Comment On Classics Week: The Contractor's Note

How do people get away with this?

And how do i get one of these cushy contractor jobs :)

Well. At least he was honest.

Kind of...

If he was really honest, he wouldn't actually have taken the job there, but, anyway...

I was going to post another "Too Soon" rant when I saw the originally-ran date on this one, but then I saw the image of the note and remembered -- this one really *is* a classic, even if it ran less than half a year ago. Fantastic!

sorry, but haven't we read this before already?!

it's the exact same too!

That's why is it's a classic...

Dan:

sorry, but haven't we read this before already?!

it's the exact same too!

Yeah, it's Classics Week! There all going to be re-runs.


captcha: burned - pay more attention next time...

Dan:

sorry, but haven't we read this before already?!

it's the exact same too!

Yeah, it's Classics Week! There all going to be re-runs.


captcha: burned - pay more attention next time...

Sorry for the double post, itchy trigger finger.

Stewart:

How do people get away with this?

And how do i get one of these cushy contractor jobs :)

It's easy, you just do it. I've been doing it on and off for 15 years, once you get a few decent jobs on your CV you're never out of work. I don't even bother looking for jobs any more, I just put my CV back on the jobs boards and the agents call me, and I wait around until one I like comes up. And the money is fabulous, and you don't have to take part in the politics or long term angst of the company concerned.

Smiley noted, BTW. Some contracts are cushy like this, but the majority of them want you to jump right in and be producing value-add code by the end of the first week. Only the truly huge and wasteful companies pay you for sitting on your hands. And I get bored in those anyway, especially if I'm staying away from home doing them. Money aint everything.

As for being a serial incompetent, I'm sure they can manage it for a while, but the contractor world in any particular genre (in the UK at least) is smallish and if word got around then you'd be over. I've been asked back by a few of my previous clients to work on some additional work, and this always looks good on the CV.

Your double post adds so much when it's about how this article was recently posted. :)

ForcedSterilizationsForAll:

Your double post adds so much when it's about how this article was recently posted. :)

yup especially when his captcha was "burnnnn"

hmmm!!!


captcha: vern - yeahhhh vern baby vern!

Why wasn't the table wooden?

I need someone to teach me the ways of the contractor.

They didn't teach me that in College

http://www.firejaypa.com --> PSU Football Talk

Stewart:

And how do i get one of these cushy contractor jobs :)

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 outlawed unsolicited faxed advertisements as one of its provisions. It also guarantees private right-of-action in court for $500 per violation. It's now 2007, sixteen years later, and most company fax machines still gets junk faxes rolling in every day. If junk faxers were regularly (rather than sporadically) held accountable for their illegal activities, they could not afford to operate.

Similarly, if contractors who clearly misrepresented themselves were sued for breach of contract, or even if payment was withheld, they wouldn't be able to continue to operate. I've seen complete incompetents that produced nothing of value, did not meet the specs in any arguable way, and yet walked away with full payment!

Far too many companies don't want to spend their time and money on defending their rights and choose to ignore problems like this rather than deal with them. That's their choice, but the more companies stick their head in the sand, the less incentive there is to do anything else.

On another note, any organization that set themselves up as a reputation-tracking firm for contractors would probably find themselves sued for libel or slander if they gave bad recommendations for someone.

Thuktun:

Stewart:

And how do i get one of these cushy contractor jobs :)

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 outlawed unsolicited faxed advertisements as one of its provisions. It also guarantees private right-of-action in court for $500 per violation. It's now 2007, sixteen years later, and most company fax machines still gets junk faxes rolling in every day. If junk faxers were regularly (rather than sporadically) held accountable for their illegal activities, they could not afford to operate.

Seebs? Is that you?

This isn't so hard to believe. I just started doing contract work for a small subdivision of a large evil government contractor. Now maybe I'm still too young and naieve, but I take pride in my work and always try to make good code. So I was shocked when my primary contact for the work saw my code that was (to my specification) about 1/3 done and said how great it was. It was sloppy and buggy and slow and lots of WTFs, but it was my first iteration. I needed to learn their system which was pretty black boxish to me, so I'd hack around until something worked and then my plan was to make it more efficient and fault tolerant and all those good things. But they would have none of that. They said what I did was great and were impressed with how quickly I got it done. They paid me and asked me to join another project.

