Slashdot Mirror

NGC is what we in the business refer to as a "body shop."

http://www.realrates.com/bbs/messages/tips4.htm

Any one had any success with realrates.com ?

Your current employer is trying to walk all over you.
Do not allow them to.

Here's what is reasonable for a professional:
1) Two weeks notice

That's it. NOTHING more.

If you want to do more for them, then treat it like a brand new business arrangement, everything is on the table and you should not hesitate to take as much of it as you can.

That means, that under no circumstances, would a professional EVER give away their time for LESS than they were being compensated for before. To do so is to open yourself up to all kinds of continuing employment abuse. Do not, in any way, allow any sort of feelings of guilt or the like manipulate you into discounting your worth. Apparently they NEED you and in business that translates into paying MORE, not less.

Go to the RealRates forum for sage advice from experienced contractors on how to handle this former employer's needs without letting him take advantage of you.

PS, that your former boss would demand these things of you suggests that you've been mistreated all along and probably didn't realize it (I bet you were vastly underpaid and probably more than a little overworked). A stand-up guy would try to negotiate fairly, but he is clearly NOT doing that, instead is trying to manipulate you. That means the gloves are off and HE took them off, do not feel bad about playing hardball yourself, he started it after all.

Regular contract agencies are designed to rip off their clients and their people. Either go in as an independent, or go in using an "umbrella company" like www.mybizoffice.com - Umbrellas take a small fee (2-4% of gross) do your paperwork, hold your security clearance, file your 'corporate' taxes, and provide the appearance of normal employment as far as places like banks are concerned. They also sell you benefits like health insurance and really good retirement options (way better than what a regular employee can get) which you pay for with pre-tax money.

Also, as a general rule of thumb you should expect to bill your client an hourly rate equal to the equivalent yearly salary divided by 1000 - so a $75,000/yr job would equal a $75/hr rate. This rate covers your additional expenses for insurance and retirement as well as the extra taxes the self-employed must give to uncle sam and finally it also pays for the risk of downtime between gigs. You should expect to sock away at *least* three months of expenses and preferrably 6 or more to be secure.

Finally, go to www.realrates.com and check out the rate surveys and the discussion forums for advice from guys who have been contracting through the thick and thin of the last 10+ years. That forum will get you a lot higher quality of answers than asking slashdot where you have more chance of getting advice from a 12 year old poser than you do of hearing from actual contractors.

Sorry, messed up the link to realrates.

Go to RealRates and look through there. Get one or more of Janet's books, and go to the message boards / BBS run on that site for more insight and feedback - that place is to contractors what this place is for nerds.

Enjoy.
And come up with an answer to the following (follow the sig-link) :

She also has published a number of books about how to be a computer consultant, which are quite good. I bought the PDF download version of her marketing guide, and found its advice very valuable.

For good info start at rate survey then move on to the forums at: realrates.

For a good way to farm out all the "back-office" hassle for like 3% of gross, plus get access to portable benefits, including retirement savings (the best time to start saving is when you are young, the magic of compound interest will handsomely reward you for getting an early jump on retirement savings and it isn't like you can count on Social Security pyramid scheme to be there either) - MyBizOffice.

This is very true, chaeron. I think it is also a side effect of another phenomenon, something I realized painfully in 2002 while out of work.

The fact is that software development and information technology is an industry undergoing severe deflation. It used to be such deflation affected only hardware, a byproduct of it becoming a commodity industry. But with interest rates so low and growth not so good, most businesses are really cutting costs and anything which doesn't translate directly and can be seen to translate directly into improved sales or profits is a likely candidate.

In my opinion, which was discussed extensively in a forum at realrates.com, demand for programmers has been constant since 1990 and, in fact, slightly decreasing. There has been a lot of demand for other computing specialists, including the database development crowd to which I now belong. The reason for this is that businesses have moved to buying shrinkwrap solutions rather than keeping a stable of expensive programmers. For most companies who cannot sell a product to a zillion customers and thereby fund an expensive development group, doing software is just too expensive and consumes resources not related directly to sales or support. Heck, I saw an article in one of those business mags for the suits that recommended rethinking corporate philanthropy so that it is more oriented towards sales and so the business gets something back for it. Buying shrinkwrap is the cheapest form of outsourcing there is.

If tools for special effects in movies are any indication, large sectors of what were hot domains for programmers are becoming standardized and usable directly by functionals. Naturally, the company that makes these tools needs programmers, but once a market has a dozen competitors offering products that everyone else buys that caps the limit on the number of coders. And, of course, if the sector sees a shakeout, as most eventually do, that trims the demand more.

I think this phenomenon is behind the rise of one-size-fits-all enterprise packages like PeopleSoft, SAP, and the Oracle Financials entrants. Suits seem to have decided that software is so much a drain they win bigger if they distort their policies and procedures to fit the software rather than using custom. I think this phenomenon is also behind the push for software that lets one DBA administer hundreds of databases.

