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.
Yeh. People give grandpa Joe a hard time but what about the other 3 grifters. And let’s not forget the kid. He could have easily worked 16hours a day in a coal mine and instead treats his family like shit by buying chocolate for himself out of shameless greed
"Oh BTW, we gave the stadium to some wealthy dude, and he’ll keep all of the money the stadium makes. Don’t worry though, your tax dollars will pay for the upkeep.
It’s a weird accepted fact that everyone despises, dismisses, denies and disregards but otherwise believe is true
It’s so widely accepted by anyone who has read a bit of recent history over the past 50 years that all evidence points to the fact that they were complicit in assassinating their own president in 1963.
People on Lemmy like to argue and I’m taking a strong stance on something here. With those two things in mind, I’m expecting some level of push-back. (Which, admittedly, has yet to materialize.)
The best thing is that they’re made by people who grew up on the same stuff. Like OK KO is this wild blend of Looney Tunes and 90s/early 2000s Shonen and I love it.
That fandom nostalgia is a helluva drug. Mix it with updated norms and politics and you’ll get 10,000 word essays on why purple-hair Dr. Sattler can’t use a hyperdrive as a weapon because it’d make Star Wars unrealistic.
I haven’t watched the others, but yeah, Teen Titans Go was hard to get into because of nostalgia fever. After a few episodes I saw it for the new thing it is and not what it was, and yes, it fucking rocks.
My daughter was watching - I guess it was the current Mickey Mouse (?) - cartoons on Disney+ a couple nights back. These include Mickey, Donald, Goofy, etc.
Only none of them look like the standard toons anymore but look like Disney had inbred sex with Ren and Stempy.
Even the humor and art is similar to that same style drawn by Kricfalusi where the characters all seem to be borderline psychotic and all the humor is based on shock value.
At the height of World of Warcraft, a coworker of my mom’s moved from Vancouver to the southern US to live with a guy she had only ever talked to in WoW. Things were not as promised when she got down there. She eventually moved back.
Before WoW I played Ultima Online, and the co-GMs of my UO guild were a couple that had only met online. About 6 months after I started playing, they had an in-game marriage, and then about 6 months later both moved to Las Vegas to buy a house together (I think they’d met in person once by this point). Under a year later, they were married in real life too. Last I heard, they were still together.
If you’re out there Ramirez and Azizza, I hope you’re still happy.
I see your contextless non-sequitur CoD:MW2 campaign reference in a reply-to-a-reply 15 comments down on this thread. I like to think we all have a tiny Keith David sitting on our shoulder, yelling at us to live our dreams.
Talking about supercomputers in your pocket… am I the only one who finds extremely funny when people ask for directions with their smartphone in their hand? Or ask for anything that can be easily solved by just using the device they’re already holding? In the past I used to send “Let Me Google That For You” links, but I think I need a “Just use your smartphone!” T-shit or something. :P
Edit: while I find the situation funny, I want to clarify that I never mock people, or be rude to them. I try to go out of my way to help them, since you never know why they don’t do the obvious thing.
For people whose childhood didn’t have an internet, it makes sense. Many are more comfortable getting information the way they used to. Even though I grew up in the 80s, I prefer to avoid having to interact with people when possible, so being able to use the internet for information was a godsend.
I mean I agree, but also can see the advantage of asking someone who seems like a local if you’re confused about the transit system or if you took a wrong turn and just want to get some place without further hassle.
That’s absolutely true. One person asked me for directions once with Google Maps open and pointing where they had to go. Clearly this person was unable to understand the app.
It should be noted that while chat services that many use require low bandwidth, sometimes on throttled speed it’s not enough to even make a basic Google search.
It is likely that the person you are talking to already used up their high speed mobile internet and now is running on throttled. Searching something up can take a minute or two in that state. Opening up a website or navigation becomes straight up impossible.
I totally understand that. As I said, I never know the reason, so I don’t judge. It’s just that the situation is funny, in the “we have the tools, but still can’t solve the problem” kind of way. :D
My parents and grandparents will routinely give me directions to the restaurant we’re all going to. In the past I tried to stop them as I can never remember them anyway and certainly don’t use the same landmarks. Now I just nod my head and pretend like I got it all on the first try and then just use Google maps like a sane person.
am I the only one who finds extremely funny when people ask for directions with their smartphone in their hand
Depends on the context.
If I’m hanging out with friends, in a city or area I’m relatively familiar with, and somebody suggests going to a restaurant or something I don’t know, I might just casually ask “Where is it? How are we getting there?” or something like that. Because there’s a good chance I don’t need to pull out my phone, open an app, type something in, make sure it’s the right location (being buried beneath the ad results), and following the steps the whole time, when a simple “just head to where the BDSM dungeon is, it like 2 doors down”
I remember it getting bought out. The older teas had about 5 ingredients on the label. Overnight they doubled or tripled. Of course we needed all those chemicals because they were cheaper than just making a good tea.
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