My guess is that in this big evil corporations, most people don't know what's going on, so as long as something works, they're happy.

I can see that it'd be very easy to be The Incompetant for quite a while without ever getting caught.

I like the "hmmmm!!!!" comments. I'm gonna have to start adding those to my code.

It is better this way. If only dummies program our computers, the computers will never get smart enough to overthrow us. Nature always provides balance. Here, it is the power of the computer, balanced with the incompetence of programmers.
Do not try to change the balance!!!

Stewart:

How do people get away with this?

And how do i get one of these cushy contractor jobs :)

Two things I hate when I read other people's code:

1) misspellings -- especially when its a common business term that is literally used EVERYWHERE and so then whenever you update the code you have to also intentionally misspell the same word. sometimes i just create a new define with a condescending comment:

// Conversion from Punjabi to English:
#define K_NORMAL_STATUS K_NORMAL_STATATUS

2) colloquialisms in the comments, such as "cast these buggers to strings" or "just to be safe..." it reads like a gertrude stein novel, and i freaking hate gertrude stein.

not to mention, why do people get so folksy with their job responsibilities in the first place? only a developer would think its okay to include documentation that is completely unprofessional. it would be like titling the annual report, "cutesy numbers 2007: all math problems done at least twice so we feel good"

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

Anonymous:

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

Another pet peeve is the lack of proper capitalization. Why do people get so folksy when commenting on the web and ignore basic grammar? At least it wasn't ALL CAPS.

;-)

Tom Woolf:

Anonymous:

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

Another pet peeve is the lack of proper capitalization. Why do people get so folksy when commenting on the web and ignore basic grammar? At least it wasn't ALL CAPS.

;-)

(That was not directed at "Anonymous")

Anonymous:

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

I agree, Anonymous. Misuse of the word "literally" is becoming irritatingly common in broadcast media. It's usually used to mean "figuratively" -- exactly the opposite of it's proper meaning.

These are the same incompetents that hide in the larger companies shielded by layers of management. Oddly enough, when you're contracting you are often dealing with these incompetents, either trying to meet deadlines, or trying to hide under their management and take credit when the job is complete. Either way it doesn't bother me since I only want to get paid :-)

I've done a lot of contracting over the years, and as of late it has gone like this:

'135 an hour'
'thats crazy, this guy here wants 80'
'have fun'
...month passes...
'hello, the code is spaghetti/incomplete/etc. and was farmed out to eastern europe/india/somewhere cheap. no one will help us'
'135 an hour'
'when can you start'

Almost to a tee. Not that cheap subcontractors don't do good work, but companies always seem to go for the CHEAPEST option, more so if they have little technical knowledge.

The biggest mistake you can make is to subcontract the work IMHO, unless it is in-house.

Sgt. Preston:

Anonymous:

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

I agree, Anonymous. Misuse of the word "literally" is becoming irritatingly common in broadcast media. It's usually used to mean "figuratively" -- exactly the opposite of it's proper meaning.

...literally the opposite...

Thuktun:

Stewart:

And how do i get one of these cushy contractor jobs :)

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 outlawed unsolicited faxed advertisements as one of its provisions. It also guarantees private right-of-action in court for $500 per violation. It's now 2007, sixteen years later, and most company fax machines still gets junk faxes rolling in every day. If junk faxers were regularly (rather than sporadically) held accountable for their illegal activities, they could not afford to operate.

Similarly, if contractors who clearly misrepresented themselves were sued for breach of contract, or even if payment was withheld, they wouldn't be able to continue to operate. I've seen complete incompetents that produced nothing of value, did not meet the specs in any arguable way, and yet walked away with full payment!

Far too many companies don't want to spend their time and money on defending their rights and choose to ignore problems like this rather than deal with them. That's their choice, but the more companies stick their head in the sand, the less incentive there is to do anything else.

On another note, any organization that set themselves up as a reputation-tracking firm for contractors would probably find themselves sued for libel or slander if they gave bad recommendations for someone.