Not all software application areas seem to be sucuumbing to this. Games development still looks like it can afford building independent engines and the like. But it'll probably happen there, too. I mean, realistically, what's the point of repeating a creation of a good renderer? Most games today seem to be built using tools that let artist-designers develop scenes and having extensive parameter files. How much longer before a half dozen companies standardize that and make up for any efficiencies by simply exploiting faster hardware?

Frankly, I think the reason why scripts are becoming so popular and widely used is that they can do a job quickly. That means it's cheaper because it draws fewer programming hours. And, with reason, I think the suits don't see a cost to impossible-to-maintain software, at least not one that's comparable to the price of paying the programmer hours. If there are components of their process that must be maintained carefully, they buy that. Anything else by definition doesn't require long term maintenance. It does require speed, flexibility, and low cost.

I, like many people here, love to code and it's what I envisioned doing indefinitely. But the demand is decreasing. So, I get my kicks doing ETL, database, and business intelligence stuff, using gawk to do it whenever I can. And with gawk I can knock out applications really fast. Clients often don't even know or care as long as the job gets done cheaply and quickly.

Hey, we have always known, struggled, and argued with software being too expensive to develop and maintain. Much of the training professional programmers get concerns how to build better software. We've always felt a tension between quality and speed in the sense of rapid development. The suits have decided that we took too long to solve the problem and found their own way. Oh well, the computer giveth and the computer taketh away.

It's a bit of a game, yes, but generally it goes like this: look at the value of your services, and look at the class of your customer. You can't ignore that different customers require different levels of service.

There are three balancing points you need to look at when setting a price for goods or services:
a) what's it worth to them (1 customer)
b) how much are you worth relative to your peers in ways that MATTER to your customer
c) what's the benchmarked rate for this class of service

Sales skills involve convicing your customer of your estimates for (A) and (B), and also keeping (C) in mind as you haggle. You'll need a "benchmarked" rate such as those at RealRates to keep your feet on the ground.

Notice how the stock market uses a stock ticker listing the last bid/offer prices for issues? That's because people need a benchmark to know what others are charging, what tactics to use, what the trend is, etc.

It's not so simple that "companies buy outrageously priced services and products". What's outrageous to one person is acceptable to another, because DIFFERENT customers have DIFFERENT needs, many of which are intangible. You can't purely quantify price on technical quality alone, though that's a major factor.

A perfect example: J2EE servers tend to be fairly costly, compared to jBoss (free). This is the subject of many a flamewar: why do people keep spending the $$ on IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic? There are a lot of people that are certain of the imminent world triumph of jBoss, but I'm not so sure (even though it's a solid product). There are a LOT of intangibles that go on when purchasing a mission-critical product. To keep this brief, I'll focus on one: TRUST.

Do you (as a Manager Director or VP of a company, responsible for the company's performance) trust the jBoss team? Do deliver quality, to continue making improvements, etc? It's an open source team without identifiable faces... so you try to find a face... and the leader, Marc Fleury is often associated with it. So when you say "do you trust jBoss", it's really a question of, "do you trust Marc Fleury?".

Alternatively, do you trust BEA? The owners of Tuxedo which has a reputation for reliability & scalability, and with a suppport staff that is always in the message boards helping people out, with major accounts among your peers, with guaranteed 24x7 support if need be, etc.

Similarily for Linux, it originally was do you trust Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox -- but is increasingly "do you trust IBM and RedHat and Oracle?"

Many people think "I don't trust those suits" when judging mySQL vs. Oracle vs. PostgreSQL, or [insert pissing contest here], but that's because you're not a suit. Suits trust other suits, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. They'll pay around the rate their peers are.

It's not clear from your comment whether you want to be a regular full-time employee because you prefer it, or just because your savings is running dry.

If you prefer being a consultant, but you're not getting contracts, you need to up your marketing and sales. Some excellent advice is in the Contract Employees Handbook, especially the appendix on resources. Another good place to check is Janet Ruhl's site, Real Rates which tells what recent contracts have gone for by specialty.

(A great tip I heard is to bypass HR altogether and ask the switchboard for "procurement" or "vendor relations". You are, after all, a business offering a product, not a worker offering to become an employee.)

On the other hand, if you prefer to be an employee, dig out your trusty copy of What Color Is Your Parachute. Do the exercises, then go after companies who do what it is you want to do.

Either way, it has to start with what YOU want to do. You might take something else as an interim measure, but always keep your focus.

• Contract Employee 's Handbook -- This explains better than anything else I've ever seen what the differences are between the all the options and presents one that most people don't know about.
• Janet Ruhl's Real Rates -- Lots of top notch contracting info here and a great BBS where you can ask more questions.

