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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."
Wu claiming that he doesn't want to try to unionize contractors to Microsoft rings hollow. If he's building a site that encourages community, couldn't any other member in the community just as easily make a big push to unionize as he could? I suspect that if enough buzz was drawn around the idea, it wouldn't necessarily matter what the founder thought, unless said founder quashed notions of the idea, an action I find unlikely.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
two forums that have sprung up as a meeting place (cyber & meat) for current/past/future contractors of the empire. (emphasis mine)
;)
Ummm?! Sounds like you get a whole lot more when you are a contractor for Microsoft
Microsoft's two biggest contractors are Volt and Kelly Services
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Thats what some of the full time blue badges at one point liked to call any of the vendors/contractors (they get e-mail addresses that start with a "x-" before the username and the different letters stood for differnt contracting & temp agencies. A friend of mine used to work there (went from Orange to Blue badge) said that there were a number of full timers who completely looked down on the contactors. They would ignore thier e-mails, not co-operate with them and brush it off since the temps were just "dash trash". If this is still happens and full time employees still get away with it, they could use a support forum or two...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
We don't need no stinking orange badges!
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.
"It might be psychological, but it does make a difference," he said. "You walk into a meeting and everybody knows immediately that you're orange. It changes things a little bit -- however slightly, but it does."
People recognizing your orange badge instantly makes you an 'outsider' or 'not really and employee' at Microsoft. It is in people's nature to want to belong to a group, and once they see that you are not part of their group, you are not deemed as trustworthy or good enough to be part of their select group.
If I ran Microsoft, I would make a lot of changes but first I would not make badges with an opposing colour scheme. Everyone should have the same badge, eliminating the psychological effect of being an 'outsider' or 'not really part of the same team.' One less thing to worry about and one less possibility for employees to become divisive and uncooperative.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I knew a guy who worked for a company as a contractor. He was billing $60 an hour, and they were giving him about 50 hours of work a week. They gave him a nice office. The guy turned around and sued the company to be recognized as an employee because he wanted the benifits. I forget the details, but his argument boiled down to "they treated me like an employee, so I am an employee, now give me my benifits or severance pay".
I'm the kind of guy who likes working on projects, then moving on to something different. What is wrong with contracts? I have been very happy working on a project for 5 or 6 months, then taking two or three weeks off before starting the next project. I have more vacation time than my friends who are employees.
I learned my ABC's watching television! I learned science watching Voltron.
Or maybe he's interested in only making anion.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
Maybe there isn't so much benefit for the potential union members, now that I think about it, but for Microsoft? Resistance makes them futile; they'll find some other temps to assimilate.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
Anyone with an orange badge should be forced to wear it for life !
Badges orange you!
Im contracting for a financial services firm and I see the same childish behavior everywhere I go. They put contractors out in hallways with a desk, pc and chair. The employees used to laugh. Then, suddenly, an employee was sitting out in a hallway one day and the contractors were laughing. All the while, no one realizes that companies create an environment of uncertainty and stress by putting workers against each other. Contractors are not the only mechanism used this way. Forced ranking systems are another example. This atmosphere creates workers that are on edge all the time, overworked and worried.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
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
In Soviet Russia badges orange you!
No, you are thinking of Ukraine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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$100 for my health insurance (31/M/ex-smoker/kidney stones). I have great coverage, but I pay my doctor cash -- and get a discount for it from his office.
Doens't Google have the same setup: a team of enmployees and a team of disposable contractors?
Are the contractors treated better at one place or the other?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Why orange ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel
orange is the opposite of blue, just like red and green.
Is this intentional ?
How desperate for news must the slashdot editors be to have posted this article?
Not desperate at all...the motive is far more sinister than mere desperation.
Check out the member page for 'coolball'.
'Coolball' is obviously one of Zonk's numerous dummy accounts he uses when he wants to shove another uninteresting story down our throats, but doesn't have the balls to do it directly. Just peruse his old stories, and check out the user pages of the alleged 'contributors', and you can see for yourself that Zonk has a long and sordid history of this sort of jerrymandering.
Zonk is singlehandedly killing Slashdot, and we're all letting it happen!
STOP HIM BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!
Arguably, you're right--even if parent was meant as a troll. Only 31 posts on OrangeBadges.com with 121 replies. Not exactly a thriving environment. Sorta surprising that this was considered interesting enough for someone to write an article.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
I started out at M$ as a contractor. (End user support for MSAccess in Irving, TX back in '95) I was an employee within six months. (Then an ex amployee six months after that.) When I switched over, the difference was like night and day.
:)
While I was a contractor there was a site wide carnival where they trucked in mini roller coasters and other fun stuff. Contractors were literally ushered out the door and weren't even told about it beforehand.
One day when I was a full time employee all of the contractors...ALL 700 on site...were fired because of low call volume.
The class action lawsuit brought in later years by former contractors didn't surprise me one bit after that.
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.
The people left homeless in new orleans seem to be the biggest whiners I have seen in the world. *Whine* they didn't rescue us fast enough, they put us in a stadium and we didn't have food *Whine*.
Guess what? No one cares. Some people never had a home, period - especially a cushy historic home in a famous tourist destination.
I really hate the "you have no right to complain because other people have it worse than you" mentality. You're half a step above the "why are we discussing this when people are dying" trolls.
There is nothing that puts more fear in a Megacorp like employee awareness. Especially when they know if they treat someone unfairly, everyone is going to know about it. I've seen temps treated pretty unfairly at times, almost as if they agreed in writing to be treated like a doormat when they signed the contract. Good job Wu.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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.
