Sad, but true. First 7 years of my software career were split between two companies and despite 3 promotions and exceeding expectations in reviews regularly, salary growth was between 2-5% YoY.
Most recent 5 years of my career I’ve changed jobs every 6ish months and am now averaging about 40% YoY salary growth.
Insane that a company will pay you a 20% premium to hire someone that they’ll spend 6-months training just to watch said person fly off to another firm.
Contracting is even worse. Bring someone on to do menial piecework at 2x-5x the median company salary, then kick them out so you can bring on another person who has no idea how your company operates to do the same entry-level jobs. All so you don’t have to tell investors how many people are actually on your payroll.
No wonder the business failure rate is so fucking high.
Contracting is even worse. Bring someone on to do menial piecework at 2x-5x the median company salary
Lol, as a contractor, I bring in value the current team can’t deliver, and when I leave the team has gained skills and delivers better work. You sound like somebody with very limited, bad experience and decided to hate something you don’t understand.
Well no, ideally contractors should do everything this person says they do. They should provide expertise that teams don’t have, and by the time they leave the team shouldn’t need them anymore.
The problem is less the contractors and more the people handling the contracts. Sometimes it’s between client and contractor, sometimes contracting company. You can’t blame the contractor for being hired to do a job, blame the person claiming there’s a need for contractors.
I’ve been on both sides of the contracting game. While I certainly have broad skills and a speedy comprehension, I’ve never been on a job site where the guy handling the software for the last 10 years understood it worse than I did after the first six months.
I also can’t help notice the deplorable state of documentation, at least in my corner of the O&G accounting software field. So there are plenty of instances in which a contractor will roll in, throw something patchwork together, dump it on the client, and then leave me to support the rickety piece of crap for the next five years. I get to play Inspector Gadget as I parse through miles of spagetti code, trying to run down why some obscure command has decided to produce a vague error.
Did the contractors know more about some niche javascript package than I did when the project started? Absolutely. Do the contractors care that I’m going to be the one shoring up this antiquated, sloppily implemented code injection until we retire the system? They do not. Would the $300/hr for a year of fussy support been more valuable if applied to a $40-$80/hr on-site tech who stays with the firm for the next five years? Yes.
Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.
I’ve never been on a job site where the guy handling the software for the last 10 years understood it worse than I did after the first six months.
Bring in contractors for a codebase 10+ years old? Yeah, the current team is not working properly from management perspective. So either the manager doesn’t understand what they do, or the team is incapable of communicating to management what they do, or the team is shit.
So there are plenty of instances in which a contractor will roll in, throw something patchwork together, dump it on the client, and then leave me to support the rickety piece of crap for the next five years
So management and current team let in garbage code, that means there is no working review process. If the team didn’t establish a review process they don’t know how to work with modern methods, if management prevented it they are just incompetent.
Would the $300/hr for a year of fussy support been more valuable if applied to a $40-$80/hr on-site tech who stays with the firm for the next five years?
I don’t think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything. And contractors can’t magically fix your broken org.
Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.
You’re not wrong. This falls on the managers heads as much as it falls anywhere.
I’m not blaming contractors for being contractors. A lot of these folks are straight out of college and new to their respective fields. It isn’t there fault that Deloitte or Accenture or whomever spent six weeks teaching them to make power point presentations rather than giving them a proper six month seasoning in proper standard business practices. Even less so when the folks running my own company never bothered to learn how to do things properly themselves and don’t appear to know who to ask.
But the consequences of the practice of hiring a flood of pricey contractors to do implementation and then leaving the maintenance to a bare-bones staff is misery for everyone involved.
So management and current team let in garbage code
Management doesn’t know shit for shit about coding. The current team doesn’t get to vet and approve the code that’s released (as if we’ve got the time given our existing maintenance roles). They only get to handle the final product that’s delivered. That is a central problem with the business model. Trust is invested in contractors that isn’t earned or deserved. Meanwhile, the expectations of functionality are transferred to the skeleton crew staff once they leave.
I don’t think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything.
