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Orange Badge Culture At Microsoft
coolball writes "For those of us that have worked as a contractor (a-dash or orange badge or whatever), Seattle PI's 'Microsoft's 'orange badge' culture gets forum' article caught my eye this morning. He talks about OrangeBadges.com and Contractor's International Network, two forums that have sprung up as a meeting place (cyber & meat) for current/past/future contractors of the empire. If you have been a Microsoftee, then you would laugh out loud in recognition some of the tales he relates."
Microsoft's two biggest contractors are Volt and Kelly Services
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You've got to give them a bit of credit. Here these guys are making money from the great evil one, working in the belly of the beast. At least they didn't end up changing badge colors.
Having been a contractor in IT working for some of the "big ones" the last 10 years, it is a lot different wearing the OTHER color badge. Things like:
1. No free meals on "employee appreciation day".
2. No access to the company park/gym/pool/volleyball pits.
3. Parking 2 miles from the building entrance.
On the good side:
1. Real easy to leave and go to the next gig.
2. Money.
3. More autonomy. I am my own boss when my wife's not around.
FWIW - US Govt Employees are some times referred to as "Blue Badge" while contractors are "Yellow Badge".
I recall in one of their security training videos contractors were even mocked. Some "evil" data-mining company was doing things such as stealing laptops, eavesdropping on conversations, and pretending to be members of the target company. When the tasks for the day were given out, and dumpster diving came up, someone said something along the lines of, "Well, give that to one of the contractors. Heh heh heh." Funnier yet, when the "contractor" showed up in the video, he looked more like Joe Dirt, covered with tattoos and a mullet. He was dropped off way, waaaay up the street from the target CEO's house and the truck with the other contractor went and parked next to the trash cans. So about 20 seconds of the video shows this guy walking up the street in broad daylight, sticking out like a sore thumb, only to come to where the truck was parked, dumped the trash bins into the truck and left. It was horribly ridiculous and MST3K-worthy.
--Chag
10 weeks a year? Try more like 20. Contracts who know how valuable they are can easily charge well over $150-$200 per hour and accomplish in a day what some IT employees take a week to do.
Health insurance isn't too expensive if you realize you need it for EMERGENCIES, not for yearly check ups and all that. Drop the co-pay, pay for your doctor's visits, and use insurance only for the big things. When I put my deductible to US$5000 annually, my insurance rate dropped big time. I put a little over US$5000 in gold to pay my deductible in an emergency, and I believe I pay just over US$100 for my health insurance (31/M/ex-smoker/kidney stones). I have great coverage, but I pay my doctor cash -- and get a discount for it from his office.
I'm pretty sure this article is more about "temps" and is just using the word contractor as a PC term.
And for temps it's a whole different world, of course.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Um, to compare someone who has a cushy job at MICROSOFT versus someone who has survived a major hurricane is, um, rather incredible actually. It just goes to show you how out of touch you are with the real world. Get a grip, you have a comfortable job in one of the largest tech companies in the world, your house is not floating away.
It's called hyperbole. It's the same line of logic as the original statement, but purposely taking it to an extreme to show the fallacy of logic. Just because someone has it better than someone else doesn't mean they have no right to ever complain.
Alright boys and gals, I'm here so, please, bring on the onslaught. I'm the grinning dude in the PI article, Howard that started OrangeBadges.com. DON'T ALL THROW FECES AT ME ALL AT ONCE!!!
But seriously, I'm not sure if you all realize how huge an organization Microsoft is, and how much of its workforce is made up of temp employees. Just in Redmond, WA, there are 30,000+ head counts, and between 1/3 to 1/4 of that is made up of contractors. If you also take into account of the perma-temps of the 80s and 90s, plus, due to the "work-365-days-and-take-100-days-off-with-no-guara ntees-your-position-won't-be-fille-by-another-cont ractor" perma-temp settlement, there is a huge swarm of people flowing through the orange-badge system every year. That's easily 10,000+ people who are/have worked as an orange badge at MS. If you also take into consideration all the people who WANT to, plus all the international MS orange badges, you will realize that this is a huge community of people.
Now, I know we are all supposed to hate Microsoft. Trust me, now that I am in the bastion of open-source @ Amazon.com, there is no lack of distrust of commercial licensed software, but I'm talking about real people here. So, cut me some slack, boys and girls. It's just a message board. :-)
OK, now you can all throw feces my way, and I will answer the best I can. :-)
OrangeBadges.com BEAN
When i was still working at the redmond campus (as a blue), a few times a year we'd see a bunch of bozos walking around campus with "WashTech" signs / banners etc. A few people were trying to start a tech-workers union back then.
