This thread just showed up in my vanity search, and I thought I'd revisit it -- however unlikely it may be that anybody else will read my late follow-up. After a good bit of searching, I settled on a new "six month right-to-hire" position via a contracting firm that had really good benefits and that I just had a good gut feel for. The six months is now a year and a half, as the company I am currently contracted with made one offer I turned down, and then entered a very long hiring freeze that is just now starting to thaw.
Twice my firm has absorbed cuts in the rate paid to them (which they openly disclose to me), once in combination with a previously promised increase to my pay rate because "a promise is a promise."
Last year I had a significant family event, and I took a week off to attend to things. I had enough vacation and/or sick leave that I could have taken the week off and still received pay, but the firm insisted that I just 'take my time' and 'not to worry about it'. That week off was paid without an hour taken out of either balance.
In short, my firm treats me how I would expect any company to treat me -- but let's face it, some don't. In fact, I may have even become a tad spoiled... :-) So, I'm happy to say that, while my experience may not be typical, I found one of the good ones. I would love to post their name here on the off-chance somebody finds this, but I feel that it's inappropriate due to the nature of the site. If anybody out there is interested, please feel free to PM or e-mail me and we can talk.
Pineconius
@Pineconius
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RE: How to tell a good contracting firm from a bad one? (And can we please avoid the anti-contractor snark?)
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RE: How to tell a good contracting firm from a bad one? (And can we please avoid the anti-contractor snark?)
@asuffield said:
Seriously, starting from the assumption that there are good contracting firms and you can somehow identify them, is fatally flawed.
Sigh... maybe I've come to the wrong place to ask this question.
Okay, would "better" firm from a "worse" one work better for you?
(P.S. I've dealt with a lot of very skilled, competent contractors in the course of my 8-year career. Maybe it's the nature of my current industry, but it seems to me that the distaste for contractors prevalent on this board is an over-genarilization of some bad experiences. But just remember, there are bad direct hires, too.)
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How to tell a good contracting firm from a bad one? (And can we please avoid the anti-contractor snark?)
I'm currently looking for a change of job in the St. Louis area, and it seems that the vast majority of programming jobs are being staffed via contracting firms. In theory they are mostly Contract-to-hire positions, but if I take one I don't want to get stuck with a crummy contracting firm when the "to-hire" part doesn't pan out. So, how does one tell if a contracting firm is "good" to work for or not? I've searched for information online and have had no luck.
Hopefully enough of you out there have enough good or bad experiences to help me out.
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RE: Excel clears the undo stack?
@stratos said:
My next to second most annoying excel pet peeve would be the fact that it can't decide if it wants to make a new window for every excel sheet or put them all just in one excel window instance.
Huh? Last I checked this was one of Excel's program options. (In 2003, anyway, it's Tools->Options, View tab, "Windows in taskbar" checkbox.)
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RE: "We should not do this"
While I've seen (and probably made) my share of those comments as well, I prefer the "rage against the supplier" type of comments. e.g.:
//No need to pollute the test port with messages on [infrastructure]'s shortcomings
// This is my fault for believing that [supplier code] would return a consistent value...
Gotta love it!
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RE: The Googlebot WTF cousin
@Volmarias said:
Lets not, and just agree that stupidity is universal?
Agreed. In fact, it has been my long-standing opinion that, per the great philosophical debate, people are not born inherently good or evil; people are born inherently stupid. What happens after that is more or less a crapshoot.
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RE: The Googlebot WTF cousin
$200 a month? I pray that that was a *very* part-time job.