One of the things our consultants like is the down time between contracts. I have one guy who took six months off last year, is on a year contract that he doesn’t want to work more than eighteen months at, and is hoping to take Summer of 2018 off.
But, he has a number of people like us in his network who know where the roles are. He is a full stack developer - and a good one - so there are lots of opportunities when he wants to work.
Most of the people I know who do this do it for a few years, then take a “real job” for a few years for the security, then want the flexibility of a contract and go back to contracting, then want a “real job” - I’ve known one guy who in 30 years has gone back and fourth a dozen times. In those cases, the jobs - both contract and full time - often come to them - they quit their real job with a juicy contract in hand, quit contracting with a juicy full time offer in hand (again, another high end guy with a great reputation and a huge network).
A few do the speaking circuit to find clients - which can be an awesome way to get clients, but involves a lot of travel. If a security guy does half a dozen presentations a year to large convention audiences, he’ll have work. But the best speaking gigs involve - guess what - that reputation. No one gives John Doe, newly minted Security Engineer who installs Norton on desktops a speaking slot at any good convention. You give Mark Russinovich as many speaking gigs as he wants - and pay him. The most successful guy I know personally who does this has half a dozen books published on development.
@msmith537: No kidding. Businesses are complaining about the high cost of labor but are willing to buy it 2nd or 3rd hand through middlemen who mostly are jacking the price for nil value-add.
Whenever we see economic ill-logic, look to the cost-accounting system for the reason. Somehow this method appears cheaper when it’s not really.
Well, there is a value add. For my consultants, I pay them in 30 days - I don’t get paid by the clients for 60+. Our salesperson gets them work, she has a few hundred contacts. I bill. I write checks, I handle the contracts, I call the corporate A/P department when the check is late, I deal with the H1-B Visa letter. I deal with it when the consultant says they worked 40 hours and the client says they took Friday off and didn’t show up (thank God for client internal time tracking systems). Our sales person and consultant manager deals with the complaints - one of the things managers buy with a consulting company is that if they have a problem with you - they can avoid conflict - they go to the salesperson and the salesperson deals with it.
And businesses really don’t complain about the cost of labor. The jobs generally come in like this “BA with experience with tools X and Y and skills A & B. Rate guidance - $79.40- $86.20” The firms look though what we have in BAs. If there is a good match for skills, who will work for the rate once we handle all the cuts, we present them - with their permission. If we can’t find someone willing to do the job for less than what the firm finds an acceptable cut, we pass. Since we know what the people we work with want to make its pretty easy - if someone has been looking for work for a while, they might take a smaller paycheck. We just placed a guy with the smallest cut we’ve ever taken - its like $2 an hour. But he needed the job and the guidance was really low - he was willing to take a cut, and we decided $2 was better than $0 for us.
And acceptable cuts are highly variable. I’ve worked with firms that have a 100% markup between what the client pays and what the consultant makes. Ours are much much smaller.
Its impressive on a resume. Its like an Ivy League degree - it opens doors.
In part because the big name firms are so competitive to get into (and often to stay with) that having made the cut and survived a few years says something.
I’m not fond of my Accenture managed projects either - when I’m on the corporate side. But its meaningful on a resume - other than indicating possible douchebaggery.
In general, top schools and big name companies where you spend a long tenure is a great way to be traditionally “successful” in a middle class sense. But IMHO it’s also a career of kowtowing to the company line and corporate policies. At the end of the day, if you don’t like the people you work with and the sort of work you are doing, it really doesn’t matter if your company is in the Fortune 500.
Yep, my friend who lives in her car and does migrant labor for several months a year is still happy as a clam - and not at all successful in any middle class sense of the word - but one of the most successful people on a happy life scale I know.
Along with what dangerosa said, the value add is that the company can use just-in-time staffing methods (some idea as inventory). They can staff up just before a project launches and then dump staff when the project ends. Doing that with w-2 full time employees is expensive and difficult.
