Below are entries from the "Contractor Hall of Shame" which were collected from visitors to Realrates.com in 1997. If the messages on our BBS are anything to go by, the abuses are far worse now.
Here's a taste of what unwaits the unwary:
Bait and Switch
* Offered a contract 'in Hawaii', paying $60/hr with free local housing, transportation, and monthly trips home to the mainland (extremely attractive terms, don't you think, considering the desirable location?). Recruiter 'needed to check' which city the contract was in. I submitted my resume', and never heard from them again about this or any other contract (1 year now). This may have been a new start-up's way of building a resume' data base.
* This firm also advertises signing bonuses but never pays them as well as exobortant salaries that it never delivers.
* Agent promised interview and requested my list of references. As I found later this promise was a lie and my list of references was used for marketing.
* Sales representative pressured me to sign a non-compete agreement after I interviewed with the client, stating verbally to me that an offer was on the table. I signed the agreement. The day after I signed the non compete, the representative stated that the client withdrew the offer. I confronted the representative with this suspicion and my impression was that the offer of a position was an out and fabrication to induce me to sign the non compete agreement.
* Although the recruiter and I had agreed to a rate before the interview, when I called her several hours after the interview (which had gone well, as I was rejoining my former project), she tried (and failed) to chisel me down, saying that 'the client is reluctant to pay your rate'. This might have been plausible, except that she had quoted me what she said was the billing rate, and it was below that of at least one other team member (I had checked). When I mentioned this, she quickly dropped "the client's" demand, and gave me the rate we had originally agreed on.
Pestering
* Called me several times after I told them to stop, and I had also told them to take my resume off of their database. I stopped getting calls from them only after I changed phone numbers. Staff acted like used-car salespeople.
* Marketing was done in so unacceptable style that some of my references asked me not to use their names again. I met other contractors with the same experience.
Contract Shenanigans
* Submitted a different contract than the one signed by me and therefore a lower rate showed up on my pay check. After checking and verifying the difference, they corrected it after 3 weeks of calling and demanding the change.
* Required that [I] sign a "contract before the contract" before being submitted to anyone. This contract...would have required paying a lawyer twice. One of the provisions was that, if the client makes an offer, the consultant must "finalize all contractual matters with ACS" within one business day of the INTERVIEW (not the offer).
* Before the interview, told me that I had to accept the contract if the client offered it to me. When I balked, they seemed visibly upset.
* Real contract has Penalty clause ($1500) for cancelling + restrictive non-compete. Very vague about this at the interview.
Pressure to Go W-2
* They claimed to deal with contractors or Incorporated people, but when I went to interview with them, they "suggested" that it wasn't "profitable for you to go as an IC or Corp unless you were making at least $45-50 per hour," and instead I should become one of their employees. I brushed them off, and they called again recently saying they had a position at Chevron, and they I only had to send them a non-compete agreement before they submitted me. I did so, and they COMPLETELY avoided talking to me or returning any of my msg's.
* Extremely aggresive Legal department. Every Contract renewal is a fight ! - with more demands surfacing every time. Wanted 2 yrs Corporate Tax returns and all kindsa information - on a renewal...
* Initially said I must incorporate to be independent. Then, after I went into them for an interview, said I could not be independent even if I were incorporated. They were advertising their positions on the DICE Bulletin Board as INDOK rather than W2ONLY. At the interview (before revealing their requirement for W-2 work) they pumped me for my company's confidential client list.
* They had gotten me a job, which, to my understanding, was to be 1099. At the last minute, they said it was W-2 only, and that if I were to do 1099/corp-to-corp, I'd have to have had a "relationship" with them for over 6 months before they considered it. After telling them to fly a kite, due to "ethical" reasons, they "deactivated" me from further work with [their firm]. The recruiter I worked with was EXTREMELY pressuring, and very hard to deal with.
Looking for Cobalt programmers . . .
* They also had test questions in CICS and COBOL that they gave consultants over the phone, and some of their "right" answers were out of date by about 10 years!
* The recruiter...felt I didn't have enough experience in WinNT (I have 2.5 years NT experience), because their client requested the contractor have at least 5 years experience in windows NT...the program didn't exist back then.
High Pressure Tactics
* Were trying to make me promise that I will take the offer if the client decides to take me. Idiotic bargaining by increasing the rate by $1 or $2 while I was asking for about $10 more. Absolutely arrogant.
Pay? You mean you expected to get paid?
* I know several people working for them who earn $30/hr-$37/hr and are billed out at $90/hr.
* Stiffed me for the last week of the assignment then refused to return phone calls and/or letters
* After signing a contract with which specifically stated I was a hourly employee, they placed me at a client that only paid consultants on a "professional day". This meant I was they expected to work up to 10 hours for the same daily fee as 8. Regardless of my contract, the agency would not pay me the additional hours.
* Contract states that they pay in 30 days, but I was lucky to get 45-60.
* After getting a raise from them, it took over 2 months and repeated phone calls to actually see it on my paycheck.
Out of Control
* Sent my resume to a client where I was on a contract without informing me.
* Faxed resumes to my boss for my contract position to replace me by getting the company's name from my resume.
* Kept trying to pump me for names of my co-workers, even after I said "no". Sent my resume to many firms without consulting me first.
--Janet Ruhl
Author of Answers for Computer Contractors.
Disclosure: I run the Real Rate Survey/Real Salary Survey found at http://www.realrates.com cited in the previous message.
Salary.com looks pretty lame to me. Their explanation of how they get their figures is high on mystery and "secret sauce." An HR professional told me that the word in the industry is that they merely multiply some generic job title numbers by a factor that is the Census bureau's cost of living figure for the area. Not very accurate.
Indeed, after years of looking at surveys, I don't have much respect for any summary numbers purporting to tell you what salaries are in some niche.
There is no such thing as "the salary" for a Unix Sysadmin. There's all different levels of responsibility and all kinds of complexity in the work environment, all kinds of employers in all kinds of locations and industries, but this detail gets smooshed out in surveys that only show you averages or medians.
Any salary survey that combines the salaries of Java programmers in Silicon Valley with that of Cobol programmers in Des Moines to come up with a salary for a "Sr. Programmer" is garbage--and alas, that is what most of them do. That's about as useful as an average "American" salary figure computed with my salary, yours, and Bill Gates'.
At Realrates.com All our data is viewable on the site, using the SEARCH. You don't have to rely on medians, averages and other boiled down useless figures because we show you all the data points that describe the job--where, how long, what industry, what software, what credentials etc. etc.
I wish more surveys did the same as it is the only way that people can really figure out what they can expect to earn.
I remember wondering idly back in 1980 why there were no old programmers in my workplace. I figured that it was because programming was such a new discipline.
A few months later a co-worker in his 40s set me straight and explained that it had long been a tradition in the engineering field to fire anyone approaching 40 and replace them with new hires fresh out of school. The reason? They came out of school having learned the newest technologies and as new hires they would work for cheap.
The next decade proved him to be completely right as I watched everyone who had been a new hire in 1980 get canned.
My response to this was to think "People need to be warned" and to write my first book, The Programmer's Survival Guide which was reincarnated this year in a brand new form as Computer Job Survival Guide.
The problem is that sharp young people who come into the field (like say 99% of the folks reading this board) always assume that older people who are fired or otherwise replaced must be "dead wood" and that, because they themselves are so obviously brilliant and willing to learn it will NEVER happen to them.
Well, guess what. It does and it will. The moment your salary gets up to the level where someone with cost cutting responsibility notices it, your career as a salaryman is in jeopardy. The importation of H-IB is one solution. Eventually they'll find others.
That is why it is SO important that anyone working with technology, no matter how brilliant they might think they are have a back-up plan for what they will do when they are no longer young, enthusiastic and cheap.
Ironically the H-IBs who are finding themselves being tossed out are generally those who have been here long enough to figure out the way things work here and get into a position where they can ask a market rate for their services. In doing this they lose all their appeal to those who brought them in and are of course replaced by newbies working under serf conditions.
This will only end when the people who work in the computer field realize that they have to unite, stop arguing tech nits for a moment, and act together politically to do what the large companies and other interest groups do: buy legislation.
But given the personalities of the folks attracted to our profession, I'm not holding my breath.
Thanks for the kind words! We put the ! in front of country codes so that they will sort high when we sort our files making it easy to separate international from US rates. We don't currently get enough international rates to include them in our statistical analyses, but they are all viewable online through our search. You do not need to put the "!" in for the search to work. For example, searching on UK or CAN will turn up British or Canadian rates. BTW, there must be a heckuva lot of folks reading this board! Rates and Salaries have been pouring in all morning citing this site, and I can't even get into our BBS (which is hosted by another server) as it seems to have maxed out. If you can't get in, try again later.
Slashdot Mirror
Below are entries from the "Contractor Hall of Shame" which were collected from visitors to Realrates.com in 1997. If the messages on our BBS are anything to go by, the abuses are far worse now.
...would have required paying a lawyer twice. One of the provisions was that, if the client makes an offer, the consultant must "finalize all contractual matters with ACS" within one business day of the INTERVIEW (not the offer).
Here's a taste of what unwaits the unwary:
Bait and Switch
* Offered a contract 'in Hawaii', paying $60/hr with free local housing, transportation, and monthly trips home to the mainland (extremely attractive terms, don't you think, considering the desirable location?). Recruiter 'needed to check' which city the contract was in. I submitted my resume', and never heard from them again about this or any other contract (1 year now). This may have been a new start-up's way of building a resume' data base.
* This firm also advertises signing bonuses but never pays them as well as exobortant salaries that it never delivers.
* Agent promised interview and requested my list of references. As I found later this promise was a lie and my list of references was used for marketing.
* Sales representative pressured me to sign a non-compete agreement after I interviewed with the client, stating verbally to me that an offer was on the table. I signed the agreement. The day after I signed the non compete, the representative stated that the client withdrew the offer. I confronted the representative with this suspicion and my impression was that the offer of a position was an out and fabrication to induce me to sign the non compete agreement.
* Although the recruiter and I had agreed to a rate before the interview, when I called her several hours after the interview (which had gone well, as I was rejoining my former project), she tried (and failed) to chisel me down, saying that 'the client is reluctant to pay your rate'. This might have been plausible, except that she had quoted me what she said was the billing rate, and it was below that of at least one other team member (I had checked). When I mentioned this, she quickly dropped "the client's" demand, and gave me the rate we had originally agreed on.
Pestering
* Called me several times after I told them to stop, and I had also told them to take my resume off of their database. I stopped getting calls from them only after I changed phone numbers. Staff acted like used-car salespeople.
* Marketing was done in so unacceptable style that some of my references asked me not to use their names again. I met other contractors with the same experience.
Contract Shenanigans
* Submitted a different contract than the one signed by me and therefore a lower rate showed up on my pay check. After checking and verifying the difference, they corrected it after 3 weeks of calling and demanding the change.
* Required that [I] sign a "contract before the contract" before being submitted to anyone. This contract
* Before the interview, told me that I had to accept the contract if the client offered it to me. When I balked, they seemed visibly upset.
* Real contract has Penalty clause ($1500) for cancelling + restrictive non-compete. Very vague about this at the interview.
Pressure to Go W-2
* They claimed to deal with contractors or Incorporated people, but when I went to interview with them, they "suggested" that it wasn't "profitable for you to go as an IC or Corp unless you were making at least $45-50 per hour," and instead I should become one of their employees. I brushed them off, and they called again recently saying they had a position at Chevron, and they I only had to send them a non-compete agreement before they submitted me. I did so, and they COMPLETELY avoided talking to me or returning any of my msg's.
* Extremely aggresive Legal department. Every Contract renewal is a fight ! - with more demands surfacing every time. Wanted 2 yrs Corporate Tax returns and all kindsa information - on a renewal...
* Initially said I must incorporate to be independent. Then, after I went into them for an interview, said I could not be independent even if I were incorporated. They were advertising their positions on the DICE Bulletin Board as INDOK rather than W2ONLY. At the interview (before revealing their requirement for W-2 work) they pumped me for my company's confidential client list.
* They had gotten me a job, which, to my understanding, was to be 1099. At the last minute, they said it was W-2 only, and that if I were to do 1099/corp-to-corp, I'd have to have had a "relationship" with them for over 6 months before they considered it. After telling them to fly a kite, due to "ethical" reasons, they "deactivated" me from further work with [their firm]. The recruiter I worked with was EXTREMELY pressuring, and very hard to deal with.
Looking for Cobalt programmers . . .
* They also had test questions in CICS and COBOL that they gave consultants over the phone, and some of their "right" answers were out of date by about 10 years!
* The recruiter...felt I didn't have enough experience in WinNT (I have 2.5 years NT experience), because their client requested the contractor have at least 5 years experience in windows NT...the program didn't exist back then.
High Pressure Tactics
* Were trying to make me promise that I will take the offer if the client decides to take me. Idiotic bargaining by increasing the rate by $1 or $2 while I was asking for about $10 more. Absolutely arrogant.
