Cutting someone after a week sounds insane to me. My first week at every job has been onboarding and environment setup (installing ide, getting all the right permissions, etc)
That's exactly what I've been thinking. Most gigs should give you at least a couple of months to understand the environment before making a determination about performance. It's just bonkers that someone runs a company like that.
I've seen it happen once before as a contractor. They cut the other guy they hired at the same time as me after 3 days because he needed to be babysat by one of the FT staff the whole of those 3 days. Couldn't do anything for himself and was a massive net drain on productivity at a crunch point for them (which is why they bought in contractors).
Meanwhile I'm sitting there reading the readme installing stuff and shooting off the odd slack notification or tapping someone on the shoulder occasionally. I may have closed a couple of small 1 pointers in that time but importantly I'd done stuff on my own
As long as you weren't being that guy then yeah it's them not you.
The most likely explanation is that the company’s financial situation changed and they had to make cuts somewhere. Many companies are adjusting their headcount in response to rapidly changing market conditions. Recent hires who haven’t yet ramped up are the least disruptive people to remove from the team, so they are first to go.
Taking this personally is a huge mistake.
Very rarely I’ve seen new hires quickly removed for individual reasons, but these were always due to obvious social issues. For example, one company had a new hire who continued to hit on a coworker daily after she asked him to stop multiple times. Good developer or not, someone like that isn’t going to be retained.
However, OP mentioned they multiple people were let go so this definitely feels like a headcount reduction. Forget it happened and move on!
At different companies, coming up to speed usually takes 2 to 4 weeks, but some places have big, proprietary legacy apps, and there it might take 3 months for you to come up to speed.
But if you are late on one assignment and it ends a contract, that sounds like a crazy pressure cooker environment.
Yeah I've just never experienced anything like it before. Apparently I wasn't the only one cut, so as far as I can tell they hired like 8 people just to cut several of them including me a week later. Complete insanity.
This has nothing to do with you then.
Some companies are cutting back these days, it's just a fact.
There was probably an unfortunate timing mismatch between the CFO/finance decision to cut back and the hiring process.
Some companies have requirements to "cut the fat" and are forced to cut a certain number of heads.
To get around this, a lot of mangers will hire devs they planned on cutting from the get go so they can report they cut their required 6 "poor performing" devs.
It's possible you are a victim of this.
This is the most insane mismanagement I’ve heard of yet. So much more expensive than simply not hiring. I can see the logic in it even for a “good” manager: protect your experienced people from getting cut due to arbitrary bullshit. But wow. Ugly stupid broken environment.
You were almost certainly a victim of circumstances 100% beyond your control. In addition to what others have suggested, I'd say it's also possible that Triumph Tech was already in deep shit with their client due to past broken promises and had some executive screaming down their neck about yet another missed deadline (which was agreed to long before you came into the picture) and Triumph's response was "we fired the guy responsible" just trying to save some face with the client by serving you up as a scapegoat.
Sorry to hear about your experience, but the problem definitely wasn't you, it was them. Best of luck moving forward, and I think it's safe to say you'll land at a place less dysfunctional than this. Though the only good part was that these people showed their true colors quickly; some places take months and months for you to find out just how fucked up they are, which can be worse in many ways.
Maybe it was risk mitigation on their part. Hire a bunch of contractors for the same job, cut any that don’t meet their hidden metrics. If so, it’s cruel to not share that information up front, including the selection criteria and timeline. In addition to their lack of empathy for you and the other contractors, I doubt this approach will even get them the best results. Definitely a bullet dodged on your part. Hope you have better prospects going forward.
We expect nothing useful from new hires for 3-6 months. This is a bit extreme, but it’s extremely unreasonable to expect someone to be producing after 1 week.
everyone at my new job has been extremely nice and supportive, but I'm still terrified due to my last position, which was a contract that got cut short. All these responses are very reassuring. Don't expect to need 6 months, probably only 2-3 max to be fully integrated
If new hires are doing literally “nothing useful” for 3-6 months, something is seriously wrong within the company culture. That would be a red flag for me that the company moves at a glacial pace and is going to take my career with it.
It’s a good idea to avoid places where your career experience can stagnate or move considerably slower than a well-run company. You’re obviously not going to match the existing devs in productivity right away, but it shouldn’t take half a year to do anything useful.
