Vicky88

The big joke is the younger kids think that putting your details up on the internet is networking. However, I personally believe that networking is much more about interpersonal skills and relationships you build.

Dh is a very good networker, he has been able to transition 4 times in the last 10 to new positions on very short notice because of his interpersonal skills. He has always kept in contact with previous colleagues/superiors, not because he thinks they may be useful in the future, but because he is a genuine people person. Me on the other hand, I have no people skills at all, and as soon as I leave I block them all out of my mind which is why I have no contacts at all.

ian1976

I did pretty much the same as you - contracting software professional in the UK and moved to the USA.

To be honest I didn't consider contracting for long when I realized that you couldn't get on to decent group health-care as an IC (Independent Consultant). Also the pay rates in a lot of cases were lower than going permie!

Vicky88

Also a lot of big companies will not let you contract direct to them, even if you find the job they will make you contract thru their preferred agency such as Manpower.

goatherder

I'm a SAP consultant (does that count as IT?).

Anyway problem I had with Contracting (like I did in the UK) was that the health insurance was horrible and expensive. I've got 2 little dependants and one older one. I went Permie...

made of kent

Not a IT contractor myself but hubby was in the UK, in the US he is a permie, as otherwise we would not have a cat in hell chance of being here, I digress (as per) but he has IT contractor's working with him, who he does the charges for, so he knows what they are paid, and he said the other day, that it surprised him that the contractors are really badly paid compared to their counterparts in the UK, where as he is better off in the US as a F/T, to explain he was a contractor for 10 yrs then, F/T for 5 years in the same company in the UK, and is working for the same company in the US, and as said before by another poster, health insurance is the killer literally and metaphorically.
In his company contractor's are not well paid compared to the UK, earning less than their F/T equivalents.
However this is one company, but as they are a huge company, I imagine that this could, and say could, as what the hell do I know, translate across the board?
good luck, I am sure you will get work, it's just timing, and hassle, hassle, hassle, agencies who you can phone up, they will get so sick of your voice they will send you on every interview until you get a job and leave them in peace
hubbys company use small agencies as well as the big ones so look up agencies in the Yellow Pages.
we are counting the days til, the BIG announcement to see if we are off home, if he loses his job....fortunately if it happens now, we are in our 2 year period and they will pay all our cost back home... we are very lucky.

thinbrit

It seems the norm is to invent your own resume with fictitious positions you held, qualifications you hold, and experience you have. Just tailor your resume for each position you apply for, and hold back no lie.
At least this was my experience the last time I was hiring.
90% of all resumes I received were just outright lies, the other 10% contained at least some form of embellishment. I had to create a list of 10 simple questions relating to the position to weed out the first 90%, and the rest I crucified at the first interview - although some had no shame they had lied on their application, and others knew no boundaries and would happily keep digging the hole even when it was obvious to all they were just full of it. The lady I hired was qualified for the position, but had also not been completely honest about her skill set.
You are going to be competing against these people.
Good luck.

BritishGuy36

At last! An explanation as to why nobody will hire me. Everyone else's resume is 'better' than mine for a reason!

chartreuse

It's worse than that, though. She's right - they're all lying bastards. So, if you've got anything out of the ordinary on your resume, that makes you look special, best delete it. Because the hirer will just assume that you're a lying bastard too.

You can't win.

anotherlimey

I "exposed" one of these during an interview. On his resume he wrote he knew NT4 (this was a few years ago..), but when I asked him if he knew NT4 in the interview he said no! So I asked him why it was on his resume and then he replied "I don't know"!

Needless to say he didn't get the job.

Bob

Another tip to guarantee being noticed is using comic sans or papyrus as a font

thinbrit

One candidate said they had added skills they didn't actually possess at the request of the recruitment agency who was hoping to get paid a referral fee.

As a new manager I once interviewed a candidate in the UK for a customer service/tech support position (solely phone based). The candidate was almost completely deaf and wore a hearing aid that offered only partial hearing. His speech was extremely difficult to understand because of his disability. When unable to also read my lips he would ask to have the question repeated. I had no idea what to do and feared the company could be sued for discrimination if I terminated the interview because the candidate was obviously unsuited for the position due to his disability. I politely went through all the motions, but it was obvious I couldn't hire this person. I did have enough sense than to try shouting the questions and over exaggerating my lip movements as I spoke, but other than that I felt completely out of my depth. Being a new manager I wasn't sure if I had been set up, and on more than one occasion I glanced around the room for hidden cameras.

crosscountryrider

Hello,
I just went back into IT contracting.

here are the facts:

Yes you should have a LLC or LLP. Other wise you will fully liable with all your assets. You can contract wherever you want but most likely you need to go through another company.

And the problem will start there .You need to find the right partner. There are
a lot of indian staffing companies out there trying to talk into a contract.

They are using faked names and are often mot more than a mailbox.

Make sure that you check references; background etc for those companies.

Otherwise you will never get paid.

However the contractor market is picking up again. If you have unique skill sets or experience you find good work out there.

Kind regards
CCR

veryfunny

Can you be more specific in regards to your field? Programmer, C, C++, C sharp, Java, ABAP?

Bluegrass Lass

As an engineer, I've had to deal with a couple of different types of contractors. One type, as some of you have alluded to, is a contractor that works for Company X Contracting Agency but is actually outsourced to Company ABC. Sometimes these can be lucrative. The downfall is though, that Company X does not have to provide you with any benefits - IOW, no paid vacation, no health/dental/vision insurance, no disability, etc. Usually though, they do offer some of these types of bennies, by they are by no means comprehensive.

The other type of contractor is basically a self-employed consultant. They have to have their own company, set up to do business. This type of business would probably be an LLC as I think other posters mentioned. A person doing this type of contracting, in my experience, gets paid about $100 or more an hour. Don't let this fool you though. Being self-employed, you will be responsible for paying all income taxes on this amount, not to mention paying all of the diff types of insurances (ie liability). So if you charge $100/hr, you really are probably only making 33% of that amount. Not to mention being self-employed you are going to face a huge challenge trying to find private health/dental/vision/short-term disability/long-term disability polices that you can reasonably afford. It's a huge gamble being a self-employed consultant.

To get the best bennies, and to feel most secure in a position, you really need to be permanent with a company, not a contractor. In my experience, contractors are the first to go because you're essentially nothing more than a temp employee to a company. Second best to a direct hire position would be a contract to hire - but you gotta work your tail off to impress them so the company is willing to extend a permanent position to you.

Same for me too. I haven't kept in touch with any of my previous coworkers/managers. One of the reasons why I left those positions was because of the managers. I now find myself in an awkward position because I really don't have any good references for my previous employers. Not sure what to do now that I'm looking for a new job.

TimNiceBut

A bit more than 20 years worth of commercial software development, around 18 of that in C++ (and not 18 repeats of year one either like some people I've interviewed), Java, C#, Ruby, Lisp (all of that in the last 6 month) and some other languages that I won't mention because I really don't care for tons of agents calling me for Perl jobs . I've mostly been working on scalable systems (trading systems, most of the time) for the past 8-10 years but I tend to throw in some completely unrelated work from time to time (like mobile phone technologies) in order to broaden my view. Oh, and I've got management experience ranging from team leading to playing IT director at reasonably well funded startup...

Nothing's going to happen without an LLC/LLP - I've made that mistake once in the past and it cost me a sizeable sum. Never again. Took several years of court cases and almost another 10 years to pay off.

Oh joy. That's a tad worse than it is in the UK then. Mind you, we have fly-by-night agencies over here as well but due to the nature of the majority of my clients, the fly-be-nighted ones usually don't get the interesting work I'm after anyway.

If I read this right, you're talking about the Accenture-type consultant here? Ie you're employed by one place and then body shopped out to various other places and dropped like a hot potato if/when the "employer" can't find another follow-up contract?

That's something I'm definitely not interested in, plus I'm not the right sort of material for that sort of work either (too old and experienced, for starters - I've seen what the consultancies in the UK are sending through to clients of mine and there is no way they can add that sort of markup to anything they'd have to pay me).


That's what I'm doing here in the UK at the moment, but even after deducting all the taxes and insurances, I think there's more left in my pocket than 33%. Considerably more, actually. I guess what that means is that I need to find out exactly what the overheads are because if the overhead's around 2/3rds it's probably not worth my while.


Oh, the "contractors first against the wall" approach is the same here in the UK and I'm used to that. I just found that it's a decent niche for me as I don't seem to make that good an employee for a large corporation - too blunt and germanic, for starters. Although one (American) company I used to work for was more than happy to make use of these traits when dealing with an Indian outsourcing company . That said, through a recruiter I've worked with before, I should be able to find something in a couple of smaller companies where getting things done is more important than playing political ping-pong. For some reason the bigger companies I worked for seemed to be worse for that.

I do prefer the existence as a consultant for the simple reason that the downtime between contracts tends (if I had had any, which I didn't for the past three years) to afford me to keep current in other technologies and also do things that aren't work related. The trouble with IT and programming is that if you want to stay ahead you've got to spend a lot of time keeping current and that's something I find hard to do as an employee.

I've had people like that come through as well, only that in their case the agency "embellished" the CV somewhat. That's happened to me in the past as well (agency editing my CV before sending it on, and I'm not talking about removing my personal details here) and I only found out during the interview when I asked the interviewer if I could have a quick look at the CV he was looking at because some of his questions didn't make any sense to me at all. Fortunately I had a non-edited one on me "just in case". The agency was a little surprised when I gave them my 'feedback'.