What's the worst gig you ever had?

[Liability]

Both my gigs at Barclays Capital (well first was BZW) were poor : but not unbearable.

No-one is rude to me often though : which is a pity as I love publicly humiliating with "witty" put downs. My favourite being to call them thrush as they are an irritating c**t.

I interviewed their twice - in CW - first time they wouldnt budge on rate - second time I went to Barclays Retail instead as project waslonger. From what people say BC isnt a good place to work~?

[shoes]

Took me a short time to realise this and changed my methods to be 'deliver whats asked, don't try and run their business'.

Absolutely, I too initially fell into the trap of trying to help the client with what they were doing. But that was not what they wanted. I was there to assist them in what they had already decided to do, rather than help them work out what they should be doing.

You try and help and you come across ego, and contractor resentment, and reactions from people who don't want you hilighting how bad they are at their jobs.

Much easier to just keep schtum and be a part of the solution as they have defined it. More often that not if they did take my opinions on board i'd end up with a shorter contract as the result of increased efficiency... don't forget you're there to optimise income for your business, not for theirs!

If saying nothing gets you more money, say nothing.

[scooterscot]

Way back in the stoneage when I was a proper contractor; I always found that the quality / price(!) of the coffee and the state of the toilets were a very good sign of if there was going to be any problems at the gig. Any doubts with either of them and you'll find all sorts of trouble is on the way.

Well I dismissed this as first... but

Every good contract I've had has had poor toilets and crappie coffee, vice versa for the less favourable gigs.

wow... must be true. Thanks for the tip.

[HairyArsedBloke]

Well I dismissed this as first... but

Every good contract I've had has had poor toilets and crappie coffee, vice versa for the less favourable gigs.

wow... must be true. Thanks for the tip.

That's because you are north of the boarder; everything is backwards up there.

[bobspud]

Last one by a long mile. 15 months of pure hell. All down to the fact that the end clients did not want to listen to the advice they were paying for, and chose to listen to the other party who were screwing them...

The software vendor would deliver a sealed release DVDs full of junk in order to meet project milestones (and payment gateways). Knowing that they had delivered a disc full of MP3s and crap renamed to look like Java, they would stall for time by telling the end client that they would need to make several environmental changes prior to the software being applied. This would take weeks as they would need to go through change control. The changes would break the test environments and while we struggled to undo the mess they would continue to work on getting the real software dropped, while trying to blame the infrastructure guys for holding them up...

Then at the last minute they would come to site with the real code and pretend that they had patched some issues and would ask to replace the original disk with a new copy. Unfortunately for them I always opened the disks and took ISO dumps to our CMDB. I caught them out when I openly compared disk images with one of the managers... (he could not figure out why he had 300mb of bangra music in the CMDB...)

Once they realised that they were being shafted on a scale that would border on serious fraud they went into professional denial (I think they were terrified to be fair) . In the end programme had overshot by seven months they started to try and blame us instead of the other mob as they did not want the senior directors to go near the other can of worms...

That was when my day rate went up to roughly double for the last six months of the project $$$

[threaded]

Last one by a long mile. 15 months of pure hell. All down to the fact that the end clients did not want to listen to the advice they were paying for, and chose to listen to the other party who were screwing them...

The software vendor would deliver a sealed release DVDs full of junk in order to meet project milestones (and payment gateways). Knowing that they had delivered a disc full of MP3s and crap renamed to look like Java, they would stall for time by telling the end client that they would need to make several environmental changes prior to the software being applied. This would take weeks as they would need to go through change control. The changes would break the test environments and while we struggled to undo the mess they would continue to work on getting the real software dropped, while trying to blame the infrastructure guys for holding them up...

Then at the last minute they would come to site with the real code and pretend that they had patched some issues and would ask to replace the original disk with a new copy. Unfortunately for them I always opened the disks and took ISO dumps to our CMDB. I caught them out when I openly compared disk images with one of the managers... (he could not figure out why he had 300mb of bangra music in the CMDB...)

Once they realised that they were being shafted on a scale that would border on serious fraud they went into professional denial (I think they were terrified to be fair) . In the end programme had overshot by seven months they started to try and blame us instead of the other mob as they did not want the senior directors to go near the other can of worms...

That was when my day rate went up to roughly double for the last six months of the project $$$

Were we on the same gig? They tried to get me fired when I showed the code could not be reversed engineered, but if you changed the file extensions it played some songs in Gujarati and one was a video of 'Princess Superstar'...

[zara_backdog]

Were we on the same gig? They tried to get me fired when I showed the code could not be reversed engineered, but if you changed the file extensions it played some songs in Gujarati and one was a video of 'Princess Superstar'...

All sounds very simular?

Was not for a large Logistics company was it?

[bobspud]

Were we on the same gig? They tried to get me fired when I showed the code could not be reversed engineered, but if you changed the file extensions it played some songs in Gujarati and one was a video of 'Princess Superstar'...

All sounds very simular?

Was not for a large Logistics company was it?

No it was London based and financial.

It would seem to me that this is a wide spread problem Bet the off shore software company is the same though (Lets not name names here though.)

[threaded]

No it was London based and financial.

It would seem to me that this is a wide spread problem Bet the off shore software company is the same though (Lets not name names here though.)

Tata then.

[MarillionFan]

Worst two

The BBC. Only time had a contract terminated. Had a day off planned for months before joining. Didnt get system access for the first three days, started properly on day four/five and had the Monday booked off. Got off the plane with a message from the agent, dont come in, we'll pay you for the week but saying my work wasnt up to standard. I was furious, when challenged, they it changed to taking a day off with getting notification, talking to colleagues around me and taking personal calls.. PM had ok'd and the ok was on the work email only. Hence couldnt prove it. I just didnt fit in.

Gutless project manager, gutless team of contractors, gutless permies and frankly biggest bunch of tossers ever. I of course have a long memory and will indeed bump into this individual again!

Lotus Cars.

Awful place. I was quite new at contracting then, living away from home. There was another contractor there who kept everything to himself and thought he was the bigwig(yeah mate £20 p/h as a senior contractor during y2k was f-cking pitiful. Long story but basically he got arsey and squared up for fight. I was already on more money and decided to take another gig. I put his name in my book.

Recently Mr Bigwig applied for a job at the company I now workat. Imagine my surprise when i found our and was asked to have a look at his CV. My god, his arrogance on his CV was incredible and HR spoke to me. I told them he was unsuitable and why. So between HR and myself we had a little pay back. I knew all about the project he had worked on, to which he claimed complete ownership and I gave HR a number of questions which went 'Well you say that, but is it not true that this is not the case'.

Ten minutes was all it took before he had crumbled and was falling over himself.

Mr BBC. You;re next.