Hello Contractor UK - I've been lurking around the site for the past 6-8 months whilst I was seriously considering getting in to contracting, so for everyone that has posted articles or other valuable content, thank you! You all really helped in my decision making process.
I've just moved from a 10 year long career in perm jobs climbing the greasy pole over to being a contractor. My last position was at a global food distributor with 2000 odd employees as the global IT team leads right hand man for the infrastructure, this included pretty much everything and was semi architectural and about 70% project work. My contract role was for an organisation of a similar size but in aviation, with a claimed 70/30 split of project/BAU work, so I naturally had very high aspirations for the kind of work i'd be doing, things i'd be exposed to, etc...
Well - sadly nothing has really lived up to my expectations. Turns out the place i've moved to has literally an 8th of the servers to look after when compared to my last place and the same number of us to look after them. Nothing is fault tolerant, the DR plan is "flap your arms and panic" and change control is "run it by the manager but don't expect an answer, you'll just have to make a call on it".
I knew from the day rate on offer that this role would be slightly more junior than my prior one, but Jesus, it just feels like i've stepped back about 4 years in my career! What have I done!? I thought that receiving my first payment from the agency would help, and it did, but for about 5 minutes, but unfortunately due to being a perm in my last role I took a cut in my desired rate in order to get my first gig.
Fortunately it's only a three month affair.
Has anyone else experienced this with their first contract? Or any of their contracts? What did you do to try and rectify it? I put a remediation plan together in my own time for restructuring the entire infrastructure here to try and be proactive about things, but the guy in charge just said "yeah, we know it's not ideal but it probably won't change. Nice diagram though."
I've just moved from a 10 year long career in perm jobs climbing the greasy pole over to being a contractor. My last position was at a global food distributor with 2000 odd employees as the global IT team leads right hand man for the infrastructure, this included pretty much everything and was semi architectural and about 70% project work. My contract role was for an organisation of a similar size but in aviation, with a claimed 70/30 split of project/BAU work, so I naturally had very high aspirations for the kind of work i'd be doing, things i'd be exposed to, etc...
Well - sadly nothing has really lived up to my expectations. Turns out the place i've moved to has literally an 8th of the servers to look after when compared to my last place and the same number of us to look after them. Nothing is fault tolerant, the DR plan is "flap your arms and panic" and change control is "run it by the manager but don't expect an answer, you'll just have to make a call on it".
I knew from the day rate on offer that this role would be slightly more junior than my prior one, but Jesus, it just feels like i've stepped back about 4 years in my career! What have I done!? I thought that receiving my first payment from the agency would help, and it did, but for about 5 minutes, but unfortunately due to being a perm in my last role I took a cut in my desired rate in order to get my first gig.
Fortunately it's only a three month affair.
Has anyone else experienced this with their first contract? Or any of their contracts? What did you do to try and rectify it? I put a remediation plan together in my own time for restructuring the entire infrastructure here to try and be proactive about things, but the guy in charge just said "yeah, we know it's not ideal but it probably won't change. Nice diagram though."
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