Comment by duxup
7 years ago
I know someone working as a contractor for a big company.
1 year contract.
6 months have gone by and they've done ... nothing. Their boss keeps saying "Don't worry we'll get to you, we're just swamped right now, you're good."
They're already talking about extending the contract.
Big companies (rather, people at big companies) WANT to spend money on this kind of stuff for all sorts of reasons.
-A team might have use-it-or-lose-it budget, so they have to spend it on something, and a contractor might be the lucky recipient!
-Tax purposes!
-Spending a lot on a contractor gives them someone to "fire" when they need to explain why something wasn't getting done or something went poorly!
The list goes on!
All that being said, as a consultant myself, I consider those types of projects windfall, as they tend to be the ones that end abruptly. It's kind of a scary feeling getting paid without actual work to do. I have found I 100% prefer the projects where there are clear tasks, goals, and results to report, if for nothing else than my own sanity.
I remember growing up and going to work with my Dad. There was like a 3 hour period where he had no work for me to do. He told me I'd only get half wages for the day (I was like 12) since the last few hours I did nothing. I felt betrayed. He empathized with me, saying 'It sometimes feels like more work to not have any work to do'. I completely agree.
In my current role, there is no real roadmap or trajectory for what I should be doing or how I should report on it, etc. I have felt at times that I was just collecting a check, and that felt really scary. I expected I would love to have a job where I could kind of just do whatever I wanted on my own time table. But I have learned it's actually very stressful, and at best very boring. Luckily I got a roadmap created and prioritized, so I feel better. But it is an odd experience.
Better yet, at an internship, create your own roadmap (complete with a timeline, too) and, with no external validation, so it.
so hard
One of my bosses was the recipient of one of these during a corporate merger, and I think it did a lot of damage to him. He has been mostly was coasting off of his reputation from before he slacked off for 3+ years in that role. But it doesn't look like he's able to last for more than a year anywhere. I suspect that he was one of those competent-but-lazy types whose skills rusted out to to just lazy.
Its stories (and personal experience) like this that make me laugh when people try and say that governments are inefficient and lacks accountability.
Big things are more likely to be inefficient and lack accountability. Governments are big, so are big corporations.
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Big corporations are inefficient and lack accountability. Governments are like big corporations in that manner, but also can't be held accountable by the market.
Corporate monstrosities can get away with being inefficient insofar as they can stay out of the red overall. Governments can get away with being inefficient insofar as we are forced to continue funding them via taxation. Note: giant, unaccountable, inefficient corporations usually became so large through monopolies created through government force (i.e. regulation).
Getting bigger any organization inevitably achieves a level of complexity where it becomes less, and less efficient by spending increasingly more resources on communication, and politics (in wider meaning of the word, not electoral). Do you think governments are small organizations? UPD: Apperently, I'm not the only one here who came to the same thought :-)
Right - the government is the world's largest employer, with all the inefficiencies that come with that title.
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Governments lack accountability because there is no incentive to be sustainable. They just tax people more or run a higher deficit.
If Whole Foods wastes their money and goes out of business, I don’t care. I’m not being forced to pay them to make up for it.
At least private companies are losing their own earned money when they're inefficient, not someone else's.
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yeah, more like any 'large organizations' without a dictator
One would think the use-it-or-lose-it problem would've been solved by now. It's so obviously dysfunctional. Is there really no better way to determine budget?
I think the issue is management unwilling to trust other levels of management to make the call when they need money / a strong desire some folks have to filter / make decisions for others.
I don't know what the fix is for that except to take a chance and trust folks but ... it doesn't seem to be a thing and instead they come up with easy systems to just make arbitrary decisions and there ya go.
It boggles my mind sometimes that "Like if you don't trust that guy to make decisions... why is he a director here?"
Sadly it filters down, I've been places where it was clear the director of my department couldn't do much at all... at that point why should I be there, it doesn't matter if he and I talk, agree, or anything then ....
Steve Jobs said something about it making no sense to hire people in decision making roles and not let them make decisions. Granted, Steve was also able to hire some fine people.
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Some organization have this issue where you get a budget for your group, and if you don't use it then upper management will think you don't need more resources next year and will budget less or even cut from your department. If you don't use it, they reallocate it to a department that needs it and you never get it back.
Another part is where if you get a hiring budget they expect you to use it because if you aren't spending it on personnel then it means you aren't hiring the best available people at that time.
Non-profits usually spend out their budget.
Regulated utilities can charge a % + the cost of hiring you if it is a capitalized cost, i.e. hiring a contractor to implement a project.If a contractor works 100% on a capital project it's profits especially in a low inflation economy or when the profits are not going to be as good due to forecasting issues it can pump the books.
There are probably other reasons I can't think of.