:)
The sort of people Microsoft wants to hire (as FTEs) are not interested in unionization. Microsoft, more than anywhere else i've worked, is a meritocracy where people are vastly rewarded for excellent personal performance. We want to hire people that excel in that environment. People that know they are bright enough that they could walk and find other gainful employment, so don't put up with things they don't have to where they are. People that have a variety of options and beleive where they are at is the best available.
That's pretty much the opposite of the sort of people that are interested in unionization.
I don't see Microsoft putting up with any kind of unionization of contract workers. The last time contractors aggregately sued MS, we amended our policy by making them sit on the bench 100 days per year (to make it crystal clear that contractors/permatemps were temporary.. a- (agency-temp) workers have to take 100 days off every year now)
There are some distinctions at MS between blue and orange that probably need to remain, but others that could probably go away. The latter are mostly individual actions.. people with poor professional behavior that treat contractors unfairly or as if they're some kind of lesser person. There need to be some differences in the way you treat the non-blues for legal/other reasons, but that shouldn't spill into how you treat them as humans. Unfortuneately it is completely possible to work at MS and not really have any sense of how to interact with people effectively [unless you define "effective" as badgering people into submission].
I've worked with great contractors and not so great contractors. Hell, I know of at least one guy that moved from blue->orange so he could take 100 days of "vacation" every year to snowboard. Not a bad sounding idea, honestly
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Anheuser-Busch envied the MS contractor model so much that they implemented MS policies, right down to badge colors, contractor term limits and different user-id's mapped to email addresses.
Working there as an "orange badge" is the equivalent to being charitably bussed to an expensive private school from a poor neighborhood. You are an untouchable, not to be socialized with and become the scapegoat for poor management. You don't attend department meetings that directly effect your project and workload, you aren't allowed to attend office parties (even those happening right outside your cube - just getting some cheese from the party tray is firable) and you are reminded daily by ego driven managers that you are disposable trash that has no value to the company. Morale sucked.
I was "disposed of" when a manager was being investigated for sexual harassment reported by a co-worker who was a blue-badger. HR scheduled an interview with me on the matter and days before the interview I was sacked. They provided no reason for my seperation, simply that I was "no longer needed." Nevermind that I was the lead on a major rollout that was nowhere near completion.
I've read several short-sighted responses of "these stupid whiners should be thankful they have a job" and "these orange badgers make crap-tonnes of money." Thanks to a glut of techs on the market when I signed on, I wasn't well compensated and I ended up unemployed for the first time in my life. Due to "orange badge" policies, I was unable to get a reference from AB or anyone who worked there. Oh yeah, I was thankful... thankful my ass!
I worked several contract jobs prior to AB with nothing bad to say about the previous companies or contract work in general. Companies who foster the "orange badge culture", such as Microsoft and Anheuser-Busch, really need to find a better way to integrate contractors into their workforce.
Typically, an employee's total cost is about 125% of salary. Some government agencies or companies with really generous pension plans costs as much as 155%.
In the vast majority of cases, a typical "permanent" employee is costing somewhere between $40-60/hr, depending on skills and the location. With contract workers, billing rates (NOT what the contractor gets) routinely exceed $100 for skills beyond Level-2 helpdesk. Big companies like IBM/HP/Oracle tend to bill $150-350.
The sole advantage to contract staff is that you can hire them for a specific project and then get rid of them with a minimum of drama & fuss. If people are working for years billing $150/hr, they are wasting company money 90% of the time.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I was a contractor for Intel, and because of that, I had a "Green badge" where the people that had checks with Intel's address on it were "Blue-badge employees"
One of the differences that was clear on your first day, was that greenbadges had to swipe their badge every time they enter or exit the building. Bluebadges just showed it to the security guy from across the room and walked in or out.
We developed a saying: "Green badges always swipe when they are done"
There was a contractor once that used some of the 3M blue masking tape you find everywhere around Intel to turn his green stripe into a blue stripe, just to see if anyone noticed. It was two weeks later that a manager asked him "Hey - when did you get hired as a blue badge employee?"
She wasn't happy when he peeled the tape off.
Now I work at a company that has Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow badges for completely different purposes.
Red = access to secure areas such as "the vault" in the Jewelry division, the datacenter, wiring closets, etc.
Blue = employee non-secure access
Green = contractor
Yellow = temporary
However, no one really even knows what the difference in the colors mean except the security clucks.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That's great, but what percentage of the people you've met in life are as ethical as you are?
In my life, maybe 5% (being generous) of the people I meet are sufficiently ethical.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking