Posts by Doctor Syntax 42420 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I was think more along the lines of just acting as a consultant to the outsourcers
The company doesn't see JimC on site (assuming the outsourcing is done on-site) nor as a name on any roster list. If anything they just see the name of JimC's consulting company - which shouldn't look anything like JimC - as providing consulting services to the outsourcers but it shouldn't really be any of their business. The costs just go on the bill with the outsourcer's mark-up and everybody's happy.
The nature of freelancing is more complex than this although it's too often lost sight of, including by HMRC. Basically the engaging company is trying to balance a variable (holiday, sick leave, parental leave, training etc) staff availability against a variable workload. This can be done by recruiting more permanent staff that would be required to ensure the mismatched peaks and troughs are covered. However this also risks having under-employed staff from time to time and also risks the costs associated with making staff redundant. OTOH not having sufficient staff at the time of peak demand risks missed business opportunities. The role of contract businesses - emphasise businesses - is to ease that balancing by taking some of that risk themselves*. For a price, of course.
It's provision of services on the basis of T&Cs very different to those of employees which is the USP of a freelancer vs a permanent member of staff** for any given role. Although there may be a 24 month contract in place it will almost certainly make provision for early termination and this should be allowed for as a possibility. It's one of the things built into the rates as is time spent on the bench - the standard greeting of the agent is "Are you available?" and if the answer is "Yes" that availability is a cost to the freelancer.***
So no, don't assume two years means two years. Don't go round blacklisting companies. Don't prosecute them. You'll only damage your own professional reputation. If you're freelance it's part of the business you chose and whatever you do don't build financial expectations on it without a fall-back fund. And don't go freelance without understanding this. If they've made a mistake getting rid of their skills base regard it as an enhanced business opportunity.
* This, in my view, is what makes them businesses and what HMRC & IR35 overlook. They are taking on business risks, they're businesses and should be taxed as businesses even if they only have one principal.
** This is no excuse for trying to run a business with free-lance staff only. A business needs employees to provide continuity.
*** These are two of several factors the permie might fail to take into account when looking at freelance rates. The freelancer should not so fail.
Now I'm going to get nightmares tonight.
If products X & Y & Z were sold together as product A they had a different price than the total of prices when told separately. What's more X had a serial number which would become the serial number of A when it was sold as part of A. There could also be product B which was X & Y but not Z but also inherited the X serial number so A could be B & Z.
Products with serial numbers had a table individual rows for each item and stock levels were the counts of those which were unsold. Other products just had a stock level on the main product table maintained by dead reckoning and reset at stock takes.
The subtleties of this were only communicated to me shortly before go-live when I though the code was finished. The resulting hastily constructed recursive BOM with two limbs for the different cases worked but was clearly categorised as DO NOT TOUCH, even after I left and after I came back. Fortunately the whole pile of bits approach became redundant and could be removed from the codebase.
"A series of frantic phone calls to the former contractors elicited precisely no co-operation at any level, or for any price."
Unless the contractors were already in contract elsewhere that's not very professional. The professional approach is "Don't get mad, get even. But payment upfront this time."
Your original cards might have been on the limits of readability before they went into storage - that's why there were card duplicators. Providing they'd been run through the interpretor you could always go through a card at a time and look for comments by Mk 1 eyeball.
The alternative, I've discovered, is not to train them but let another of the client's suppliers train them instead. Or, as it turned out, the other supplier's contractor. It became obvious that the data we received had similar mistakes in it every few months as a new lot were rotated in on their 6 month visas and decided to rework their predecessor's code that they didn't understand.
It still sounds like something that could have been sorted over the phone with one, possibly major, proviso - that there was someone at the client end who could be relied on to make the change without breaking things. A remote dial-in might also have been a possibility.
But a more honest solution would have been to have recommended some training courses* for the IT department - which would probably have pleased them - or spent the seek providing some training.
* Advanced, of course because this was a problem needing advanced knowledge.
Your expectations were correct. And pretty indicative of the situation. All I can say is I went to bed, woke up in the morning finding myself still sitting up in bed - I passed out without even getting as far as lying down. Felt fine. Had breakfast. Still fine. Gone taken out to wait in some large hall for proceedings to begin. Still fine. Thought I'd better read through my file. Looked down and waaaaay - the whole thing started to spin.
Got through it OK and discovered one thing that makes courts martial different. I got invited to lunch in the officers' mess & found myself sitting next to the Judge Advocate to whom I'd just given evidence. That never happened at Crumin Rd.
But I'll admit my typing is getting very erratic these days. It must be age.
I would say that "client management" is part of my job description.
But how does that relate here? Is it something the client's staff should have known about? Have the wrong staff been recruited? Do they need a more knowledgeable and senior member of staff? Do the existing staff need training? Did they demand someone on site rather than being satisfied with telephone support? There would be ways in which to spend a few extra ours or even a full day with the client providing value on these lines rather than spending a week pretending it was a big job just to save someone's face.
Even glyphosate isn't easy against knotweed. You can't just spay it, you have to pour it into the hollow stems so it's a matter of mowing them down, disposing of the mowings to make sure they don't root, then treating each stem separately and redoing it every time a new lot springs up from the unkilled roots. And less fun than 3KV.
"Is keeping the customer happy not part of the job then?"
My experience in freelancing was that the customer was very happy to have the problem fixed quickly and cheaply. Happy customers brought repeat business. Repeat business from happy customers had the added advantage of cutting the agency out of the value chain.
And big hints as to how to make the necessary adjustments with a cattle prod.
BTW I read an article the other day about using a 5KV device as a weed-killer for Japanese knotweed. It boils their roots I wonder if Simon has heard of that and arranged to trade-in the cattle prod to buy one.
"I've got more important things to do."
I have sympathy with this. I once had to give evidence in a court martial about a break-in to the NAAFI at Omagh. They said they wanted me there, Inverness barracks*, on the Monday for a hearing on Tuesday. It turned out they didn't really need me there on Monday at all, they were just being hospitable (resulting in giving evidence with a raging handover).
The trouble was that that was my last week in the job and I still had a lot of cases to write up. I could really have done with spending the Monday in the office. I finished the week with a murder case to write up. I ended up spending my spare time in my first week in London working on that and taking the work to the N Ireland Office to get it sent back and forth in internal mail for typing, checking etc.
* If they'd left it any longer it would have been in Kenya.
"it's the prettiest Linux around"
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. With controls in the title bar it wouldn't find favour in mine. The title bar of the window in which I'm typing this has the article title, "The Register Forums" and browser name occupying a significant par of the bar. No room for controls, it's called the title bar for a reason.
My experience didn't entirely match. Some of it did. When the lab was rebuilt after a fire it was decreed offices for anyone less than Director had to have lino - until it was discovered after the first office was fitted out that way that lino was dearer than the alternative non-woven floor covering that looked like carpet. Then nobody below PSO could have an office at all until it was pointed out that we had reports to write and quite often held rather confidential case discussions so we were able to put "writing rooms" on the plan.
On the other hand salaries were held below general service grades and promotion was withheld (until I put my notice in when a much too late offer arrived PDQ) on the grounds that we didn't have management responsibility, i.e. enough junior staff; the responsibility of the job itself was ignored. As the major employer of scientists in the UK they could control salaries in general.
Pension? Well, for a final salary scheme the low salary has its own consequences. Apart from that, a year's service accumulated 1/80th of a year credit which mean that a new graduate, joining at 21, retiring at 60, would be a year short of half pay. I went to industry where the rate was 1/60th so the same graduate would end up a year short of two thirds pay. And as a final twist the scheme was non-contributory but the salaries were adjusted down to take account of what the contributory scheme would have paid after contributions - that meant that the final salary was this discounted value.
The Civil Service might be great for somebody in the higher ranks with a degree irrelevant to the job. If you're a specialist in the scientific branch it's crap and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
