Quote:
Originally Posted by kerowo
He’s giving away the hours he doesn’t bill to the project. Which is dumb because they hired him knowing he’d have to spend time figuring things out.
I'm not saying I'm a fan of it, but you're often faced with a choice:
* give up those hours now, but get fair hours in the future
* get paid for your time but lose the contract
this isn't limited to program jobs or really even to jobs. Things are not always fair, and you're often forced to choose. And sometimes, either way, you're wrong.
As a brief diversion let me relay a story a friend of mine told me. The numbers are approximate but close.
He started as a subcontractor working for IBM, I don't know doing what exactly. The contractor he worked for sort of dropped them and a new contractor came in, and interviewed them one by one. My friend was making 30k. The contractor asked what he was making and he said "55k" and the contractor didn't bat an eye. As he left the room he told the next guy "I told them I make 55k, and they didn't blink, you should do the same and tell the next guy" and that's what they did. So he started working a $30k job for $55k.
This made him think, am I really at the top of what I could get paid? So he started shopping around. He found his actual "title" or "level" which at IBM is an actual thing. He started calling contractors and saying "I'm a level X in department Y, how much will you pay to have me contract under you" and finally he found someone who was actually already an IBM employee but acting as a contractor on the side who would pay him $70k for the same job.
This means that for the job he was doing, the contractor was being paid enough for it to be worth their while to employ him at $70k - so they must have been paid more.
The moral here, if you want to call it that, is that it may seem set in stone how much you "can" or "should" make but the people who are paying you are way more likely to know the top number you can make, and it's in your best interest to find out what it is, and possibly, to try to achieve it
This story ends with him getting laid off perhaps a year later. I wonder if he'd have been laid off if he had stayed at the $30k level or $55k level. Like maybe those contractors could stay afloat because of their margins - they could take a haircut from IBM and still make money, but his contractor couldn't at $70k. Like maybe the job was paying $80k and the contractor was taking $10k and paying my friend $70k, but then IBM lowered the rate to $65k and any contractor paying over that had to fold. I really don't know.
(He was not the only person laid off, there were thousands in his cohort, it's just the way it is at IBM sometimes)