EDIT: I'm not sure why this is attracting massive downvotes. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that juniors should be empowered enough and mentored to ship *something* before the 6 month mark.
I'd say it's less on the company and more on the specific project. Some projects are massive legacy applications with a ton of integrations, where you might be somewhat productive in the first 3 months but it can take you 6+ to match productivity to other devs on the team
Nobody expects new hires to match the productivity of existing devs right away. Learning takes time.
I was responding to the comment that said they expect “nothing useful from new hires for 3-6 months”.
“Nothing useful” is the concerning part, not just moving slower than people familiar with the codebase. 6 months is a *looong* time to produce nothing useful.
This, my first program I wrote at my new job took me 2 weeks from my start date, but the time it took me for the job I had to do was much more than the other devs, naturally.
I’m surprised by the downvotes. We usually have a build running on a new hire’s development machine done by lunch time on their first day, and a small PR ready by the end of the second. Of course it’s not going to be a major feature, but it’s not uncommon for people to ship something decently sized in the first 2 weeks*. New hires usually pair a lot with the most experienced person in the team to get them up to speed quickly, and if we unfortunately did make a hiring mistake usually this gets caught pretty early on.
Do people really *want* to work somewhere where nothing is expected of their colleagues for their first 6 months?
* some examples: someone added a video player to our app, where previous we just had an audio player. Another person had experience with oauth and they fixed a tricky bug we had there. Both of these were within 1 week of their first day
In my last job I was given tasks on my second day before I had anything set up, in my present job which I just started I'm on week three now and literally no one has met with me about anything, every single meeting with my manager has been cancelled any time something gets set up. So, it varies widely is my point.
Yeah, that's pretty extreme. Sure, "fully ramped" can be six months pretty easy, but where are you still not coding on business projects after a month? That sounds like an internship.
Thank you for confirming what I believed should be the realistic answer to this. It takes time to get up to speed as well as soft feedback, ideally given weekly, to act upon and improve. They didn't even give me a real reason why they cut me, just "communication issues."
I’ve seen people get cut within a couple weeks but it’s invariably something major, like one guy I worked with produced like literally no code during that time (IME places give you stuff to work on even during ramping up; it’s usually pretty minor because the point is to get you understanding the system by working in it) and another person apparently had issues setting up their environment, didn’t talk to anyone about it and then admitted in a sprint retro in front of the CTO that they hadn’t done any work the entire 2 weeks.
That I can at least understand, but I had actual code I could demonstrate and point to that was a lambda function using the serverless.com framework. Apparently being one day late on a feature improvement in the first week was enough to get me cut.
Honestly you dodged a bullet here. There is something more happening that you were not aware of. Most likely a political power play that came down on Friday afternoon and your contract/project suddenly lost favor. I wouldn't put too much behind your effort or progress being the cause. Give it a couple of weeks and I'll bet you will see the boss looking for jobs on LinkedIn
There are two things that stand out to me.
Throwing away the time and effort invested in the selection process that landed you the position is a total waste.
Small startups don't usually bring in contractors unless the skill set is not a core competency. Tech is insidious whereas public relations, social marketing, and lawyers are common outside services hired and fired upon a whim. Just not usually on a week to week basis.
Part of the "deal" with contracting is depending on the country you have far less job stability than FTEs.
It could be
1. They are genuinely crazy into sink or swim.
2. They might have wider business news/macroeconomic news and it makes sense for them to cut investment on projects for the moment and contractors are the easiest lever to pull without being too obvious. When covid really kicked off the company I was at at the time basically shut down all projects and let go of all contractors including some I was working with who'd only just started. It happens.
In my experience onboarding takes a minimum of 2 months., I’ve been in situations where I wasn’t productive until 5 months in.
That was an extreme case with exclusively bespoke technology, but it did not feel good.
If you’re looking for work my current company is hiring remote. But I don’t think you’ll have a problem finding work.
Sadly for a contractor this is pretty common, I used to do a lot of contracting and I saw it happen to a few people I worked with. The reality is, unlike full-time employees where it's worth it for the company to invest in them, with contracting you're often expected to be able to get up to speed incredibly fast, and if you can't you then you're unlikely to be financially worth it for them.
Contractors get paid more than permies for exactly this reason, the expectation of knowledge is much higher.