I don't know but the article quality on Slashdot really sucks lately. It's winter, and it's the holidays. Geeks aren't looking for articles about what it's like to work at Microsoft or the same old stuff about obscure OSS contests, the US gov't spying on us, Windows having scurity holes, yet another 'Ask Slashdot' "How do I admin a server?", or a (yawn) DE flamefest.
We're looking for something interesting or something to do. This is a site for hackers, remember? Not just middle-managers. I want to see articles about somebody heating their house with a server farm, or HOWTO build your own embedded system from a system-on-chip or something. I mean, ever since somebody decided Slashdot has to only be about OSS, there have been more articles about fscking Microsoft than anything really interesting.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
You pay 15.x% up to a certain amount, which employees actually already pay. Your employer pays you less so he can pay the matching 7.7% or whatever it is. As a contractor, you already figure this tax into your billable rate. 20 hours a week at $150 per hour, minus the self-employment tax is still hefty dollars.
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.
I have contracted for years in Silicon Valley (since the bust) and am always treated well by the companies I work for: Invited to office parties, holiday bonuses and the topper of them all: quarterly profit sharing. All of this despite the fact that I am typically only at each client for 15-25 hours/week. Granted, these are smaller companies (under 500 employees), but nevertheless. I suppose you weigh your choices and go from there.
While a full time technical employee at IBM (Essex J*, ** - shhhhh!) in the nineties, we envied the contractors. At least they were treated like human beings. They were paid more. They had more free time. They had the option to convert over to regular where we would have to leave the site for a year before we could accept a job with a contractor. Job security, I got laid off after 15 years and offered a line job with a pay cut. "Brain the size of a planet and all they wanted me to do was open doors" - Marvin
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
I will accept that some contractors are highly skilled problem solving ninjas, well worth the premium they're paid.
The stories that I'm always fed are about contractors who are paid 180-300% what the regular coders get, eat steak every day from their ridiculous per diem and travel compensations, jerk off for a few weeks at the office, then its up to the regular staffers to fix their shoddy code for a month afterwards. And for whatever reason, some companies get stuck in these loops for a long time. A friend of mine built databases for a big big big tech firm (huge chip/IC mfr), and that was his story about twice a month. What was even richer was when he was laid off along with most of his dept while the company increased its reliance on the shoddy contractor work (he found a better position in a couple weeks since he was experienced and talented). Of course, this is more a story about poor management than any real statement about contracting.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
I have close family that was affected by Katrina. The ones that are whining Whine* they didn't rescue us fast enough, they put us in a stadium and we didn't have food *Whine*. have this sense of entitlement and are losers. They are lazy. These are the same people that were given food stamp and cash credit cards that spent it on televisions, stippers, and booze.
Mind you that this money comes from our taxes so WE are giving these 'unfortunate' people luxuries that we work hard ourselves to EARN.
Now, I'm not heartless and alot of people were put out that deserve a break and a little handout but you never hear of the stories of the families that move their family and start over (like the ones I know) without any assistance. You never hear of the real heroes that provide comfort and security for their familes ALL THE TIME. All we hear is how someone was stupid enough to stay in a flooded house for 2 weeks, get rescued by a recue worker that will never be thanked, and how this person is now going to be evicted from a hotel room.
Well, you know what? GET A JOB.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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
That happened to me. Once. Shortly thereafter, I had a chat with my manager, who had a chat with his manager's manager. His unwillingness to work with contractors was on his review the next cycle, and he "spent more time with his family".
. . . in DOD TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information) facility.
When I arrived at a new assignment in the former West Germany in the 1980s at a USAF TS/SCI facility, I waited six weeks for my SCI access to be verified.
In those days, a red badge was issued to anyone who's SCI access had not been verified. While in the facility, you had to be escorted everywhere and before you entered a room your escort had to announce "RED BADGE" to alert everyone to stop the secret-squirrel stuff.
And when I say "escorted everywhere," I mean everywhere, including the restroom. Red badges were encouraged to make number two BEFORE they entered the facility, or wait until they left.
What?
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.
Hyperbole isn't just a glorified Mad-lib, you've got to have a valid point.
A statement that applies for one group (Upper Middle-class tech workers) might not apply for another group (Impoverished disaster victims). That doesn't mean the original statement is in any way incorrect.
In America, the only really important color you need to remember is Green. The rest are just trimming.
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.
Dead on. People buy insurance and then expect coverage for every little tiny thing.
I recently lost my wife's wedding and engagement rings, and I was, of course, crucified for this rather significant error in judgement. But we didn't spend a ton of money on the set - probably $2,500 for both - and that's Canadian dollars to boot.
My in-laws think we should go through our house insurance, which i think is ludicrous. I have a $1,500 deductible, so the very best I can hope for is to squeeze $1,000 out of them, which I will, of course, have to pay for myself anyway in the years to come in the form of rate increases.
Insurance is for protection from *catastrophic probems* like your house burning down, writing off a car wreck or covering $250,000 in medical bills for some obscure ailment which strikes unexpectedly.
Ratcheted up your deductible, and your rates go down significantly. Put the deducible in a bank account and use it to cover the little "emergencies" that life dishes out periodically. You'll be far better off.
The big secret is that the contractors do ALL the work while the full-time employees go to endless meetings and lunch.
Get off Slashdot and get back to work!
I got a two-hour lunch, then meeting, then going home early...
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
His unwillingness to work with contractors was on his review the next cycle, and he "spent more time with his family".
Is that a euphemism, like "sleeps with the fishes"?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I can't get over the deep irony of the gay rights group discriminating against you.