any IT contractors here? Boy can it suck...
Discussion
I have just got back into IT contracting after a break. (I have been doing auditing, but thats not really IT.)
I am not a super IT bod or anything but i can fix most users problems and have a basic network admin knowledge etc. But i always seem to get sent for jobs which sounds like a peice of cake and it turns out to be:
"Welcome aboard hedders, here is your desk (not that you will see it much) and here is the comms room and here are the 200 hundred users you will be supporting and they all use five different pieces of bespoke software, good luck"
Why is that they think that every IT contractor is a fully qualified network guru and desktop supporting/ hardware repairing deity??? They just call the agency and ask for someone with some PC knowledge and expect a guru...
I need to brush up on my skills or start blagging better
I am not a super IT bod or anything but i can fix most users problems and have a basic network admin knowledge etc. But i always seem to get sent for jobs which sounds like a peice of cake and it turns out to be:
"Welcome aboard hedders, here is your desk (not that you will see it much) and here is the comms room and here are the 200 hundred users you will be supporting and they all use five different pieces of bespoke software, good luck"
Why is that they think that every IT contractor is a fully qualified network guru and desktop supporting/ hardware repairing deity??? They just call the agency and ask for someone with some PC knowledge and expect a guru...
I need to brush up on my skills or start blagging better
hedders said:Because for what they pay us, they expect someone half competent
Why is that they think that every IT contractor is a fully qualified network guru and desktop supporting/ hardware repairing deity??? They just call the agency and ask for someone with some PC knowledge and expect a guru...
>> Edited by tomtom on Friday 6th January 19:14
tomtom said:
Why is that they think that every IT contractor is a fully qualified network guru and desktop supporting/ hardware repairing deity??? They just call the agency and ask for someone with some PC knowledge and expect a guru...
That would be all very well but i am not on the best rate either! Actually it IS the best rate I have ever been on, but it is right at the bottom of the proper IT scale ..
ATG said:
At risk of doing a Gerald Rattner, it is because our dear customers are ignorant, stupid, cheapskates. Prawn sandwich anyone?
Or is it the agency? I have been sent for some ridiculous jobs in the passed. Based on some Internet helpdesk experience i was once sent to interview to run a companies european IT division
I realised as i soon as i spoke to the receptionist that something was up....
"AH yes, Mr Hedders, the directors are expecting you, I will escort you upstairs, Can I get you a coffee or anything?"
Me: "Oh shit...."
skinnyboy said:
I've been out of IT for 3 years, used to be an SAP R/3 EU Consultant, would like to get back in the fray but its nigh on impossible now, any tips?
SAP market is pretty good at the moment, a fair few large projects in UK & abroad. The big players are recruiting & things look like they are moving back onshore again for many things.
Right now the market is flooded by fabricated CV's from India, anyone with proper experience is definately an asset. There are so many crap wannabe's out there thinking they are on the gravy train. Rates are down on 2000-2001 but £500 p/d is about average I would sat. BW is very hot at the moment, as is Netweaver. BASIS etc is plodding along as usual but there seems to be a lack of decent Basis folk out there. Functional stuff is about the same as it was a few years ago, it's still a pig to configure & OSS is even more useless than ever
PM me if you want any up to date info etc
Sounding off,
I'm doing a 2nd line support job at the moment for a power utility company, remotely supporting users and taking away some of the load from the engineers based on site. I'm part of a large IT services provider. The company keep introducing things without telling us to make things interesting. Someone in this company decided Radia would be good for deploying software to thousands of users after trying it in an office with a few machines. Radia happens to suck dead donkeys and keeps refusing to do what its told, often ending up in having to reinstall the entire PC because it is faster than trying to uninstall and reinstall a 5 meg outlook plugin. We suddenly started getting calls for people trying to use VPN without any warning, often caused by the users not being told they would require a broadband router for it to work. Half my call queue is full of user training issues and users I cant get hold of, the other half is for calls I need to pass to other teams but they wont accept them, or noone supports the application/database anymore.