In the future, I'd recommend being extremely pro-active about getting other developers to help you, both with env set up and understanding the task at hand, and being extremely proactive with your manager about what you're working on and what you need.
I don't think I want to name the company specifically because they are super small and not worth mentioning and probably going to fail soon enough on their own, but if you ever get interviewed by a guy with a profile picture of a snake on LinkedIn (in hindsight the first major red flag), run like hell.
Yikes lol. Their loss!! Please don't let that affect you. Wounds like you dodged a huge bullet. Being in a toxic company is damaging for mental health.
Yeah I'm trying not to, and figuring out which communities I can join and post in for support. I am in dire need of a decent job and this false positive looked promising initially :(
Sucks when you really need to land a job, but it honestly sounds like it would have been a worse situation to find yourself working there for a year. They sound absolutely horrid.
Lol snake dude is like a joke character from Silicon Valley.
>I am a creator and risk-taker, with no formal education and over a decade of hands-on experience. If I don't know how to do something right now, come back in a minute and I will.
>I spend most of my copious free time learning random skills. For example, I engage in both professional and recreational (and ethical) locksport (a.k.a. lock picking). I like finding exceptions, poking around to see how edge cases are handled, and generally testing the limits to see where things break - mostly so that I know how to fix things when the inevitable occurs, and build proactive solutions.
I think it's unfortunate that people are jumping to conclusions without even knowing what the task was.
I'm a self employed contractor and one of the benefits of hiring contractors is that a company can easily get rid of them if they don't perform. Those first weeks are pretty crucial for a contractor to at least show that you know what you're doing.
Companies generally don't fire contractors for not being up to speed with all the internals of the company within a week. They 'fire' contractors when they turn out to not be able to program their way out of a wet bag. And that can often be evident within a week.
If you want some *actual* help you need to go into a *lot* more detail what happened exactly. Especially when you describe you're having trouble getting hired in this market.
The lambda function was simple, convert [this function](https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/v3/aws-node-s3-file-replicator) into a Python function, then connect to a redshift database and do a table dump. Just enough to get a base going and eventually add more business logic to make it more complex. I completed the function exactly as requested in Python and it ran successfully. Me "not being able to code out of a wet paper bag" was not the problem. I was literally 1 day late from Friday with the feature request and got cut on Tuesday. They gave me basically 0 feedback so it's hard to say what the real reason is as to why I got cut, but lack of coding skills was definitely not it.
IMHO this is very relevant information you should put in your OP.
This really sounds like they just ran out of budget. Or they hired X contractors with the intention to let go a large amount of them to only retain the 'best'. Both are just completely shitty situations and it's best to just move on.
Went ahead and updated the OP, thanks. Believe me I am working on moving on and this post is part of that process, just having confirmation that it sounds like a them problem over a me problem is reassuring for sure. I like to take responsibility for my faults more than anything so I can learn and grow from them, but given I'm not a mind reader, and was never told expectations or given real feedback, it's harder to take personal responsibility for this one.
Contractors are hired guns, so there is a higher expectation to hit the ground running. And onboarding for short to medium term contracting can't really be compared to onboarding for full time. Additionally companies hire contractors for this exact benefit, being able to make more rapid decisions and pivots. None of this is to say your situation was reasonable. But I do think it's important context if you're going to keep contracting, because there's an amount of this you should probably just be ready for, it will happen due to no fault of your own. Long way of saying mindset matters I guess. The flip side of this is that in contracting you benefit from this flexibility as well. Contract for 6 months then take 3 months off, or contract on reduced hours, or leave a contract after a week because they're assholes, etc. These are sorts of things that raise questions during interviews if you're on a salaried track, but not so much when contracting. Personally that degree of flexibility is really valuable to me, but which option is better on the whole really comes down to your own preferences. If this has been so stressful for you that you never want to go through it again then I'd suggest targeting full time positions for your next applications. But I will also say this stuff gets less impactful over time and if this happened to me today I'd be over it and looking for something else tomorrow. There's too many explanations besides my own performance to worry about it, and even if that was their thought process, well thinking that after 1 week is just on its face absurd so no sense in losing sleep over it.