Good luck!

For great information on this and other topics for contractors (contracts, finding work, etc) you owe it to yourself to check out Real Rates - The Computer Consultants Message Board

Fortunately, the same trend toward outsourcing that has placed many techies into a shotgun wedding with entrepreneurship has also created a web of resources they can use to cope. For starters, check out Janet Ruhl's Real Rates website. Also, those seeking a relatively painless (though pricey) back-office solution should check out Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E.). And be sure to read the Contract Employees' Handbook by the same guy who runs P.A.C.E.

I found her PDF on how to Market Your Consulting Services very helpful in my own practice - and she's got a lot of tips that I don't mention on my own marketing tips page above (while I have some she doesn't mention).

I've also found that Janet has been quite helpful and responsive in answering the occasional questions I've emailed to her.

In general, I prefer the resume sites which do not require a fee for the end client to search and get meaningful contact information from. Some of these require a small but very reasonable fee from the consultant, some are supported by advertising.

You'll probably find as I do that the sites that require the client to pay a few are frequented mostly by headhunters, and they also often don't allow search engines to index them, so your clients won't find you.

Other sites I recommend are The Software Contractor's Guild and Guru.com - know any others?

Finally, read alt.computer.consultants.moderated - but be sure to read the moderated newsgroup, the unmoderated one has gone all to hell.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I found her PDF on how to Market Your Consulting Services very helpful in my own practice - and she's got a lot of tips that I don't mention on my own marketing tips page above (while I have some she doesn't mention).

I've also found that Janet has been quite helpful and responsive in answering the occasional questions I've emailed to her.

In general, I prefer the resume sites which do not require a fee for the end client to search and get meaningful contact information from. Some of these require a small but very reasonable fee from the consultant, some are supported by advertising.

You'll probably find as I do that the sites that require the client to pay a few are frequented mostly by headhunters, and they also often don't allow search engines to index them, so your clients won't find you.

Other sites I recommend are The Software Contractor's Guild and Guru.com - know any others?

Finally, read alt.computer.consultants.moderated - but be sure to read the moderated newsgroup, the unmoderated one has gone all to hell.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Okayyyy... you could look at it that way, or you could look at the research ;)
Here are some resources I found. Hope they help.

*Real Consulting Rates Survey: 01/15/01 - 01/21/00
*ERi Salary Trend Wizard for US/CAN
*MIS & IT Comprehensive Salary Report - [.pdf version] - [.rtf version]
*Fill out the computerjobs.com 2001 salary survey to help other consultants or read the 2000 Survey Results.
*Other resources

Real life real contractors on Janet Rules real rates home page includes salary surveys by skill and by geographic area, and an active BBS populated by vocal and opinionated contractors. The site also includes some arcane information, such as contracting overseas (my contribution).

Salary.com
I am not sure how accurate they are:

JobSmart's Salary Surveys

Pencom Systems Incorporated: Interactive Salary Guide

SalaryZone

http://www.realrates.com

Are there any others and how accurate are they? Thanks. :)

Each year, a new batch of H1B visa are issued and it takes 6-8 months for the quota to be filled. The contractors at RealRates can usually tell you when the quota has been filled by the change in the contract job market. Within a week or so of hitting the quota, these people report getting a huge increase in the amount of interest from job brokers. It is almost as if someone has flipped a switch and turned the job market back on.

I think this phenomenon is clear proof that H1B visas are used to supply artifically cheap labor to the IT market.

I'm earning $85/hr corp to corp for writing Perl scripts, Sybase stored procedures, and Sybase triggers in the New York financial industry. The Sybase is the reason my rate is this high, not the Perl.

• Cost of Living comparsions. (US only) This is huge. Very good reference.
  
• Salary Survey (US only) Nice, because they've been doing the survey for nearly 10 years, so there's data not only on the current situation, but also overall trends. (Good when negiotating your annual pay raise in a non-software company that doesn't realize that we geeks really should get more money. :-) )
  
• Salary Comparsions (US/Canada) (Credit to matman)
  
• Salary comparsions (US/Canada, mainly. Some entries for overseas.) (credit to smalltalker)
  
• Salary comparsions (UK only) (credit to GC)
  
• Salary comparsions (Netherlands only) Not in English, so good luck. :-) (credit to Riddles)
  
• Salary Survey (Ireland only) (credit to bigdaisy)
  
• InfoWorld Salary Survey (location unclear) (credit to The Evil Dwarf)
  
• USENIX/SAGE salary survey (location unclear) Requires registration.
  

You might want to check out RealRates.com. It's got some good information, at least for contract work (I didn't really check out their salary survey section, but I'm sure it's OK). Not much good outside US/Canada, but there you have it.

I'd also encourage folks to contribute their current rates - kind of like open source for salary information!