Recently in work Category

I have spent over a week waiting for an agent to get back to me with an offer of a contract. I saw this company last Tuesday and the manager is apparently very keen to get me working there. The sticking point seems to be the money.

When the agent first spoke to me about the contract, they wanted to pay about £30 a day less than the minimum amount I currently feel comfortable working for. She agreed to try to get me my minimum amount. A couple of days later she called me to arrange an interview. She told me at that point that they had taken a couple of days to get back to us as they had been confirming that the extra money was available.

I went to the interview last Tuesday. I thought it went very well. So, I'm told, did the people who interviewed me.

But the money was still a problem. They asked if I'd work for their initial suggested rate. I said no. They said that at the rate I was asking for, the initial contract would only be for two months rather than the six months discussed in the interview. I said that would be fine (see - that's me compromising).

On Friday of last week they told my agent that the money had been found but that (for reasons which were somewhat unclear) they still couldn't make a firm offer that day. The offer would follow on Monday.

On Monday I had a call from my agent. There was still no firm offer, but the client had asked her to "keep Dave warm". She tried to speak to the manager again on Tuesday, but he was out of the office for a day. On Wednesday I had no contact with them. On Thursday she called me to tell me that she still couldn't reach the manager because he was off sick. And his team seemed to think that he wouldn't be back the next day either.

At this point I was expecting them to tell me that they had the offer, but the dog ate it. Or perhaps that a big boy stole it and ran away. It seemed clear to me that there was some kind of stalling tactic going on somewhere in the organisation. But as my agent pointed out during Thursday's conversation, this kind of prevarication doesn't really endear you to someone who you are trying to do business with.

Fortunately, whilst this had all been going on, another opportunity had come along. On Thursday lunchtime I had an interview with another company. A company who, if I'm being honest, I would feel far happier about working for. And this morning they made me a firm offer. For more money and for a longer period of time. I, of course, accepted.

I felt somewhat sorry for the original agent as I told her that I wouldn't be accepting an offer from her client (should one ever appear). But I hope she enjoys explaining to them exactly where they've gone wrong in this process.

The contract market isn't great at the moment. But it's still not bad enough that I need to sit around for a week waiting for an offer from a company that's quibbling over £30 a day.

I've just heard that my current contract won't be extended when it finishes at the end of this month.

So if you are looking (or know someone who is looking) for a half-decent Perl, Unix, database contractor then please let me know.

Seems like we're approaching another of those periods when it's fashionable to leave the BBC. This morning my RSS reader brought me "I'm off soon" posts from Tom Loosemore and Alice Taylor.

Oh, and there's me. I'm leaving (again) on Friday. Back in the City from Monday.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post about job hunting. I'm happy to report that I got two firm job offers out of it and I've now accepted one of those offers. In a couple of weeks I'll be going to work at the UK's biggest broadcaster (again).

My current contract finishes at the end of this month so I'm looking for something new and interesting to do starting in early April.

So if you think you could use the skills of someone who knows a bit about Perl, Unix, databases and the web then please get in touch. If you need more convincing then my CV is online.

Probably of little or no interest to most readers, but there's now an e-petition calling for the abolition of IR35.

IR35 was a way of gathering extra tax revenues (without raising the basic rate for taxation) by picking on Computer Contractor's who work in a way that suits the relatively short life-cycles of the industry.

It paints tens of thousands of honest hard working tax payers as tax avoiders, whilst giving no recognition to the risk and extra work that they have to put in to make there living.

Shame that the petition paints contractors as people who don't know the difference between "their" and "there".

Oh, and while we're talking about spelling - d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.

Anyone who has anything to do with customer service in their organisation should read and learn from Joel Spolsky's article on the subject. It's not just software companies he's talking about. Anyone who deals with customers could benefit from taking his advice.

I particularly liked point 2, "Suggest blowing out the dust".

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen tells the story of a customer who complains that the keyboard isn’t working. Of course, it’s unplugged. If you try asking them if it’s plugged in, “they will get all insulted and say indignantly, ‘Of course it is! Do I look like an idiot?’ without actually checking.”

“Instead,” Chen suggests, “say ‘Okay, sometimes the connection gets a little dusty and the connection gets weak. Could you unplug the connector, blow into it to get the dust out, then plug it back in?’

“They will then crawl under the desk, find that they forgot to plug it in (or plugged it into the wrong port), blow out the dust, plug it in, and reply, ‘Um, yeah, that fixed it, thanks.’”

Many requests for a customer to check something can be phrased this way. Instead of telling them to check a setting, tell them to change the setting and then change it back “just to make sure that the software writes out its settings.”

This is really pissing me off.

My current contract ended yesterday. The clients want to extend me for another six months. I'm happy to stay there for another six months.

However, since I started there in April, the clients have outsourced the running of their temporary workers HR department to a third party. And that third party want to impose new standard contracts on everyone they deal with. And this new contract imposes terms that any contractor who knows anything about IR35 would run a mile from.

I'm sitting at home trying to work this out as appearing in the office could be seen as accepting the new contract.

Don't you just hate middle men.

Update: I'm back in the office today. I heard yesterday that we've got an extension on the old contract until the end of the week in order to try and sort out the contract. And this morning I've heard that the extension might well be... er... extended to one month.

I was in a meeting just before lunch and I passed the time by trying to remember the Litany Against Meetings. Of course, Google found the full text easily.

I must not attend meetings.
Meetings are the mind killer.
Meetings are the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my meeting.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the wasted time has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

With apologies to Frank Herbert and thanks to the denizens of the #perl IRC channel which is where I first heard it.

Not that anyone is going to be surprised by this, but it seems that a number of recruitment agents have problems with basic reading skills.

This morning I got three emails from agents containing details of potential jobs. In two of the three cases they were actually quite good matches for my skills. But, of course, I've just started a three month contract at the BBC and I'm not looking for work right now.

To make life easier for agents (and, in theory, myself) I maintain a web page which has up to date information about my current availability and the list of skills that I'm interested in using. The theory is that an agent will have the address of that page in their database and they'll check it before contacting me about work. That way they don't waste their time contacting me unnecessarily and I don't waste my time replying to their email.

So I wrote back to all three of them pointing out that I wasn't available and giving them the address of this useful page. I've just heard back from one of them who said:

Thank you for getting back to me. Anything changes, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Well no. Did you even read my email? The point is supposed to be that I don't need to get in touch with you when my circumstances change. When my circumstances change I'll update the web site and the next time I come up in the results of one of your searches you'll check the page and see that I'm now looking for work.

Moron.

I swear that one day I'm going to snap and spew so much bile about recruitment agents all over this blog that none of them will ever deal with me again. Hopefully I can hold off from doing that until I'm rich enough to never have to work again :-)

Update: Just got a reply from one of the other agents. As I mentioned above, my email to them pointed them at a web page where they can always get my latest CV. This new reply simply said:

Please send word doc cv Thanks

My web page does has the CV in a number of formats. Including a Word document.