A working arrangement

Well its been an interesting week on the work front. I am struggling to get the company I am contracted to too make a decision on the project I have been working up for the past six month. It has been and off again, on again proposition. They want the job done but are struggling with forking out the cash for what essentially is a system upgrade (no production increase). Most of the benefits are reliability driven and they haven’t had a catastrophic failure to spur on the decision.

In the mean time I was the target of a poaching exercise. A former boss has been grooming me for an offer from the company he has just started with. I had a couple of meetings with the management of that company and the role seemed fairly good. Lots of independence, lots of nice technical challenges and a bit of travel to exotic locations – but not too much, sounded great.

I was entertaining them based on the performance of the current company with respect to the approval of the project mentioned above (its about 8 months of solid interesting work at a very nice pay scale plus ongoing support). If they don’t pick up the project I would be left doing fairly trivial small projects for them and that is not what I am after at this stage.

So the poachers finally came through with the offer. If was verging on an insult. The bottom line was about 20% les than what I am getting now. On top of that the form of contract was so one sided that I could well be much worse off based on an hourly rate. During the discussions there was lots of talk about 8 hour days, flexibility and extra cash for working away etc but in the contract it was framed as “you will work what the job requires” and the stated (low) salary covered everything.

I have been burnt by this sort of arrangement before and will not be fooled twice. So while my current arrangement is prone to uncertainty it is honest. I get paid for the hours I work and if they don’t like my work or they run out of things for me to do they let me go. Very simple.