Moving up the tree

[Francko]

Does anyone else find that the higher the rate, the lower the status?

I'm writing software on a daily rate that I'm extremely happy with but a long way down the pecking order as far as status goes. Nothing wrong with that but do people feel the need to "climb the ladder" and become team leads etc. or just keep doing dogsbody work and taking the cash?

After 10 years of coding I'm getting a little jack of it but the "better" jobs don't seem to pay anywhere near as well!

Well I have known a few people that claim that they work for the "status". But unfortunately your case doesn't seem to be the norm to me. I am seeing that lowly qualified IT contracts are not paid that well, unless you are well known in the company. Couldn't it be that after many years of experience you find your job very easy but instead it isn't?

I don't agree with Rebecca point of view unless it happens you stay a long time in the company, then you might look after an access DB for 1500 a day. However if they are looking for a contractor to manage an access DB I would expect they pay peanuts.

Permie world is slightly different as there are a few perverted "status" maniacs who will give away some money for a fancy title but the majority of jobs are paid increasingly with responsabilities and skills from my point of view.

[Lucifer Box]

Who cares about status when you are pulling in big bucks. The money
is what is important and the more the better. You need plenty of lovely shiny crisp £50 pound notes to roll up all that canabis and snorting a line of coke from the asscheeks of a beautiful bird doesn't come cheap.

Now you're talking, comrade.

Just so we get it clear before we start the week, for the next 7 days are you:

a) a foaming at the mouth socialist?
b) a fundamentalist Christian?
c) American?
d) some combination of the above?
e) something else you thought of over the weekend while your mum was out doing the shopping?

[Fungus]

Since going contracting I've found that my earnings have doubled and my status has sky-rocketed. As a permie, managers would often treat me like dirt. I think managers thought I was gullible and would feed me with bulltulip to encourage me to work hard for piss poor money. Doh. I never cease to marvel at how stupid some managers are.

In terms of how interesting the work is, I s'pose it depends what you work on. I have the impression that banking and/or database work is dull and that you need lots of experience to do it as a contractor. Anyway, I hated permie banking work and left after a year or so and a friend tells me that his 4GL DB work is dull. As a contractor I have done some quite challenging work though not the latest technology (Windows NT, TCPIP, multithreading, GSM/GPRS, COM, real-time, C++) and clients have been very satisfied which to my mind equates to high status. Most people seem to dislike real-time, multithreading and so on. I suspect this is because you need a mathematical mind. Fortunately I love maths. Sadly I am not earning the big money, but ~£70K per year is good enough. Oh and the people I work with are friendly. To me that matters more than perceived status. (Heck, I drive a friggin' Ford Ka for good ness sake.)

Fungus

[DimPrawn]

I drive a friggin' Ford Ka

Are you a girl or just gay?

[zeitghost]

I'm a Giant Alien Lizard and I drive a 1992 Bloo Volvo 940.

It's got this really neat sort of trap door in the back seat so that I can comfortably fit my tail into the boot. (That's trunk for the likes of Jabba the Hut).

[Fungus]

Are you a girl or just gay?

You've lived a very sheltered life if you think that driving a Ford Ka constitutes a homosexual act. I'll let someone more knowledgeable than me tell you what gays do.

Actually it's a great little car, especially round town. Dirt cheap to buy: £4.5K new with 3 years warranty. Easy to park. Four seats. Excellent handling. Sticks to the road. Decent build. I've had mine to 115 mph on the clock (110 in reality) and it felt rock solid.

Fungus

[zeitghost]

I never drive my big Bloo volvo faster than 45mph.

It keeps the oil consumption down to a quart a week.

[Joe Black]

I expect that in 5 years time I will be working for Goldman Sachs and looking after an Access database with 5 tables in it and no more than 20 rows in each. There might be a few indexes but that would be quite complicated. There will only ever be one user in it at any one time. And my rate will be around £1,500 a day.

Becs, you're spending your spare time learning XML types etc on Oracle, yet acknowledge that in a few years your main skill will be the Report wizard in MS Access...a double spanking is all I can recommend!

[Jabberwocky]

You've lived a very sheltered life if you think that driving a Ford Ka constitutes a homosexual act. I'll let someone more knowledgeable than me tell you what gays do.

Fungus

I am afraid there are not many people here with intimate knowledge of gay sex - mainly we have virile and fit heterosexual athletes here. Except for myself of course - I'll take one up the bum if offered. But please, do continue to talk about your vehicle and its fascinating performance statistics.

[Rebecca Loos]

Becs, you're spending your spare time learning XML types etc on Oracle, yet acknowledge that in a few years your main skill will be the Report wizard in MS Access...a double spanking is all I can recommend!


Good point! But I guess I am only getting the skill so I can put it on my CV and impress at interview time, knowing full well that when a job spec reads "XML Java J2EE Enterprise Java Beans .NET C# Object Oriented Programming XML XSL-T ETL Warehouse Struts", what this means it that you'll spend most days writing bog standard SQL statements!