I was working as a contractor/consultant at a large financial institution. My pimp/headunter told me that my contract is expiring. They did give me 2 weeks' notice, rather than "security immediately escorts you out". My contract ends just before Christmas.
My pimp said "The money in the budget was used up." They don't have to give a reason for firing me. He said they might hire me back next year. I shouldn't wait. I'm starting to send out resumes. Unless I have a specific restart date, the value of that offer is $0.
My project manager didn't even know I was getting fired, until I told him. He seems eager to keep me, because I'm getting a lot done. However, he's probably SOL. I was doing almost all his work for him.
I was doing fine at work. Even after taking time off for my panic attack, I was able to function normally. They didn't seem to mind that I missed a week and a half due to illness.
My parents assume, by default, that I did something wrong. That's an unhealthy attitude. I thought I was doing well. They don't have to give a reason for firing me. Maybe the headhunter is telling the truth, when he says "That's the way the budget worked out." However, they could have converted me to a full-time employee, but didn't.
With high emotional awareness, that works against you. Almost every hiring committee has a psychopath. The psychopath would be eager to not hire me, because I can tell he's a psychopath. The psychopath can tell that I can see through him.
I thought I was doing well. It's actually irrelevant. They have an explicit State-backed monopoly.
It makes no difference if they hire great people or unskilled pathetic losers. The project I was QAing is a total trainwreck. I can identify the "I'm covering up failure." tone of voice in the developers. I submit a bug report and they deny it's a problem or deny they're responsible for it. It's an excellent example of corporate CYA, rather than getting the job done. I don't have write permission on the server, so I can't create my own test cases.
Anyway, it makes no difference. They have a monopoly. They don't need to hire competent people. I'm back to the usual headhunter grind.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Unemployed Again!
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6 comments:
Well the issue with your parents is that a prophet is without honor in his hometown. Not that you're a prophet necessarily but the idea is that talented people seldom have their talent recognized by those that saw them in diapers and such. There's also the hospitalization issues, which most people see as evidence there is something wrong with a person, but I see this as evidence the person sees the truth of what is going on and is disturbed by it, which is a highly rational response, and not being disturbed by it like the general Facebook Soma imbibing public is the insane response.
Some long time ago I interviewed for a job. As I had already had a stable job, I wanted to make sure the new company was stable. The manager that interviewed me effectively lied. He said he could not reveal their blue-chip clients because it was confidential. The reality was that they had none at that time. I was promised bonuses, share options etc. but nothing actually materialized. I only gave up my old job for these promises, but they were lies.
Laughingly one senior manager came out with the share option rules one day but he never gave it out. He kept it clutched tight to his chest, so nobody could even get a peak at it.
After I had been in the company a little while another manager told me the company had no software written and at some point was going to go bust. Charming. I had only been in the company a few weeks at the time and had left a stable, good enough company.
Despite the negativity, I buckled down and wrote the first version of some software. It was shown to a very large company and they gave us a big sum of money to develop it further. At the time I was paid a low salary.
Instead of the big sum of money going to raise my salary, my manager used it to hire a few friends. They got much higher salaries than me. The pigs made sure they got a recruitment bonus for recommending a useless friend.
One of these bozos wrote a lot of rubbish code. The other one was given a non-job. His code wasn't even incorporated into the final working product.
I was eventually fired but the bozos that failed to do any real work kept their high salaries. They even were given big wodges of bonus cash on top of their big salaries.
Keeping your job has nothing to do with competence. It can just boil down to who you are friends with.
At this scumbag company, the first Director of Software pirated software at some level. I'm not sure what was pirated as I wasn't involved or told explicitly what went on.
For generally being useless he got fired. After he was fired he reported the company for software theft. So he stole the software and then reported the company for his theft after being fired!!! The company had to pay a big fine. Certainly it would have been something like the year's salary for two regular staff members.
A couple of months after that I got fired along with around a third of the company. A colleague mentioned to me he thought it was strange that I got fired as the head of the company seemed to value my work. He even joked (or maybe not) one evening that he thought I was doing all the work in our sub-group.
Anyway it could be thought that because this bozo cost the company a lot of money in fines, that it caused my job to be lost. That fine could have paid my salary for two years.
The scumbag reportedly walked into a job straight away.
I had endure scummy headhunters and the whole horrible process of getting another job.
I once worked for a famous tech company.
At the beginning of the year our group fired two employees. I guess this was a regular clear-out of the least experienced members. They got a pay-off.
One of our associated groups was disbanded and we inherited their responsibilities.
With staff members leaving and new responsibilities, the work load went up quite a lot.
My manager handed over some work to me, but greatly underestimated how much needed to be done. At the time I was having to work at the weekends anyway due to the increased workload. The manager then made matters worse by setting a QA deadline too soon and getting an ex-colleague of his to do a code review when that colleague was about to leave the company and so could not really be bothered.
I ended up with a vast work load.
A new director joined the company and he wanted to hire a couple of people he knew. At least one of them was exempted for having to answer interview questions.
Anyway two new people joined our group and two people, including myself, got fired.
Strangely I didn't get a pay off, but the people fired at the beginning of the year did.
Shame really because I did a vast amount of work during my last 6 months there.
FSK, first of all, don't let this affect your emotions.
Secondly, you're always seem to work for finance industry, right? They're scumbags. So, you'll have a very low chance of finding productive company.
Try manufacturing. How about applying to boeing or something like that?
An employer's demand for delivering "walk" rather than "talk", must be generated at the very top, not at the bottom by an employee! There is no demand for productivity that way. At the very top, there must be a need to produce something needed, and not to scam someone instead.
Finance is a legitimate service only with honest money. Under fraudulent money finance is only a scam, by necessity.
I live in NYC and relocating is not an option. There's zero manufacturing.
The only choices are sleazy financial companies or sleazy startups.
My soon-to-be-ex-job is the best one I've had since moving back to NYC. My direct coworkers were decent. The project manager seems to appreciate me. (I'm doing almost all his work!) However, the higher-ups vetoed his request to keep me around.
"Start your own business" isn't as easy as it sounds. If it was that easy, some other clever person would start a business and hire me. My best business ideas are agorism-related.
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