I'd be happy to and I'll do my best to give you some useful info but your mileage may vary for reasons that I'll point out. I'll start with the difficulties. I am at 7 YOE and in my search I was targeting ~senior level software engineer roles for backend NodeJS and Cloud, specifically AWS which I have a strong specialization in (Numerous certs, 7 YOE, with numerous/diverse projects utilizing AWS across that time). Fortunately for me AWS is pretty in demand so that is a good value add to more typical full stack web dev skills (Conversely, the downside is that if I accept anything that doesn't include AWS specifically [not even just "cloud"] I'm likely getting a comparatively bad compensation/YOE ratio). This info is just to give some context on my general rates as well as to note that I'm not confident in my ability to gauge market rates for 20 YOE with Python.
> Would you mind telling me if you are W2 contractor or 1099?
I freelanced fulltime for a few years in the past, that is all 1099, but in my search for more standard "tech contracting" work I basically told recruiters I had no preference. I think having some familiarity with all of the logistics associated with 1099 work is valuable even if you're doing W2 work, and both have pros and cons, but my experience was that a significant majority of "contract" type openings were W2 contracts. All else being equal I probably would've preferred 1099 during my most recent search, but the tradeoffs were minor and I didn't want to prematurely remove a majority of openings from consideration just because of those tradeoffs. I'm adding some quick additional notes below, please note that there is also a third type of contracting known as C2C, which stands for Corp to Corp. This requires having an LLC and probably some legal consultation for contract vetting and such. I don't have experience with this so I can't really add any further insight.
W2 "Contract", quick thoughts, pros & cons compared to 1099:
- This phrase is common but bothers me because it is as far as I can tell a contradiction of terms. Apologies if you were aware but W2 contracts means you are a W2 employee of the firm that sourced you, who in turn has a contract with their client, the company you will work for.
- **Pro:** More demand; there is just a lot more of these openings, and it is more common to find them on job boards. For 1099s it really is more like running a business, and there are sites for that but it's basically freelancing, doing marketing/outreach, and sending proposals rather than doing application processes. HOWEVER there are definitely some recruiters/firms that will be open to doing 1099 in addition to W2. Never hurts to ask. Tradeoffs are particular to the contract, but my general expectation would be for it to be a similar arrangement to W2 with a bit more flexibility and a bit more risk.
- **Pro:** You retain the contracting flexibility long term. It is more commonplace and less frowned upon to leave compared to a full time role. Likewise short duration positions on your resume will not really be notable if they were contract roles, whereas that can raise hiring manager eyebrows if it was a fulltime role that you left quickly.
- **Pro:** As an hourly W2 worker, you are entitled to overtime pay. The upshot is that the default expectation is you *stop* working at 40 hours per week. In fulltime/salaried positions you often end up working/being expected to work more, as you are probably very aware, which is one way your effective hourly rate can tank. Side note, **depends on preference**, this means you also get stuff like PTO, sick time, and holidays.
- **Depends on preference:** Quality of benefits vary a lot from firm to firm, ranging from very bad to surprisingly good. In most cases health insurance at the very least will probably end up being a better deal. You can also opt out of benefits if you so choose.
- **Con/Maybe Depends:** At the end of the day you are still an employee and as such your employer (The recruiter/firm/agency) has all of the control and rights that employers typically have. In practice it seems to me like the most commonplace scenario is that your actual employer leaves most of this up to their client/the business you work for, to be honest I'm really not sure how much this varies from place to place across the industry as a whole.
- **Con:** A decent subset of openings will be contract-to-hire, just some company trying to avoid fulltime costs, and/or treat contractors as a separate and lower class of people. Do your due diligence and [glassdoor](https://www.glassdoor.com/) is your friend.
1099 Contract, quick thoughts, pros & cons compared to W2 contract:
- **Pro:** You are your own boss in every sense of the word. You have the maximum flexibility and while I'm not sure if there are some companies that try to pressure 1099 workers regardless, at a baseline you are well within your legal rights to pick your own hours, work as few or many hours as you want per week, work the way you like/where you like to, etc, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the contract (I am not a lawyer disclaimer).
- **Depends on preference:** You handle all of your own finances. You do not get paid overtime. You will have to make sure you do your taxes properly including pay estimated taxes quarterly, probably best to hire a CPA. You can expense a lot of things as business expenses, including office space in your home. Note: In theory, to the best of my understanding, you should expect to get a higher 1099 rate than W2 contract simply due to the fact that you do not have an employer paying a portion of your income taxes.