Pay? You mean you expected to get paid?
* I know several people working for them who earn $30/hr-$37/hr and are billed out at $90/hr.
* Stiffed me for the last week of the assignment then refused to return phone calls and/or letters
* After signing a contract with which specifically stated I was a hourly employee, they placed me at a client that only paid consultants on a "professional day". This meant I was they expected to work up to 10 hours for the same daily fee as 8. Regardless of my contract, the agency would not pay me the additional hours.
* Contract states that they pay in 30 days, but I was lucky to get 45-60.
* After getting a raise from them, it took over 2 months and repeated phone calls to actually see it on my paycheck.
Out of Control
* Sent my resume to a client where I was on a contract without informing me.
* Faxed resumes to my boss for my contract position to replace me by getting the company's name from my resume.
* Kept trying to pump me for names of my co-workers, even after I said "no". Sent my resume to many firms without consulting me first.
--Janet Ruhl
Author of Answers for Computer Contractors.
Disclosure: I run the Real Rate Survey/Real Salary Survey found at http://www.realrates.com cited in the previous message.
Salary.com looks pretty lame to me. Their explanation of how they get their figures is high on mystery and "secret sauce." An HR professional told me that the word in the industry is that they merely multiply some generic job title numbers by a factor that is the Census bureau's cost of living figure for the area. Not very accurate.
Indeed, after years of looking at surveys, I don't have much respect for any summary numbers purporting to tell you what salaries are in some niche.
There is no such thing as "the salary" for a Unix Sysadmin. There's all different levels of responsibility and all kinds of complexity in the work environment, all kinds of employers in all kinds of locations and industries, but this detail gets smooshed out in surveys that only show you averages or medians.
Any salary survey that combines the salaries of Java programmers in Silicon Valley with that of Cobol programmers in Des Moines to come up with a salary for a "Sr. Programmer" is garbage--and alas, that is what most of them do. That's about as useful as an average "American" salary figure computed with my salary, yours, and Bill Gates'.
At Realrates.com All our data is viewable on the site, using the SEARCH. You don't have to rely on medians, averages and other boiled down useless figures because we show you all the data points that describe the job--where, how long, what industry, what software, what credentials etc. etc.
I wish more surveys did the same as it is the only way that people can really figure out what they can expect to earn.
A few months later a co-worker in his 40s set me straight and explained that it had long been a tradition in the engineering field to fire anyone approaching 40 and replace them with new hires fresh out of school. The reason? They came out of school having learned the newest technologies and as new hires they would work for cheap. The next decade proved him to be completely right as I watched everyone who had been a new hire in 1980 get canned.
My response to this was to think "People need to be warned" and to write my first book, The Programmer's Survival Guide which was reincarnated this year in a brand new form as Computer Job Survival Guide.
The problem is that sharp young people who come into the field (like say 99% of the folks reading this board) always assume that older people who are fired or otherwise replaced must be "dead wood" and that, because they themselves are so obviously brilliant and willing to learn it will NEVER happen to them.
Well, guess what. It does and it will. The moment your salary gets up to the level where someone with cost cutting responsibility notices it, your career as a salaryman is in jeopardy. The importation of H-IB is one solution. Eventually they'll find others.
That is why it is SO important that anyone working with technology, no matter how brilliant they might think they are have a back-up plan for what they will do when they are no longer young, enthusiastic and cheap.
Ironically the H-IBs who are finding themselves being tossed out are generally those who have been here long enough to figure out the way things work here and get into a position where they can ask a market rate for their services. In doing this they lose all their appeal to those who brought them in and are of course replaced by newbies working under serf conditions.
This will only end when the people who work in the computer field realize that they have to unite, stop arguing tech nits for a moment, and act together politically to do what the large companies and other interest groups do: buy legislation.
But given the personalities of the folks attracted to our profession, I'm not holding my breath.
Thanks for the kind words! We put the ! in front of country codes so that they will sort high when we sort our files making it easy to separate international from US rates. We don't currently get enough international rates to include them in our statistical analyses, but they are all viewable online through our search. You do not need to put the "!" in for the search to work. For example, searching on UK or CAN will turn up British or Canadian rates. BTW, there must be a heckuva lot of folks reading this board! Rates and Salaries have been pouring in all morning citing this site, and I can't even get into our BBS (which is hosted by another server) as it seems to have maxed out. If you can't get in, try again later.