State of the Market

[oliverson]

Maybe they found your posts on here.

Which ones specifically do you think they'd object to, even if they could link 'oliverson' to my LinkedIn profile?

On a more serious note, my tennis session yesterday was brutal in 30+ degrees of sunshine. Haven't use my ball firing machine (or tennis trainers) out here since the lockdown. Within 20 mins the soul came off one of my trainers and right at the end of the session the ball machine spectacularly died a death, one of the rubber wheels that propels the balls splitting and peeling away. Kind of like my contracting career I guess :-(

[sadkingbilly]

Within 20 mins the soul came off one of my trainers

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Can people stop with the snidey personal comments and stick to the thread subject please? Why does every online community end up as two bald men arguing over a comb?

[oliverson]

I dance around the court.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Just off the phone from an agent trying to place someone for 2 months at £900/day

I did one of those "someone's walked out" projects before - it was good money but no fun and I don't think it helped my career.

[oliverson]

Just off the phone from an agent trying to place someone for 2 months at £900/day

I did one of those "someone's walked out" projects before - it was good money but no fun and I don't think it helped my career.

I also did one. Late Friday and I’m finishing up on a contract and this burly guy and his sidekick came marching down the corridor at pace. I watched them getting closer and they finished up at my desk! Turns out they’d been working with a contractor for over a year and he’d been escorted from the building a few days earlier, a result of an explosion of expletives in the office, taking with him all the source code on his laptop. Nothing had been committed to source control. One of the Big 4 consultancies as well. Head office. They’d heard I was finishing up and did I want a challenge?!

Now, you can imagine the heat of this project, already late and now they have absolutely sweet fa to show for it. Clients were expecting an imminent release. So, we got on with it. There was some initial friction at the start, understandable I guess, but I stood my ground. It took another year or so but that project got delivered and into the hands of the customer. It was one of the best projects I ever worked on. None of this scrum nonsense, I was given an actual spec, in Word format. Actual requirements with screen mock ups. In fact I’d say the vast majority of successful projects I’ve delivered have been like this. Quite the opposite of scrum.

The work schedule was hard but fair and they asked me to work extra hours given the circumstances. A lot of those weeks were 7 day weeks. At least one was 8 billable days. Not the kind of thing that can be sustained forever. Two years or so later the project came to a natural conclusion and that was that. So, to the original poster, I wouldn’t rule it out. Where there’s adversity, there’s always opportunity. In fact what I’d give for another opportunity like that to present itself right now.

[herman_g]

Just off the phone from an agent trying to place someone for 2 months at £900/day

I did one of those "someone's walked out" projects before - it was good money but no fun and I don't think it helped my career.

I signed up for a contract in Frankfurt in 2000 that was supposed to last 6 weeks - the contractor left suddenly also. I ended up staying on for 6.5 years. I met the contractor 10 years later. He was working for the software vendor and he wasn't getting his hotel bills paid. I worked for the vendor some time later and had the exact same issues.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

This one is a big name consultancy - they have the contract for the initial design phase that lasts until Xmas - but they don't have the gig to implement it yet. Too risky even for me and I'm not especially risk averse - the problem is it's mostly stuff I'd have no control over.