Re:

Tom,

--- Tom Cabanski <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well, there are many shops out there pulling this kind of crap and they
> are getting desperate people to bite.  After all, the market is pretty
> bad right now.

It's so bad here in the Austin/San Antonio, Texas area that I'm going to
have to seriously consider a career change soon. Just for reference, I've
been unemployed since August of 2002 with the exception of a few .Net
contracts.

> The only good news in all of this is that once the
> market picks up again, and it will, companies like this one will suffer
> tremendous turnover as a result of their short-sighted attempts to take
> shameless advantage of people. The bad news, however, is that larger
> trends like the move towards cheaper developers offshore make it
> unlikely that the market will ever approach the levels reached during
> the mid to late nineties.
>

This is correct.

> Having said that, what was going on back in the boom wasn't right
> either.  I had candidates attempt to take cell phone calls in the middle
> of interviews.  I can't tell you how many H1 sweat shops presented
> absolutely unqualified candidates that were clearing lying about their
> experience; they all seemed to have exactly seven years of experience.
> People were jumping from job to job in a year or less and attempting to
> hold employers hostage.  In general, technicians demonstrated an
> overriding arrogance and greed that was simply amazing to see.  Is it
> any surprise that some employers are content to screw programmers
> because they see it as payback for the way they were getting screwed in
> the past?

Hmmm. I guess I'm too honest and professional to do that, but I sure have
been on the receiving end of the stick. In one year I worked 500+ hours of
unpaid, is there any other kind?, overtime, including 7 days a week between
Memorial Day and the 4th of July. During my review I received the just
below, "Walks on water" rating, was told I was the best developer the
company had, and because of that, my raise was 1/2 of 1% above the AVERAGE
raise.

Then there was the company where the President read all your mail and
decided if you could have it or not, refused to do direct deposit of your
paycheck and handed them out after 15:00 on payday Fridays so they couldn't
hit his account until Monday.

At my last job, I was told I would be on call one week out of four. That's
not bad, but I soon discovered that you were really on call 24x7 when I had
my cell phone off during my non-call time and my manager chewed me out one
morning because he couldn't reach me the previous night. One of the network
managers told me that the frequency of calls he got while on call had
dropped dramatically since I started working there. It seems I have this
bad habit of testing my code before I put it in production.

Since this list is about jobs, I guess I should say that if anyone needs a
good VB.Net/SQL developer who is also teaching himself C#, and has over 20
years of development experience, send me an email.

Bob



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