I think you can’t get to an environment of effective communication and consistent code dev/review standards if half your workforce evaporates at the end of the contract period. As it stands, we’ve got managers stacked six roles high while the actual applications have maybe 1-1.5 employees assigned to each. So who knows the systems well enough to review the other guy’s code?
Having a mentor-mentee relationship on each app would be much preferable to a contractor-for-a-year/single-support-specialist-for-a-lifetime situation we’re dealing with now.
And then they act like it’s the employees who are wrong. I bet every single one of the job hoppers enjoying these huge salary benefits would prefer to just chill in the same job forever if it achieved the same thing.
I can only speak for myself, but that’s exactly why I left my last job. I loved it and the people I worked with, but I couldn’t afford that pay rate with such poor benefits.
On my way out, they told me that they wished they had 10 more employees like me.
They didn’t want it bad enough to pay even one employee a little more, though. I am not the only person who left recently lmao
Absolutely! I had a job some 3 years back that said if I continue to perform well, I could probably be promoted in 2 years.
This was on the heels of no bonuses or raises that year (well, for the team I was on).
2 years? Also that was the team’s reward after a year of work? This was a Fortune 500 company with over $10B in revenue.
The next month…layoffs. We spent the month figuring out all the tribal knowledge that went out the door.
The next month after that…contractors must take 2 unpaid days off every month and holiday closures don’t count towards that.
The next month they said, “Good news! We’re renewing your contract.” - Nope. I’m out.
Last I heard everyone on my team also left in the following 3 months, the director of the department also left, and the VP got forced out and replaced.
Its nice to be both secure in your job and confident in your work. Changing positions is exhausting, both in the job-hunting process and the re-training process once you land a new gig. Then you’re back at the bottom of the “knows what I’m doing here” totem pole.
One big reason I’m at 6 years and counting in my current gig is the enjoyment I’ve had in building a system and maintaining it consistently. Its nice to know the folks in the business appreciate my work. And if I have to wave another company’s job offer under my boss’s nose from time to time in order to keep my salary competitive, I think that’s more just a disconnect between management and staff I’m obligated to make for them every couple of years. At least they’re receptive and responsive to my demands, which is more than I can say of prior employers.
There are also a second hand caste of contractors, it’s the ones that work as ordinary employees but employed by another company so that they don’t get benefits
It’s an absolute cluster. It’s also led to me just not caring about the job or company anymore (not like I should).
I love supporting the team and my immediate coworkers, but I’m not there to make friends. For all we know our entire project gets canned one day anyway.
It’s a sad state of affairs to basically take advantage of this situation, but like…company loyalty doesn’t pay my bills.
I used to know a guy named Ed back in the early-mid '80’s who was a professional college student. We were both attending the local junior college. I was about 19 or 20, he was about 30. He was tall, had long straight dark hair and a full, fairly long beard with a fairly prominent hawk nose. One day, his parents finally got tired of him avoiding adulthood and declared they were no longer going to support him and he had to get a job. He showed up to classes with a short hair cut and no beard. We all had to do a double-take. He seriously had no chin, and combined with that big hawk nose, his profile had become so comically different from what it had been that everyone who knew him was noticeably shocked by the transformation. He went from having a long profile with a prominent nose to a little round head with a huge beak sticking out. He went from a moderately imposing figure to a sadly goofy looking character just like that. I watched a couple of different people just kind of blurt out stuff like “eww grow it back!” etc. It was crazy to see how everyone’s perception of him changed overnight…
Or sitting on the couch with a laptop and searching up wikis, Google, fan forums or social media to read about the movie you think you are watching but are actually ruining for yourself because you’re so distracted that you can’t actively read the laptop nor enjoy the movie at the same time … two hours go by and you can’t remember much about the movie or the little bits of information you read the whole time.
Yep, been at this job 10 years and only seeing annual raises of about 2%. Maybe we got 3-4% last year, but that was the exception and that was still a 4-5% paycut given what inflation is/was. I’m comfortable at my job though is what keeps me, and I’m sure that’s what businesses bank on. Workers are too afraid to look elsewhere for a job, so they’ll just stick it out no matter how much they’re losing.
Real talk: retail workers constantly bitching about that song have ACTUALLY REDUCED my enthusiasm for improving their general plight.
I thought they were chronically underpaid, underinsured, overworked, subjected to abuse…but nah, it turns out that the worst thing they have to put up with is some fucking Christmas song playing a few more times than they’d like to hear it.
That’s y’all’s fucking Vietnam? Well, then, I guess capitalism doesn’t need to be fixed. False alarm. Go fuck yourselves.
EDIT: I’m fucking joking. No, y’all, people bitching about Mariah didn’t actually convince me that trickle-down economics is actually a good idea. Jesus.
I think it’s the fact that people will openly write the exact same words as you do, and they won’t be joking. It won’t be satire. And there is no way to tell the difference even if they did look at your username - it just means “Anonymous”
Edit: See Poes Law. Guess I’m not first person to think about it.
The highly hyped and long-awaited video game “Starfield” has been getting a lot of negative reviews, lately. I read some of them, and a very high percentage of them have CLEARLY been written by people with severe, crippling depression and anxiety issues.
Ya know, issues that a game can’t fix, and which will make any game seem shitty, because their brains aren’t capable of having fun, in their current configuration.
Been seeing a lot of negative press for the game but I’m enjoying it so I haven’t looked at those reviews very much. I came in expecting Skyrim in space and I got what I expected and am enjoying the crap out of it. Now, I’ve run into several game breaking bugs, but found mods to fix all of them
Prepare yourself for the stream of bitter hatred, even from the fairly chill people in this community. You’ll be getting a shitload of it, for having the temerity to enjoy a BethSoft game.
Can I ask, though, what the bugs you encountered were? I’ve played every Bethesda game, from Morrowind through Starfield, and I’ve never actually encountered any bugs that were gamebreaking. I hear about this stuff all the time, even from reasonable people like you, but I guess I’ve just been getting really lucky?
What were your bugs that you had to use mods to fix?
Ok spoilers - you know how you have to use the scanner to find the distortions to find the temple to get the star born powers? The distortions hardly ever worked for me. I thought I was retarded for a while but then I watched a bunch of videos and realized that it’s broken for me. Turns out if you explored the planet with the temple before you got the quest to find the temple, you won’t get the distortions.
In the kind of guy that does like, all the side quests in a Bethesda game before I look at the main quest. So by the time I got around to doing the main quest, I had been to literally every planet, had outposts everywhere, and wouldn’t get the distortions. I used console commands to get past the quest for the first temple because that’s a common glitch and the fix is all over the internet.
But I ran into the same issue with the second temple. I tcl’ed my ass into the sky and found it with my eyeballs. 3rd temple, still nothing. At this point I got irritated and found a mod that makes it so when you have the find distortions quest active and you get out of your ship it automatically completes that objective and gives you the temple map marker. Fucking lifesaver of a mod.
I’ve run into other glitches, but they were all pretty minor. This one drove me nuts. There was one moon where it worked correctly because I hadn’t been there before. Like the only place in the whole game I hadn’t gone before starting the main storyline. So it seems like if you want to avoid this, do the storyline first
Interesting. I am pretty sure I was, like, one random decision away from having that bug with the distortions, but I decided to explore a different planet, instead of going to that one. I did the entire space pirate quest line and some other stuff, too, before touching the main story much at all.
I do think I have been incredibly lucky, over the years, to have been so entirely untouched by this kind of bug.
I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying it. I only played it a bit when it first came out, but things happened and I couldn’t really focus on a game that big. Now all the negative press has been discouraging me from picking it back up.
Hey, man, you KNOW Todd has no idea what Lemmy is. I mean, maybe he knows about Motörhead, but I even doubt that. He’s probably one of those guys who listens to smooth jazz, entirely unironically.
My new favorite is looking for a pulse. Some movie I watched recently panned to the dead guy, clear pulse on neck, but checks pulse says no pulse he’s dead then it cuts back to him with his jugular still pulsing. Pretty funny to see
Jugular is a vein. Pulse visible on the neck would be from the carotid artery. Unless the dead guy actor has visible JVP. Which would be a serious medical problem and not pretty funny to see.
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