We need to hire and get up to speed 18 people... in the next two weeks... of which 10 will be kept on... it is going to be carnage and I'm going to heavily resent if it just ends up with them adding to the burden rather than reducing it because I'm having to babysit people who don't want to be there/poor work ethic.
This Business and Moment...
- Thread starter randomshenans
- Start date
Soldato
Having no luck at all finding a remote job (lead/senior web dev), might be forced to look for hybrid/office, really don't want to do that. I have ridiculous anxiety about working in an office now after being remote for a few years. But it feels like remote has ended and nobody let me know, so I've been banging my head against a wall searching for jobs that no longer exist.
So depressing to feel not wanted by society. My mind fills with thoughts of retiring now (at 38) and living on beans on toast to try and make it to 57 when I can use my pension to make it to 68 then use the state pension until the end.
Wondering whether I should bother trying to claim benefits, never done it before but kinda expect they'd get sick of me pretty quick unless I took a job as a cleaner or whatever unrelated thing they suggest. Anyone know if that's what happens or not?
So depressing to feel not wanted by society. My mind fills with thoughts of retiring now (at 38) and living on beans on toast to try and make it to 57 when I can use my pension to make it to 68 then use the state pension until the end.
Wondering whether I should bother trying to claim benefits, never done it before but kinda expect they'd get sick of me pretty quick unless I took a job as a cleaner or whatever unrelated thing they suggest. Anyone know if that's what happens or not?
Its not you, its the economy. So dont give up.
The tech industry is being realigned after over-hiring from Covid, this is happening worldwide.
Maybe you can look into go freelance or solo if you haven't done so already.
Sorry but why the waste if you’re only holding on to 10 people?
Waste? we would normally be hiring a few Christmas temps about now anyhow.
Just the time and effort - however if the business is driven by retail demand then I can see why
Just the time and effort - however if the business is driven by retail demand then I can see why
It is a bit of a mess, on top of our normal Christmas hirings they hit an unexpected snag expanding another site, which 2 other already closed sites were supposed to be consolidated to, and leaning on us to pick up the slack because it won't be sorted in time for the seasonal demand.
It is a trend in general in business which has been annoying me lately where budgets are slashed and costs controlled i.e. sites closed prematurely without the replacement in place without any room for contingency and when an issue does arise like here it just blows any savings out the water.
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Soldato
Second interview today - and I was 10 mins late! To be fair after the rain yesterday with the flooding and road closures plus the confusing nature of the site it was probably inevitable even though I left early. Think it went well regardless, they’re interviewing someone else Thursday so I should find out on Friday whether I got it or not.
I remember my first interview, the train pulled out of the station and the power went. No mobile. No way to call ahead. So I turned up late but all was forgiven and I got the role.
Apart of the automated responses it is deathly quiet on the job market front.
So taking the front foot starting with LinkedIn articles generating ideas but as every board and their FD are under the cost reduction/inflationary gun, then there's not many return noise (even initial filtering calls).
So taking the front foot starting with LinkedIn articles generating ideas but as every board and their FD are under the cost reduction/inflationary gun, then there's not many return noise (even initial filtering calls).
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I'm getting absolutely sick to death of working with incompetent Indians, especially those that seemingly live on a roundabout in the middle of Bangalore.
Hear me out...
Having an IT career spanning more than 20 years is in all likelihood going to mean working with a lot of Indians. Fine. I have made life long Indian friends and had the pleasure of working with some truly great ones, but.... my current company likes to outsource a lot of IT to a partner company that we work with. We go out to market every few years to renew whoever said supplier is. We've previously used a supplier that I personally thought delivered some high quality Indian devs with a mixture of on and off shore ones. Nice people. Competent.
However, the current supplier (a global leader in providing such solutions supposedly) is constantly providing us with a pool of resource that I can only describe as absolute dog ****. They are all Indian devs about 70% off shore and 30% on shore.