The opposite is true in the US. The Incompetent often sues when there is a negative recommendation.

There was a humor book about giving bad recommendations safely a few years back. L.I.A.R., "The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations" has some examples of the lawsuits. *I recommend this* Please, don't sue me.

One L.I.A.R. example had someone who sued another person's former employer because he was violent at the new company. The plaintiff claimed that the former employer failed to inform the new company that he was violent.

So why was he adding code to a .aspx file? Wouldn't it normally go in a .aspx.cs file?

CAPTCHA: doesn't change if you get it wrong, so while the time spent wouldn't be worth the amount of C!@li 5 I would sell you, I could easily extract a big enough dictionary of values to try by running this regex over the comments pages: /captcha\s*[\:\=]\s*([\w\s]*)/i

I think the author OVER GENERALISED... I'm a contractor and don't feel like an Incompetent, though that is something a full timer would say because they have a complex, its usually full timers that are drones, they feel secure in staying in the same shit hole for most of their lives... all I hear all the time from them is constant bitching about pay... if they were GOOD... they wouldn't BITCH for one thing.

I wouldn't fully ridicule the author, as even being within the contractor business for several years now, I have come across such wankers... I even went to the lengths of teaching them ColdFusion during a period where a certain project was be all or end all, which is more than I can say for most other lame arses that just bitch… waste more fucken time waiting for a Incompetent agency consultants to find a contractor and start all over, at least I gave them a footing on the technology so they can better themselves… go on, go and cry to your mummy

Firechild, just cos you are a contractor doesn't automatically imply you are lousy. You sound like you are the one with a serious complex. Is the quality of your work being questioned at the moment?

The author of the article was not suggesting that contractors in general were bad. He was describing a specific scenario that does pop up from time to time.

The real WTF was misspelling the naughty word as "fuched".

Maybe you should read his first line of the article... full timers always hate a contractor, not the otherway around... and my complex is with lame fuckers like this one... the web is full of fucks, and the guy should pose nude on you tube to get attention... only if the web had more bloody morals like it did at the start, all thats out there is crap... and the web is about to inflate itself like M$ Word.

Coming back to the post about misspellings. Did you realise that you only require 1 full stop at the end of sentences. By the sounds of your rant Firechild, it looks like you may actually be looking for the exclamation mark (shift + 1). Even still, you would only require 1 of those as your "professional" way of putting things (bitch, cry, run to mummy) is enough to get your point across.

But seriously guys/girls/Firechild, this is an entertaining story but does not say anything about either full timers or contractors. Whether it is developers, mechanics, landscapers, carpenters, you name it. There are always going to be hopeless people out there and just about everyone will be burnt at least once in their lives. Mark was pretty lucky to lose only a couple of weeks and still get the job done on time.

Personally i am glad there are people out there doing terrible jobs, it always makes me look better when i come in after and clean up.

Did you use Word to fix up your typos? I use ... often, and who fucken cares about gramma when you making a comment about a fool?

I think the point of the story is... there are wankers in all walks of life, in every industry, and most of them right shit on the web...! Lucky I'm a contractor and can waste my time now as I still charge for my time. How about yourself? Taking those sick days before a Public holiday, um isn't it good to be a full timer?

Firechild, sounds like you're not wearing your most comfortable pants today. Chill out dude.

How is StudioManager going Firechild? Get back to work!

studiomanager is going fine... maybe you should go back to downloading that porn... and don't interupt my efforts in wasting my time...

So tell me again, why they won't let you work on the company's flagship product?

cause I'm the grand daddy of them all... and studiomanager a bucket of cows droppings

CodingForPretend:

Dan:

sorry, but haven't we read this before already?!

it's the exact same too!

Yeah, it's Classics Week! There all going to be re-runs.


captcha: burned - pay more attention next time...

sorry, but haven't we read *this* before already?

(couldn't resist)

Its not just contractors - this reminds of the time I joined a financial software house as a VB programmer.

After a few weeks someone who had been with the company for over a year came up and whispered - "can you tell me what an array is?" I just stood there dumpstruck.

I discovered two others with a similar lack of fundamentals working on real life banking software. I realised then why I was rising so quickly through the ranks...

