Possible new niche

[jmo21]

Contracting these days is about learning how to sit back and have a good laugh - and then invoicing for it.

This. With bells on.

Also, telling them where they are going wrong in meetings. Then sitting back and letting all the permies argue about it.

It's not particularly witty, but I like to imagine myself as throwing little grenades in and watching them explode.
(and in light of today's events in the US, I know that might be a little off)

[Robinho]

This. With bells on.

Also, telling them where they are going wrong in meetings. Then sitting back and letting all the permies argue about it.

It's not particularly witty, but I like to imagine myself as throwing little grenades in and watching them explode.
(and in light of today's events in the US, I know that might be a little off)

The problem on my current project is that the only permie is the PM.

[hyperD]

Contracting these days is about learning how to sit back and have a good laugh - and then invoicing for it.

Amen brother.

[mudskipper]

First telephone conference with offshore team at my new gig. this morning. Couldn't understand a word the Indian developers offshore were saying, but thought it was best to keep my mouth shut, at least for now. No sooner had that thought crossed my mind when the onshore Indian developer sat at the side of me started interrupting the entire offshore team - every thirty seconds - complaining that he couldn't understand a word they were saying.

Contracting these days is about learning how to sit back and have a good laugh - and then invoicing for it.

I think you 'tune in'. After a couple of weeks of it, you start to get the common idiosyncrasies. Either that, or their accent improves!

[MarillionFan]

Argahhh

[mudskipper]

Argahhh

Good to see your posts are getting more intelligent as we go.

[formant]

I don't really see the point in 95% of discrimination laws.

If a racist person wants to diminish his potential talent pool when hiring, that's his loss.

I see a point in discrimination laws, but expecting good communication skills in someone's working language isn't about discrimination.

Wanting a 'white english' team is, but there discriminitation laws don't prevent the racial discrimination from happening, they just ensure that racist hiring managers are a bit more subtle about it. Not necessarily a bad thing.

I'm amazed how many native speakers are incredibly poor communicators, so I'm glad to see a greater focus on good communication skills. I'm a non-native speaker in theory, but unless I tell someone, they'd never realise. I work in automatic speech recognition, I fine-tune the systems to cope with various British regional accents and dialects. Yeah, being foreign (German) I get the odd question as to whether my own language background may be a hindrance there, but that just shows that whoever is asking that has next to no understanding of how phonetics and speech technology work. I can explain that away easily.

I do think a lot of foreign people just aren't trying hard enough and I have little pity when they don't make it through an interview on the grounds of their poor linguistic abilities.

In the interview for my current gig, the ClientCo guys were predominantly concerned with whether I could explain my work to a lay-audience in plain English. I managed. It's a reasonable request, probably something any techie person should be able to do.