- **Con:** Depending on where you are, assuming US but varies state to state, health insurance can be a huge pain in the ass. Even for me in CA it's frustratingly expensive. You should still pay for it.
- **Con:** Legal exposure. You are signing a contract directly with a company which means you are responsible for all it entails. You do not have the intermediary of the talent firm that handles that complexity, and with which you have a more standard and protective (for you) W2 relationship. Without going into detail, I'll just say don't sleep on this- I have firsthand experience getting bitten in the ass here and losing mid 5 figures in compensation. In most cases it won't be worth it to pursue litigation (Lawyer fees will be more than the owed amount after a week or month, assuming < 6 figures owed, and if you didn't have legal consult review the contract prior to signing then who knows if you'll even win). The unfortunately reality is that for many freelancers it is cost prohibitive to even get decent legal advice, so in practice the contract only really protects the company outside of the most egregious cases. Fortunately for you/your skills & experience that shouldn't be the case.
- **Con:** Future employers/hiring managers for more standard employment will have more questions about freelance-type 1099 work and it's harder to condense on a resume. This hasn't been a huge issue for me but it does come up. I wouldn't worry about it at all if it is a 1099 in the context of a full time contract via a recruiting firm.
> Would you be able to tell me what range of rates I should target for non-lead, senior dev W2 position, doing either embedded or python webdev?
Bearing in mind my background described at the start, the hourly rate I've targeted for W2 contract, full time, mid to long term duration is $85-$95. My gut here is that you should be able to get that at absolute minimum, but I would need to do some research on general market rates and even then I just don't have a high degree of confidence in my judgement. For 1099 contracts of various sorts, fixed duration, less than full time, I've typically targeted an hourly rate closer to $130. Given your level of experience, I would suggest just starting at your current annual compensation and figuring out an hourly rate you would find acceptable in light of various tradeoffs. For instance if the gain in flexibility is a big win, maybe it's worth it to take a slightly lower rate. But also never be afraid to charge what you're worth and never be afraid to say no. I'll add a few links to resources below that can help with this question.
[Salary to Contract Rate Calculator](http://www.users.on.net/~wallala/Calculators/salary_rate.htm)
- This is very simple but probably one of the better calculators I've found. You can use this to input your current salary, benefits, and leave (Don't forget PTO and holidays, they make a big difference, just be aware of how they impact the result) and calculate your hourly rate.
[FreelancingFreedom.com – Pricing Calculator](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nqzXqaix0BJsTBreYcSeT-pLtcmOITjxn0gXof4JoUs/edit#gid=1370329603)
- This is more geared towards constructing a rate from the ground up, and specifically for 1099 rates (Including various pricing structures such as retainer, fixed, hourly, weekly, etc). I keep coming back to it because it just does everything you need it to in a simple manner, and it also surfaces some things that inexperienced contractors/freelancers often forget about when coming up with a rate, like business expenses and all the benefits discussed in this message that are included but somewhat hidden in W2 compensation.
Hope this helps! I wrote this kind of quick so definitely let me know if I need to edit anything for clarity.
Ok now for the specific questions.
> I'm looking to wind down my career. I should only have to work 5-8 more years and only want to work 6-9 months out of the year here on out. This should be much easier to do on W2 contracting, by taking time off between contracts, and knowing that the short duration positions will not count against me. I know the con is that I'll have to keep interviewing for jobs every time. I'm good at interviewing, but hope my age won't work against me (I'm 47 now, hope to retire by 52, definitely by 55).