My time is also wasted by the service desk (first line support) thinking they need to pass us calls for things we cannot fix remotely instead of passing them to the on site support engineers. Calls like this vary from paper jams, machines that are bluescreening, standalone machines not on the network, to "my dog ate the power cable". We are also delayed by the service desk associating different trouble tickets together for issues that have nothing to do with each other, meaning we have to deal with each seperate ticket which takes ages and at the end of it it only looks like we did one call. We are also passed calls for things that we dont support. "Hello service desk, Can you look at this problem number? We dont support the company website/mainframe/telecoms/canteen/ventilation, why have we got it? Get it out of our queue!"
Then there are the executives whom the company has decided to be able to raise priority 1 calls that were normally reserved for servers down and entire sites offline. This week I closed a p1 for an executive who was trying to open a .jpg image using microsoft word.
I'm doing a 2nd line support job at the moment for a power utility company, remotely supporting users and taking away some of the load from the engineers based on site. I'm part of a large IT services provider. The company keep introducing things without telling us to make things interesting. Someone in this company decided Radia would be good for deploying software to thousands of users after trying it in an office with a few machines. Radia happens to suck dead donkeys and keeps refusing to do what its told, often ending up in having to reinstall the entire PC because it is faster than trying to uninstall and reinstall a 5 meg outlook plugin. We suddenly started getting calls for people trying to use VPN without any warning, often caused by the users not being told they would require a broadband router for it to work. Half my call queue is full of user training issues and users I cant get hold of, the other half is for calls I need to pass to other teams but they wont accept them, or noone supports the application/database anymore.
My time is also wasted by the service desk (first line support) thinking they need to pass us calls for things we cannot fix remotely instead of passing them to the on site support engineers. Calls like this vary from paper jams, machines that are bluescreening, standalone machines not on the network, to "my dog ate the power cable". We are also delayed by the service desk associating different trouble tickets together for issues that have nothing to do with each other, meaning we have to deal with each seperate ticket which takes ages and at the end of it it only looks like we did one call. We are also passed calls for things that we dont support. "Hello service desk, Can you look at this problem number? We dont support the company website/mainframe/telecoms/canteen/ventilation, why have we got it? Get it out of our queue!"
Then there are the executives whom the company has decided to be able to raise priority 1 calls that were normally reserved for servers down and entire sites offline. This week I closed a p1 for an executive who was trying to open a .jpg image using microsoft word.
I'm an IT Contractor; female to boot and don't look all that bad thank you very much.
I work for the worlds 3rd largest OEM... we recently sold our laptop divison to Lenovo. As a contractor I'm treated like scum, I know nothing can't do anything right yet somehow my suggestions (when given out by a permie) always seem to fix the problem. I'm expected to take the blame for anything that goes wrong, turn up at a random time well before my shift starts (it changes week by week and I'm always late). And to cap it all off I've been ordered by a permie manager that if I ever take my 1 hour lunch break again I'll be fired.
So far I'm 2 years in to this contract, never been able to take a holiday or a day off. God I need a new job.
I work for the worlds 3rd largest OEM... we recently sold our laptop divison to Lenovo. As a contractor I'm treated like scum, I know nothing can't do anything right yet somehow my suggestions (when given out by a permie) always seem to fix the problem. I'm expected to take the blame for anything that goes wrong, turn up at a random time well before my shift starts (it changes week by week and I'm always late). And to cap it all off I've been ordered by a permie manager that if I ever take my 1 hour lunch break again I'll be fired.
So far I'm 2 years in to this contract, never been able to take a holiday or a day off. God I need a new job.
tomtom said:
Radia happens to suck dead donkeys and keeps refusing to do what its told
Might as well leave it there. Get any major gip from it you can rename the
c:
program files
novadigm
lib
system
directory and hit "install new applications" It'll forget what it has installed and redo the lot.
Ed- I just discovered PH doesn't do backslashes
>> Edited by sadako on Friday 6th January 21:59
thepassenger said:That's not contracting - that's slavery!
I've been ordered by a permie manager that if I ever take my 1 hour lunch break again I'll be fired.
So far I'm 2 years in to this contract, never been able to take a holiday or a day off.
And, worse, that level of control by a client is very bad from an IR35 perspective too.
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