The level of English spoken is typically fluent enough to pass interviews. During the teams interviews for off shore ones, they obviously go somewhere quiet, with a good quality mic.
Fast forward to week 1 and suddenly they're mic is crackly, they can barely be heard nor understood, massive echos, problems with connection, never turn their camera on, constant beeping of horns in the background. Impossible to deal with. OK so India has people that like to beep horns. I get that. But jeez. I would say more than 75% of them cannot even write basic emails and get across what they are trying to say in a meaningful way. This slows down comms further again.
A thing a lot of them seem to do lately, is go to some rented office type place, where they all work in a big room each from different companies for whatever reason. I mean it's like a call centre. High noise levels. It might not be so bad if they actually used decent noise cancelling mics. Might have a chance then. But no. These are contractors being paid reasonable to high day rates, for a major global supplier as well.
It winds me up that we accept this as ok. We pay obscene amounts of money to our partner for this "service". Yet normal employees of our company have to pass aptitude tests, have multiple interviews etc. The vetting is high, as it should be.
I guess I miss working with like minded Brits. Being a white-British male in my IT dept puts me very much in a minority group. Never had this in any other role. I realise I can't really say this in 2024 and the police will be in touch shortly no doubt.
Hear me out...
Having an IT career spanning more than 20 years is in all likelihood going to mean working with a lot of Indians. Fine. I have made life long Indian friends and had the pleasure of working with some truly great ones, but.... my current company likes to outsource a lot of IT to a partner company that we work with. We go out to market every few years to renew whoever said supplier is. We've previously used a supplier that I personally thought delivered some high quality Indian devs with a mixture of on and off shore ones. Nice people. Competent.
However, the current supplier (a global leader in providing such solutions supposedly) is constantly providing us with a pool of resource that I can only describe as absolute dog ****. They are all Indian devs about 70% off shore and 30% on shore.
The level of English spoken is typically fluent enough to pass interviews. During the teams interviews for off shore ones, they obviously go somewhere quiet, with a good quality mic.
Fast forward to week 1 and suddenly they're mic is crackly, they can barely be heard nor understood, massive echos, problems with connection, never turn their camera on, constant beeping of horns in the background. Impossible to deal with. OK so India has people that like to beep horns. I get that. But jeez. I would say more than 75% of them cannot even write basic emails and get across what they are trying to say in a meaningful way. This slows down comms further again.
A thing a lot of them seem to do lately, is go to some rented office type place, where they all work in a big room each from different companies for whatever reason. I mean it's like a call centre. High noise levels. It might not be so bad if they actually used decent noise cancelling mics. Might have a chance then. But no. These are contractors being paid reasonable to high day rates, for a major global supplier as well.
It winds me up that we accept this as ok. We pay obscene amounts of money to our partner for this "service". Yet normal employees of our company have to pass aptitude tests, have multiple interviews etc. The vetting is high, as it should be.
I guess I miss working with like minded Brits. Being a white-British male in my IT dept puts me very much in a minority group. Never had this in any other role. I realise I can't really say this in 2024 and the police will be in touch shortly no doubt.
This grind my gears.
We have Governments talking about "We need to bring innovation back to Britain!......British job for British people!" But no....let all the companies outsource to developing nations for cheap work. Scarifying the quality of services in the UK. While making everyone else jump through hoops to get the job done in the UK.
Soldato
Think i've stuck the final knife into an external consultant. He's been assisting on an implementation but from the time i joined the project he's felt like more of a hindrance. Overcomplicating tasks which should be simple (Approvals Matrix! which has dragged on since June and still not fixed). They're many months late on go live and he just generally doesn't seem to be doing much beyond looking busy. He was suggesting 5 days for data cleansing for some data. The last cleanse was to mid August and everyone was supposed to be making duplicate changes ever since so shouldn't be any changes except a bit of reconciliation to confirm.
I've pretty much convinced the CFO that it makes more sense to end his contract when it expires in 2 weeks and we just tackle things ourselves. The system is 99% setup and then we contract some ad-hoc technical advice from another consultancy i've been in contact with to assist with guidance where we struggle.
