Client: I have lost everything on the cloud holy crap!

Me: Are you signed into your google drive, and within the folder?

Client: No, how do i do that again? I obviously cant be bothered reading your well formated and instructional guide and would rather contact you at 6pm on a saturday night

I was working on a team with people with various employment statuses. Contractors, employees of the client, and me as a regular full time employee of the company that “owned” the contract. My HR manager gave us a presentation about our reporting structure. I had at least seven managers for different reasons across various projects.

I got a new position so needed to resign but I had no idea which managers were the ones I should notify. I looked at the org chart that the HR lady showed. I sent my resignation to five managers that would be affected by my leaving. Unknown to me my project manager was actually a contracting manager hired by the client. He let his employer, the client, know that the lead dev quit.
Apparently it destabilized the contract for my employer. If I hadn’t just issued resignation they would have fired me for telling a customer about a significant internal staffing change. They didn’t fire me because the optics would have been worse for them.

New contract termination clause to be included in all future project contracts: "Contracting client agrees that uttering the phrase 'Your job is whatever I say it is,' or any semanticaly equivalent variant thereof is grounds for immediate contract termination. All work product and IP rights will transfer and assign to contracting client ONLY upon payment in full of contracted payment amount prorated to contract termination date."

Be me
Work at software contracting company
Get a new client, iOS objective-c app with ~40000 lines of code
Previous Dev didn't leave a single comment, and he didn't use a database, he used 'NSUserDefaults'

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

Looking back on 2020: I only did one small contracting job.

The client wasn’t putting their trust in us. I fired them. They went with another company. Almost a whole year - and the old flash site is still up there! Kinda a waste of time / but got paid for our work - and it feels great to just let shit go.

Besides that, I didn’t do any official dev work all year! I just continued working on our school curriculum and teaching. 2020 has been an R&D dream, really. I feel a bit spoiled! As I sit here in my Christmas pajamas!

Excited for 2021.

And that, folks, is why you never do a rush job, no matter how urgent, without an RFP and answering estimate followed by a signed statement of work confirming agreement to the estimate. Even with a prearranged, perpetual contracting agreement. And also why you NEVER deliver the end product without payment. No matter how much you trust your client or believe they will do right by you, process still matters.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

Question:

Were you hired by a company and develop software FOR that company?

Or...

Were you hired by one company and build software for a client or attend work at a client's office?

Suffering from the cash flow blues.

Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.

So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.

The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.

Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?