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Sounds like you have a toxic work environment.
They’re trying to pull the ol’ “if you’re not working you’re stealing time”
Find another job. That’s not worth it for 30k a year
Is it worth it? If not re-evaluate your contract.
you have a bad contract, but market is only getting better. so you can try start looking. open up to friends has similar skill set , experience, and see how much they make. build a trusted network is important , “zero trust” are for security, wont work for career 😉
get a secret clearance so it opens up gov jobs.
most of contract i have are remote, and just 1-2 hour work per day , plus meeting and hear guys proving they have bigger dick when they make lees than me. and i hate it because all i do is online shopping when i am clocking it.
one of my contract has lower rate , around usd$70, i often work 2 hours per week for that one. been there for almost 3 years, they gonna renew , possibly rate increase again.
and fuck on call , the even if i often i charge one hour to be stand by per day , 1min per call, i still hate it.
become a real engineer and forget on call, forget ops and support.
and dude, how do they know how many hours you spend on coding? do this… install message app on phone, spend $5 on a mouse jiggled. or find a script for key press, mouse move between 9-5. and run below command.. and take 5 hours lunch break 😉
sleep 6666; git add * ;git commit -m “xxx”’ ; git push
My friend is a contractor and only gets paid by the hour too.
Difference is, he isn’t expected to be on call and can choose when he wants to work. So he is free to take on other work too.
If you are forced to be available on call for a certain amount of hours per day, you should be paid 75/hr for all of those hours, not just for the hours you are at your keyboard.
lol that’s wild. Just cause you’re not typing doesn’t mean you’re not working and the extreme monitoring of your time is a huge red flag. If the previous guy didn’t want any part of it I’d suggest quitting also before it drags you further down. Maybe this terrible client will see their crazy turnover rate for the position and realize they’re the problem. But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
You’re crazy if you don’t push the line until you get close to written up. There are devs I work with that 10 hours of their work is worth 1 hour of mine just based on productivity. Stop trying so hard and say shit is taking you longer. You give a company 100% and they’ll expect 110%. Give them 70% max and they can fire you if you’re not productive enough. Trust me, they’d rather keep you then have the stress of replacing you.
Other option is to get another job.
Why don’t you just write a PowerShell script to make it look like you’re working all day. If you need help I got you homie
I mean 75/hr is like $150k / yr full time and if you’re only making 30k/yr then you’re basically under-emeployed and only working like 20% of the time. Almost certainly you could be doing better somewhere else.
find a different client. I am a contractor and my billables are based on weekly hours but they are ultimately just estimates. Its the scope of the work that is agreed upon by myself and the client, and ultimately I work as long as needed to get the project done. Sometimes its fewer than the quoted hours, sometimes its more. But hourly rate is just used by me for quoting. I refuse any hour tracking unless its for a job only needing a couple hours a week and my hourly for those is much higher.
Are you in North America? 75/hr is grossly underpaid for 10 YOE. You should be charging $100+.
Also you are a consultant, if you don’t like the client just drop it. Especially when you are making junior rates with senior responsibilities.
There are other jobs.
Please leave that awful job man.
That’s insane.
So any time you need to look up documentation, that’s not paid? Or write out some references on a whiteboard?
Are your managers/leads from a different country? Because this sounds like the kind of MO for foreign work — no concern for quality or whether something works, just charge time.
I’d start looking for a job ASAP. And this should serve as a warning to anyone else, just because it says $75/hr doesn’t mean they’re going to pay you fairly
I work like this but I actually love it. Remember, you are not charging for your hands on the keyboard, you are charging for the PRODUCT. Stop thinking about the 8 hours of work per day as the time that you must spend on the keyboard, start thinking about the 8 hours as the maximum that you can charge on a given day. Start pricing your work based on how much value you believe it offers. The formula is simple, if the value of your work is higher than the total price then they will keep paying you. Need to design a piece of software before coding it? That’s billable time too. Think about it for the day, write a document with your thoughts in 60 minutes, and charge for all the hours that you thought about it. Include some rest in your billed time (don’t actually put it in the timesheets lol), you wouldn’t have to rest your mind if you weren’t working, it is part of the cost, a race car does not get to remove the time in the pits from its total lap time.
The only exception is if they made you install some spyware on your computer, in that case just run lol… that’s abusive and no one should work for someone like that.
BTW if they are trying to put you “on-call” for a certain time-frame but you are NOT getting paid for this time frame… Yeah that’s a scam. They are asking for your attention during fixed hours, like a clerk at a store even if no one comes in the store. That is 100% billable time, HECK, that’s time that I would bill at 2.5x the rate because it’s f*ckin with my schedule without flexibility.
If you have to do timesheets, that’s easy, just write `7 hours work, worked on thing ABC`, that’s it lol, and if you actually want to do even better, you have to start taking charge of managing your own communications with people in charge. Make them feel comfortable with your progress, make them stop caring about the timesheets because, hey, you got everything under control and you are spoonfeeding them. Trust me, they don’t want to spend time reviewing how accurate your timesheets really are, so just make them happy, really sell what you do. That’s billable time too btw 😉
If they aren’t paying on time or making it hard to collect payment, definitely dip though. Ain’t got time to waste with people that don’t understand the basics of work.
You know you can charge per day/week/month and that you can fire cheap clients, right?
Thinking about the project is time spent working on it. Charge for it.
Being available on-call is work. Charge for it.
Like dude you are we working for free.
I could justify spending the time I wasted taking a shit, because I was thinking about how to solve stuff on the project.
>I have to choose what the path is for development, I have to choose what to maintain
All of this is work. And if you do work for them you should be charging for it.
If you can’t even manage to actually charge your client for the work you do. Maybe you should give up on being a contractor.
Delete prod db accidentally and spend 5 hours restoring from backup.
It’s a bad position AND you have bad work practices (specifically bad billing practices).
You’re literally just not billing for a portion of the work you do, and you’re not raising your rates to compensate.
Any decent client should be aware of those realities and be willing to meet you halfway. These guys aren’t and so they get shit product, or they are and they’re deliberately squeezing you for all that your worth.
You need to have a hard discussion and either get paid more or bail.
This sounds like my last role 🫠
Get a new contractor role that:
a) doesn’t have on call except maybe occasional support for specifically time periods for projects you work on, OR
b) if it does have on call, it’s extra from your regular pay
So if I understand this correctly you work for a consulting company as their sole developer on some techy contract they won?
If so, it sounds like you aren’t going to have any free time or peace of mind here. This is like placing a man on an island and having him figure out how to build shelter, forage for food, purify water, the whole nine… aka do all the coding, diagraming, infrastructure provisioning, testing, deployments, maintenance.
That situation blows, and it’s pretty high stress bc if sth breaks it’s all eyes on you, there ain’t no disbursing they weight of the project on teammates. 75hr honestly doesn’t seem worth it. It sounds like they are getting 1 guy to do the job of 5. The whole micromanaging of your time sounds awful too…
Why would you sign up for that? sound overwhelming.
I am an FTE and I have to justify every hour. I want to be a contractor and start a solo company to have more control like a shopkeeper.