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Understand that “IT” is not just programmers and engineers. It also includes project managers, business analysts, creative artists and UX designers, sales, aspects of legal, accounting and finance, marketing, risk management, pretty much everything. And pretty much every company now uses technology in pretty much every one of it’s business processes.**
The downside is that, unlike say brand management for Proctor & Gamble, it can be a bit of an “Uber” job. That is to say technology-centric companies, whether services consultancies, start ups or product based software firms can be very competitive, often with highly eccentric or youth-oriented (bordering on juvenile) cultures that make up stuff as they go along. Technical skills get outdated or offshored quickly. And even under the best of circumstances, because implementations or client engagements are of finite duration, there is constant turnover as projects start and finish.
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There are hardly no jobs today with project managers and network specialists these days. As these jobs are flooded with people. There are people working at my 711 store, gas station and pizza store so on who have network plus certification or MCSA certification.
Stay away from those two fields.
You better of doing software, programming or security.
There are lots of jobs for EXPERIENCED PMs. Last time I needed a contract it took me two weeks. They come across my desk daily - and we have a hard time filling roles.
Now network administration - i.e. servers - we’ve automated that. I was originally a Netware Engineer. There are still lots of jobs for people who understand routers and firewalls and protocols - but they often work ON the security team. Also, desktop roles have been automated - there isn’t a lot of call for someone that helps get your printer set up.
I have worked in IT since my early 20’s. I wouldn’t do anything else but I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge the extreme downsides to it. I have been truly laid off three times and have had the same number of contracts end.
It isn’t a profession for people that expect stability. Tenures of more than a couple of years at any one location, let alone single positions are rare. The H1-B visa problem is very real as well.
Most executives don’t understand IT at all but they do see all of the high salaries that are cutting into their bottom line. The obvious “solution” is just to get a bunch of people from India to do the job for a fraction of the cost. The problem is that it doesn’t work for lots of reasons. There are plenty of smart Indians but good luck getting them to actually do anything especially remotely. My rule of thumb is that it takes 3 - 4 Indians to equal one American worker but they aren’t all equal. Most of them are worthless but I do find some that are very competent and helpful from time to time and I grab them like they are a pot of gold. The reason I bring that up isn’t because of prejudice. It is just a fact that an essential part of the job these days is managing people half-way across the world with a completely different culture and work attitude.
The plus side is the state-side workers that have jobs that can’t be outsourced tend to be fairly highly paid and generally have a lot of freedom. I work on-site in a high-tech industrial facility in a higher-level position that I got just because I was the only qualified person available during an emergency. I have been there for 7 years and it is an almost certainty that I don’t have to worry about anything until at least 2020. I get great hours, my own office, freedom to structure my day as I choose and tons of benefits. The only thing people care about is whether the facility is operating normally or not. OTOH, I have had to stay up for three days straight when things were not.
I would recommend it to certain people but things are certainly not even remotely the same as when I started in the mid-90’s. Anyone could get an IT job then but the fallout was extreme during the tech bust in the early 2000’s. Today, it requires real skills and lots of experience including business skills, project management, interpersonal skills and fairly deep industry knowledge.
So is delaying a project because the contractor you hired didn’t work out. I can’t tell you the number of projects I’ve managed where I was stuck with some resource who didn’t have the right skill set, experience or attitude and had to be let go. The problem with “just in time” staffing is that staff aren’t interchangeable cogs.
Another aspect of IT I find distasteful is the “business” of IT. Basically the buying and selling of IT contingency workers. It doesn’t matter if you are an independent freelancer, H1-B, or consultant with Accenture of Cognizant, if you are billed out by the hour, then the product is “you”. Which means a) your salary caps at a function of the going rate for your services x the number of hours you can physically work in a year and b) some dumb-ass recruiter or consulting firm managing partner is really the one getting rich because their income scales as they sell more workers.
I’m not sure I’m really understanding this paragraph. Project managers seem to be in demand wherever there is more than one person working on a project. The inherent problem with project management jobs is that all projects eventually end.