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Budgeting is basically forecasting, and in most businesses it’s not much better than guesswork.
There are ways that are arguably better, like bottom-up budgeting, but they take a lot more work, and are arguably more subjective.
Internal information systems can be so poor that the best prediction of next years budget is last years budget.
In government (usa) it absolutely still exists. As the financial period ends each department spends hugely and really wastefully to ensure their full budget is spent. Its actually quite infuriating.
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There are, of course, better ways; the thing is that non-dysfunctional methodology is not evenly distributed.
This comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve
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Unless you are getting taxed >100% I never understood why you'd want to throw away money for "tax reasons". Can someone please help me understand this, it always comes up and I feel dumb for not understanding.
They may have a tax rebate which requires them to "invest" $x each year and failure to do so will result in penalties, perhaps nullifying the agreement and requirement to reimburse previous rebates.
So the company hires a few contractors to help get them as close to $x as possible, but they don't really have any work for them to do.
Simple example:
My FSA card is pre-tax money to be used for healthcare expenses. Towards the end of the year, I ended up still having a balance that would go away if not used, so I bought things that I would not have otherwise purchased.
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You have to spend X anyway, because the money is pre-tax or non-taxable, you can spend 1.5X-2X, so the extra money is 'free'.
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In limited cicrumstances it can make sense. If you're investing in a multi-year project you may as well maximize your investment in one year and take the loss against other taxable income that year. Then, when the project is finished, you pay taxes on the income that year. Only you can take those funds and invest them into a new multi-year project...
Some companies get tax breaks for hiring X number of workers in certain locations. Which is why sometimes you get companies hiring a bunch of people at a data center who don't do anything related to the data center, but mostly exist as a way to get a tax break and good press.
Sometimes to get yourself in a lower bracket.
I was tempted to ask if you have any tips for finding such jobs ;) but actually the times when I’ve been most unfulfilled in my career have been when I’ve been bored at work. I’d much rather be working like crazy (within certain parameters), keeps things interesting!
That said I do know people who’ve been paid to turn up at an office and just work on their side projects. Could probably handle that!
Get going for a few of these simultaneously and you are set.
Happens all the time. We can hire only at certain times when budgets open, so you go ahead and hire but you have no time to deal with the person. It’s better to have the person sit around until you have time because the alternative is losing the contractor and not being able to hire when you really need someone.
Stupid but very real. I always find it funny that wasting 100k this way is perfectly fine but a 5k raise is almost impossible.
> I always find it funny that wasting 100k this way is perfectly fine but a 5k raise is almost impossible.
This is too real.
At my current job they are incapable of even small raises to keep up with inflation or even investing money in making a better product. Although the company has no problem redecorating the office, sending management to a useless international fair where they spend their time in bars getting drunk, or spending exorbitant amounts of money for sending someone to CNN and getting $0 ROI from that.
When I was out of the vendor side of the business doing consulting for a number of years, I always had to shake my head a bit when clients wouldn't use paid-for time with us or would apparently never make use of some materials like a whitepaper we did at their request.
But it's exactly like you say. People wouldn't get their act together sufficiently to have a team meet with us on some topic for a day or some marketing campaign would be canceled or changed so they no longer specifically needed what we had created for them. Easier to just forget about the whole thing and move on.
I've lived this. Myself and a very expensive team of EY kids were waiting eagerly every day for anyone in corp management to throw us any kind of tasks.
On the rare occasion that we were given a task, we would all descend upon one computer like vultures, group-solving the problem typically in 60minutes or less. Then it was back to doing nothing.
Diplomacy (the game) became our primary activity. It was fun, but such a terrible waste of time, talent, and money.
That's awesome. What group were you in?
I wasn't EY, I was in through a small local firm. And we billed much less :). So the weekends when the EY guys didn't fly home, they had a few hundred $ to burn. We lived well on the weekends!
What are EY kids?
Earnest and Young placed contractors?
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I had a similar experience a few years ago.
I quit at a company I was contracting at because they kept dangling the whole, "We're going to convert you to an FTE next." in the meantime, I was working less than 20 hours a week. If you didn't have a project to bill hours to, you didn't get paid, period. I was floating between teams, fixing bugs and doing minor stuff, not being able to bill much of anything. Once I quit I was offered another contract role. I basically told the recruiter, "Listen, if I'm in the office, I'm getting paid for my time, period." Recruiter got it cleared with HR and the hiring manager.
My first day went like this:
Manager: "Ummm yeah, the two major projects we had you slated on, ummmm those got put on hold for the time being. Get your desk and PC setup and we'll have something for you soon."
I literally went 4 months and barely billed any real project work. My last two weeks I had 36 hours of non-billable time. I had two weeks where I actually billed a full weeks worth when a dev took off for his honeymoon and did exactly zero work he was assigned. The funny part is when I quit, the hiring manager told me he would hire me in a minute and to keep in contact.