Sgt. Preston:

Anonymous:

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

I agree, Anonymous. Misuse of the word "literally" is becoming irritatingly common in broadcast media. It's usually used to mean "figuratively" -- exactly the opposite of it's proper meaning.

Whether it was meant literally or not aside, was it meant to be "literally used everywhere" or "used literally everywhere"? Or, for that matter, "used everywhere literally"?

Waffles. Indeed. How did you guess that's what I was going to do?

First of all, Firechild is right. The article paints an unfair picture of contractors. The very first sentence in the article is:

"The easiest and most popular place for Incompetents to hide is within the ranks of professional contractors. It's an easy job."

Anonymous:

One thing I hate is when people misuse the word literally. It literally makes my head explo-

Secondly, read the usage notes on the word "literally". People are using it differently and it's a redundant word now. It was pretty useless to begin with.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/literally

Firechild:

its usually full timers that are drones, they feel secure in staying in the same shit hole for most of their lives...

The full timers are probably thinking, "if this is a shit hole, then you're just the crap passing through it".

Most of the people I've worked with, permies or contract, have been either incompetent or don't care enough to do a good job. Especially in the finance world.

I'm currently working with a colleague from my company at a client site. We'll call the client "Big Bank Inc", a classic of the genre, with almost all their IT operations contracted out to a number of big consultancies. As an aside, this contracting out is usually justified because the consultancy quoted less than BBI were paying for in house staff. The management are confused as to why the consultancies, that need to make a profit, are now offering poorer service than the old in house IT team. Funny that.

Anyway, my colleague is adding a report generator to our software which will be feed data to another system. He has to deal with an intermediary rather than the developers and end users of the other system. The intermediary is a contractor, who asks some very strange questions. All became a bit clearer when my colleague accidentally met the team working on the other system and found out what the intermediary does for his contract rates.

It turns out that he cut and pastes the other teams questions from their emails into his own, forwards them on to my colleague and then does the same with the replies. To prove a point, both the other team and my colleague now pop over to the intermediaries desk at regular intervals to put him on the spot by asking him questions directly. It turns out he knows nothing about finance at all.

Firechild:

cause I'm the grand daddy of them all... and studiomanager a bucket of cows droppings

Keep it up guys! While the original article was mildly amusing, _this_ thread of flaming posts is absolutely hilarious!

Anonymouse:

Not that cheap subcontractors don't do good work, but companies always seem to go for the CHEAPEST option, more so if they have little technical knowledge.

The biggest mistake you can make is to subcontract the work IMHO, unless it is in-house.

As a contractor, I often ask the company "Do you want it done right, quick or cheap? Choose two of those three."

akatherder:

First of all, Firechild is right. The article paints an unfair picture of contractors. The very first sentence in the article is:

"The easiest and most popular place for Incompetents to hide is within the ranks of professional contractors. It's an easy job."

Um, that's two sentences. You probably meant to refer to the second one.

Anonymous:

Secondly, read the usage notes on the word "literally". People are using it differently and it's a redundant word now.

Read the usage notes, it also irritates some people.

It was pretty useless to begin with.

"I was sick on the ceiling."
"I was pretty bad, too."
"No, really: I was literally sick on the ceiling."

True story. Not "figuratively sick on the ceiling", not "virtually sick on the ceiling". Literally sick on the ceiling.

But don't worry, all my string literals are only meant figuratively.

Firechild:

I think the author OVER GENERALISED... I'm a contractor and don't feel like an Incompetent, though that is something a full timer would say because they have a complex, its usually full timers that are drones, they feel secure in staying in the same shit hole for most of their lives... all I hear all the time from them is constant bitching about pay... if they were GOOD... they wouldn't BITCH for one thing.

I wouldn't fully ridicule the author, as even being within the contractor business for several years now, I have come across such wankers... I even went to the lengths of teaching them ColdFusion during a period where a certain project was be all or end all, which is more than I can say for most other lame arses that just bitch… waste more fucken time waiting for a Incompetent agency consultants to find a contractor and start all over, at least I gave them a footing on the technology so they can better themselves… go on, go and cry to your mummy

You're doing a great job showing us that consultants aren't angry, bitter loners!