Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has I think that's the part management teams are missing. They assume that employees are just human resources and they can replace a senior engineer with a 100% equivalent one when needed.
I knew multiple people there who made more in signing bonus, pay during training, and severance than they made for work actually performed.
The CEO is convinced that this is the path to "top tech talent."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen that in a large management consultancy company. Part of their risk management procedures (both for the company and in terms of some EU law) meant they couldn't keep contractors for longer than x years. They'd have to convert to employee or separate for 12 months. Bit that doesn't really work in knowledge systems. Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has, and their depa…
> Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has I think that's the part management teams are missing. They assume that employees are just human resources and they can replace a senior engineer with a 100% equivalent one when needed.
As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank. Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise. One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team,…
when i worked for an australian bank, one co-worker in a nearby team had been working on the the banks systems as a sysadmin for over a decade. the bank would go through cycles of "we need to reduce our headcount and outsource everything" and then 4 years later "we need to reduce spend on contractors and retain more knowledge and expertise in house". he'd survived multiple waves of it, switching back and forth betwee…
The uncertainty never goes away. You can pay someone else to suffer it, but it will always cost more than dealing with it yourself.
And that can be ok. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a bargain.