First Time Contractor

[kingcook]

You're in a good mood today, dearie. Does that mean you'll be downstairs for your tea in a minute?

I had to scroll back up the page just to double check that it really was NLUK

[Stan.goodvibes]

You're in a good mood today, dearie. Does that mean you'll be downstairs for your tea in a minute?

LOL. Did the sun come out oop north for a bit?

It's true every time I go to a contract I'm thinking "OMG what if I can't do what they want me to do" but then when I get there I usually kick *rse. It's even easier in the UK, the work ethic is so slack i.e. first day on one banking contract I accidentally turned up a couple of days early due to miscommunication with the agent. The Clientco was like 'Oh well we have this b*stard spreadsheet we need someone to try and fix, so you may as well start on that, grab me if you get stuck'. A few hours later I present the now fixed spreadsheet and Clientco goes 'Oh, I thought that would take you a couple of days at least'. And it was hardly difficult (cue cruisy 4 year contract taking a week to do 1 days VBA work and being treated like a God for doing it)

That has pretty well been my experience every time. By the time they get you set up with everything and ready to go, you pretty well know what you need to do.

Also back in the good old days (late 90's) an Agent once said to me "if you think you can pick it up in 3 months, just lie at the interview and say you have experience". That generally seems to work as well. Most of the time you start fixing/amending/enhancing existing work so you can gen up on how the previous person did it before you have to deliver something new.

Also a lot of the time the Clientco will ask 'Do you have any experience in <some technology you have yet to use and you weren't hired to do>?'. The best response to that is to go 'not yet but I'll have a crack at it' and you get to play around learning something new AND getting paid AND impressing the Clientco. I've just done that with VSTO, and am currently upskilling on SSIS and SSAS because Clientco want a small BI solution and I was the one who put my hand up.

So for once I agree with NorthernLad. Just get in the door and wing it.

[SuPaStA]

Some permies will hate you for the simple fact you are a contractor and won't talk to you. Though who cares you not there to make friends!

[SueEllen]

For example, I've had mixed reports where people have mentioned, contractors tend to stick together and stay in contact, in order to help each other out, i.e. when looking for a new contract elsewhere. While others have said you can find yourself in a contract job and if you're unsure how to tackle a problem, you may well be presented by a wall of silence from other contractors on the team.

You get both.

However you more likely to get the permies refusing to talk to you and be helpful rather than contractors particularly if they are from an off-shore location.

In regards to not knowing stuff as long as you can do the 50% of the stuff especially if the 50% includes the awkward stuff and you don't piss the permie managers off then you will be fine.

[Freamon]

I wouldn't worry about not knowing how to do the role. Just as one example, my current place has a couple of contractors in particular who really have no clue what they are doing, they just blag it, and they're not even very good at that. Everyone knows they are blagging, but the client co will never go through the hassle of replacing them since we are half way through the project, they'll just stay in place for another year, after which their workstream will inevitably blow up and delay the project another 6 months. At this point they might get walked, but I doubt it, the client will probably be too panicked about fixing the issue to let anyone leave at that moment in time.