Redefining Permanency

  I started my current job 2 years ago. I had held my previous job for 13 years until my owner decided to sell his company to a millionaire from Indianapolis. The millionaire had a lot of other companies and programmers that supported all of them. My role had shifted from writing the software that my company sold to documenting the features of the software I was no longer writing so the new programmers could rewrite the software in Indianapolis. I felt that my job would be finished with the documentation, so I started looking for a new job. The workforce had changed a lot in 13 years. There were very few full time programming jobs available. I also found out I'm no longer a programmer, but a software developer...sniff. The job market is almost exclusively temporary, or contract work. Contract work is problematic because you do not deal with the hiring companies directly; you have to go through a layer of recruiting companies. These companies submit you for consideration to the hiring companies. To my experience, the recruiters are not especially technically savvy and are only looking for skills and years of experience. You are basically a piece of meat.

  I was lucky enough to be hired on a 2 year contract by a company in town. Since I drove 110 miles round trip to my last job, it was a pleasant change. There is a lot of pressure being on a contract. Some permanent employees you work with assume you are being paid top dollar (or at least more than them) and there can be some resentment (‘that’s why you get paid the big bucks!!!’ or ‘you’re getting paid to figure this out, not to ask me to do it’, etc...), although at my current job everyone has been very helpful. The top-dollar part is only half right. The hiring company pays top dollar for my services, but the recruiting company keeps a large part of that for their role as middleman. It is even worse for some of my co-workers that are in the US on work visas. They have to get their job through an agent who also takes a cut of their pay after the recruiting company gets theirs. My contract was through one of the best recruiting companies, Robert Half. They pay for 6 holidays a year as long as you work 3 days that week and even give a weeks’ pay after you work 1800 hours. But there are down sides. The company I work for has a lot of days they are closed that I don’t get work or get paid for (Good Friday, Day after Thanksgiving, and a 7 day winter shutdown). A day off for sickness or leisure is a day off from getting paid. The recruiting company had a health insurance plan, but even the recruiters told me not to use it and buy my own (no pre-tax savings). Most of the other recruiting companies offer even less benefits. The hiring company pays top dollar for their employees, but there are also no benefits to pay, less HR staff to keep, and if economic conditions change, the contract employees are disposable. In July, the company I work for cut their payment to the recruiting company and the recruiting company cut their payment to me. It bothered me that while I never thought of asking to renegotiate my contract in the middle of it, it was renegotiated for me unilaterally. We were told that it was a win-win situation because we all kept our jobs, but in September, 3 of the 6 in my group got laid off (no, we did not get our pay cuts back). I still had my job, but since I’d rather play chess than 'survivor', it was back to the job hunt again...

  This time, my job hunt was very fruitful and after a month I was offered a full time position with benefits which I accepted. I’ll be back to making a 120 mile commute, but I’ve already found a ride share to help ease the expenses. I expect this will be my last job ever, but I also expected that about my last 2 jobs...