In the meantime, I was able to learn AngularJS and some other stuff while I was sitting at my desk all day. In a sense, I was very productive when I was there.
> I was able to learn AngularJS and some other stuff
Yeah that's what I would hope to do too. Lots of time, let's dig in to that stuff there's never time to learn!
I've seen the same thing, off and on, for over 20 years.
Employee or contractor gets stuck somewhere with nothing much to do... speaks to manager about it repeatedly... gets the "just find something to do, we'll get to you" speech... fails (often despite good-faith effort) to find anything useful to do... and eventually gives up.
Worst case I personally witnessed was a quite talented dev going six months without any actual project, then another couple before quitting.
Another case was a guy who tried to use his abundant free time to learn other skills but mostly ended up playing Myst, which proves this phenomenon is as old as dirt. :-). (He ultimately gave up the Myst Gig and quit, I'm sure to the consternation of his manager who probably lost a head-count over it.)
That's why I offer a retainer package. Get paid for just being available when needed and work a non-conflicting contract elsewhere.
Do you keep those packages reasonable? Have you ever found yourself with too many retainers being called in at once?
Reasonable is relative to the situation.
No, I learned how to manage my work load (potential and actual) from clients for my physical/mental health.
The motivation is what determines the actions.
I know a guy who founded a software company and started contracting work overseas. He became too confident and over-committed to clients without managing expectations. For a couple of months he looked terrible. Thankfully, he found an escape path and closed the company. He's now employed full time in a dev role.
This path isn't for everyone.
Yeah a sort of
"Hey I'm already up to speed on this so if you want to pick it up again quickly ...." proposal probabbly would seem like a good idea to the company for a while at least.
i worked for lockheed martin 10 years ago (give or take) on a client site. I was W2 (although I wish i was 1099). Anyways, when the government changed from W -> Obama a lot of the DOD contracts were changing because everyone anticipated the Obama was going to cut defense spending (which he did). The project found out that the DOD was not going to be able to re-fund the project, but we had to continue to the end. I ended up forced to "work from home" for about six months until the contract ran out. I legally couldnt get another job, but I went on vacation for a month or two. So I calculate I got paid 1/2 my salary at the time + benefits for doing exactly nothing.
I worked for another large defense contractor auditing government IT systems. To do this, you needed a clearance and auditing certification designed by the gov. Well, they would just go ahead and hire people WHILE the clearance process went through (which can take months) and only schedule certain technology certification classes every few months. There were people sitting at home for 4-6 months getting paid in full while they waited for either a class or their clearance to go through. I sadly already had a clearance and "only" had to wait a month for my class.
i have a clearance for my job also, worked in a SCIFF all day ...
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Maybe a result of cost-plus?
Anywhere where employee hours are getting charged out, a company can increase profits by increasing headcount.
It also seems to happen more indirectly. A contracting company is often motivated to increase red-tape (such as complex and unnecessary health-and-safety, because everyone agrees safety is good). That has a double win: less competition (side effect of complex requirements) and more hours charged (each hour charged increases profits with little risk).
Yeah this happens more than you’d expect! Never had it myself but I’ve worked st places where it’s happened to colleagues (usually assigned unimportant BAU work than actually doing nothing but I do know of people who’ve basically had nothing to do!)
I sort of suspect all these people I've met that I've wondered why they like being a contractor .... are all on that system.
I kinda want to be a contractor now.
I have been in this situation and you have to strong nerves. You always expect to be sent home any time soon.
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I've worked at pretty big companies and the only way I've ever gotten away with not producing any code was because I was going through onboarding hell. At the worst 2 weeks to get onboarded.
Were you an employee? I think the situation being described here is almost always with contractors and freelancers.
I was a contractor - as a general rule I find companies expect contractors to be productive really quickly because they are paying more for them then they are for employees.
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I had a friend working on contract for the local city government. The contract was I believe for 2 years. A year in the project got cancelled but since his contract has already been signed they just kept paying him with no work for him to do. He just went in (because of course he still had to show up for some reason), and played games all day. Now I partially understand why so many government projects go over budget.
I know a couple of friends who worked at the major banks. They all started out as contractors. I remember one guy told me during their first year that all they did was browsing Reddit at work. He was a close friend and didn't want me to join their team because he knew I would display the level of work ethic that would make him look bad.
If that happens then you're definetly charging too little. In a lot of places you can't actually just work for just one client for an extended time as a consultant or freelancer as you then might just as well be an employee.
Sometimes having resources on standby, ready to start really is the fastest way to get through a project (sometimes it is just waste though)...
Yeah I know a guy who had that waiting gig for 1.5 years before he was finally assigned his first bit of work.