Excruciatingly low contract rates

**To BI or not to BI?** · 13 November 2006, 17:10

well, you could always work for free:

Datawarehouse Professional - ?? -Dublin Cit[/color][/url]Oracle Datawarehouse Professional - ?? -Dublin City Our client, a BIG name in the financial services arena require a senior data warehouse professional to play a central role in developing and delivering data warehouse and business intelligence projects on an enterprise basis to our client. Key...Company: Vantage Resources · Job type: Contract · Salary: not required · Location: Eire · Date posted: 10 Nov 2006 10:27

**errorista** · 13 November 2006, 17:32

There is probably no role and the agent was fishing for info.

One way to reveal this would have been to ask what design paradigm the client uses or to ask the agent for a full job specification.

You can be sure they have no idea what PHP is and they probably think design is something to do with web graphics.

2c

**chicane** · 13 November 2006, 18:22

Unless the agent was after a copy of my CV, he wasn't very good at fishing for anything. Certainly didn't request any (cough) "references" and he was quite happy for me to go on my merry way once I'd stated my desired rate.

What worries me more is that the role may be genuine - I believe there's just as much ignorance/misunderstanding (delete as appropriate) within the design agency sector as the recruitment sector in terms of skills/rate matching when it comes to software development.

When performing development work directly with design agency clients in the past, I've lost count of the number of them who weren't prepared to spend even half of what a professional implementation would cost.

**Torran** · 14 November 2006, 10:16

I've seen adverts for a similar role to mine for as low as £13 an hour.

Gives us expensive contractors a bad name in my opinion

**MrsGoof** · 14 November 2006, 10:36

Last year my client started advertising my job and another contractors job at a very low rate, and then every week lowering the rate in the ads.

What they were trying to do was force us to take rate cuts by saying that similar jobs are being advertised at lower rates.

Fortunately due to the way the ads were worded, the slightly non-standard skills required, the location and the crap rate in the ad, they got zero responses.

This could be a similar ploy!

**lukemg** · 14 November 2006, 10:41

Warning signs these - your skills are becoming a commodity and dropping to a minimum rate - ask anyone in support.
Supply and demand controls the market so as IT is made simpler for completing certain elements e.g. basic web design, supporting networks/servers then more people can get into doing it and the rates drop accordingly.
You need barriers to entry to maintain rates e.g. professional footballers, barristers, experienced SAP bods.
Get into IT, it's brilliant, was the shout 10 years ago. 10 years later people can find themselves worth sod all as technology moves onto the next big thing. Adapt and survive or you hit the skids, it's the dark shadow cast over contracting. Can happen to permies too, but more chance of someone training them out of the cul-de-sac.
HTH

**scriptfromscratch** · 14 November 2006, 10:49

I just got asked to go to an interview for a Test Analyst role for the outlandish rate of £14/hour! I nearly messed myself.

**Ardesco** · 14 November 2006, 11:02

Ah yes that old chestnut. For that rate you will get yourself a school kid, somebody who has been on the bench for the last 6 months and is desperate (if you are lucky because these guys will be good and know what they are doing) or a graduate from the latest indian technology school of flavour who will have crap written english and write meaningless defects into Quality Centre.

As a side note do they hand every Indian graduate a thesaurus and get them to mangle thier sentances into meaningless lists of long words as a requirement to pass thier course??? I have met a lot of Indian testers who can verbally describe a problem perfectly but as soon as they write it down they insist on using long words to make themselves look clever, unfortunatly they usually use the words out of context and pull out some amazingly long ones that few people use and obliterate any meaning from the defect making it completely useless....

**scriptfromscratch** · 14 November 2006, 11:15

any1 ever had to clean up after a Maztec team had been in?

Excruciatingly low contract rates