There seems to be no Architecture documentation, and he keeps mentioning Customisations when he actually means customised configuration of standard modules which to me is very different. Again it all feels he's making it sound more complex than it is to drag out the contract.
I've pretty much convinced the CFO that it makes more sense to end his contract when it expires in 2 weeks and we just tackle things ourselves. The system is 99% setup and then we contract some ad-hoc technical advice from another consultancy i've been in contact with to assist with guidance where we struggle.
There seems to be no Architecture documentation, and he keeps mentioning Customisations when he actually means customised configuration of standard modules which to me is very different. Again it all feels he's making it sound more complex than it is to drag out the contract.
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"Do the needful." is a phrase that I despise when simply a forwarded email arrives with it. Quite often they don't know who they've just sent that to.. I understand there's a top down culture - however I'm the client!
I've worked with a very wide range of devs from India and Pakistan. In a wide number of roles and even with the partner in Pakistan providing software for a secure environment (following cybersecurity reviews etc).
You can find good developers - typically you'll find a considerable time invested in a location like Pune to bring in graduates etc. There is still a top down mentality but the teams worked and took ownership (with women and men doing equal roles). One of the key things is contractually being very strong on ensuring competent staff aren't cycled out two weeks after winning the contract.
The worst - I literally had to write a specification that would have been faster developing it myself. Then when asked if what was delivered was correct, knowing the answer already, I was told yes. I know the cultural point here but this took the biscuit.
The most recent - was a Indian consultancy that sounds like they are short potatoes, where everything was written down for them to follow manually and then they wondered why we moved away from their 1970s approach that didn't work and destabilised the customer experience. If you wanted a frozen IT organisation and protective behaviour that bordered on criminal - then these folks are bang on the money.. to add insult to injury, it was cheaper hiring a third party consultancy in the UK than the quotes we had through.
However I've also worked with a number of UK companies that can be as bad, so it all depends.
If I do need a partnership, I'm a strong believer of a core FTE team with a third party and that the FTE feedback directly feeds into continuation - this prevents the partner from causing problems then blaming the FTE. They're all adults.
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Soldato
Yeah, my wifes firm has outsourced a lot, and is now actively trying to position themselves as a provider of outsourced services to other practices. At times she had to pretty much draft email responses for them to send to clients, now she gets them using ChatGPT but that itself can bring a lot of issues.
I had actually thought the outsourced culture was decreasing. Especially with call centres as many firms got such bar feedback they brought a lot back to be UK based, although it's clearly still a problem.
I had actually thought the outsourced culture was decreasing. Especially with call centres as many firms got such bar feedback they brought a lot back to be UK based, although it's clearly still a problem.
If you look at the number of major companies HQ'd in the UK, then look at market access for growth and investment, then I'm not surprised there's little in the way of innovative companies other than those attached as university spinoffs.
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The one phrase that always gets me is "Each and everything" gets me every time..
One problem I have with the Indian and Pakistan work culture, is they say 'yes' to everything:
"Can you do this" "Yes!" (they have no idea)
"How long will it take?" "1 hour" (it's a 3 day task)
"Do you need any help?" "No" (has been slaving away at something for days)
Saving face is a pain for all things holy, and I've managed to get to a point of mutual respect, where they feel comfortable that they own it. Typically there's a little wobble of ego bloom at that point of ownership but that can also be managed to bring people together. Coaching helps a lot but applicable with FTE rather than offshored partner..
The worse is USA devs.. I remember one US team deciding they'd simply ignore the advice.. only for them to find that they'd wasted their time as technology was too slow and problematical..
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Common across many cultures outside the West. You just need to learn to word things differently and ask the right questions.
Believe me, other cultures find our (Brits) inability to address a problem directly even more annoying
Soldato
Just found out today that my Subbytech business is now ranked #1 on Trustpilot 
So pleased
So pleased