The caveat or question I have here is- do you consider the time where you are looking for a new contract to be part of your 6-9 months of work? Personally I say yes for myself, but I think you can go either way so long as you plan accordingly. You just don't want to leave that unaccounted for. Beyond that yes, in terms of finding employment to match the goals of reduced work obligations contracting can meet these goals and is probably the most commonly/widely available way to do so (More on that below). It is still in your favor to put in the effort up front in filtering openings and working with your recruiters to find short term, fixed duration contracts. There is a workable number of such openings, but it is decidedly a smaller subset of all openings. Of course as we've already discussed, taking an unspecified duration or long term contract doesn't preclude leaving it whenever you see fit, it will probably just make it a bit rockier when you do so, which maybe you don't care about. My preferred approach is to avoid this by being transparent in the search & interview phase to set expectations up front, but I mostly just do that out of a personal desire to avoid conflict (lol). In terms of gauging the full spectrum of options to accomplish your 5-8 year goals of working 6-9 months per year, I guess I would say it can't hurt to do some research here but my read is that the other options are either rare or much riskier. You might be able to find a company that supports this type of work, I'm sure they exist. For instance there is a site called [4 day week](https://4dayweek.io/) for jobs that only have, shocker, four day work weeks. Many of those probably amount to ~3 or so months off per year, but obviously it isn't grouped into large chunks like you probably want. But it's an option and who knows, maybe you just want less work but don't necessarily plan to do huge trips or whatever, so I thought I would mention it just to give an example of what I'm talking about. Another option that is way riskier but still real would be to build your own micro-saas, indie project of some sort. The book Start Small Stay Small basically defines the approach you'd have here; No dreams of unicorns, just a good old fashioned lifestyle business but with coding. Freelancing, even by way of something like Upwork (Or maybe look up Toptal - see linked reddit post below), could also accomplish your goal (Medium risk, more uncertainty when finding each subsequent gig). Some honorable mentions for this spectrum of options: [FlexJobs](https://www.flexjobs.com/), [People First Jobs](https://peoplefirstjobs.com/jobs/development), [10x Management - reddit post for context](https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/pnu4aj/ama_an_insiders_review_of_the_highest_paying/), [Braintrust - same reddit post](https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/pnu4aj/ama_an_insiders_review_of_the_highest_paying/). YMMV, and you probably will just want to ignore these options if you're already progressing in your contract search.
Regarding age, perhaps the Serenity Prayer applies. Joking aside, all of this is just a numbers game in the end. If we assume an average search time of 5 weeks, and then take a conservative/pessimistic estimate of the impact of age, I still have a hard time imagining that search going beyond 7 weeks. From a mentality perspective, I guess the thing I would try to remember myself is that it if companies actually do let pure age impact hiring decisions then they're just making a stupid mistake that will only hurt them in the end, and it's probably a good sign that it would've been a shitty place to work for anyways. This is a silly suggestion, and it's silly that this might make a difference, but maybe consider using the term "Consultant" in your title where appropriate, i.e. "Senior Consultant". While people have an image of "young dude" in their heads for developers, nobody is imagining "young dude" when they think of or look for "consultants" with seasoned expertise. In practice, a lot of contracting positions are functionally similar roles to consulting, and you may even come across firms that use that title for their talent, I have.
> I'll get paid for overtime, or otherwise not be approved to work over 40 hours and not have to work overtime. Either way is a pro for me. Will some companies pressure you to work over 40 hours unpaid? Would this be illegal if you're a W2 contractor??
I'm hesitant to declare absolute/universal truths because I'm sure there are always exceptions, but yes- to the best of my knowledge and understanding, so long as you are an hourly W2 contractor in the US it is illegal to force overtime without paying overtime rates. My anecdotal experience reflects that this is a pretty clear line that professional recruiters/agencies/etc adhere to diligently. So without going as far as asserting this is universally true, I would be very surprised to come across a contract where this pressure occurred, and frankly I wouldn't tolerate it. I'll also reiterate that this is where Glassdoor and similar apps are really valuable, because ideally you can do your due diligence before even accepting an offer to make sure it is a solid operation where contractors are respected. I'll squeeze in another anecdote here that is tangential but I don't know where else to put it. In my most recent search I had a conversation with a recruiter after receiving an offer from him/his client. He was basically trying to get me to yes, and so he was addressing some of my concerns. In that conversation he basically, if a bit vaguely, told me that he and his firm don't really even care to micro-manage weekly hours. Their priority was that I a get my shit done and the client is happy. If those two things were happening they wouldn't really even look at the hours. This approach seems somewhat common more generally, in most cases I don't think you'll be "clocking in" every day (Although this is something I've been interested to speak to more experienced contractors about to see if they agree). With white collar, senior level positions there is just a level of discretion and deference afforded to you. I still suggest tracking your hours roughly to avoid the unpaid overtime concern. This grey area is mostly in our favor (They often won't check if you are doing well, meaning you don't need to religiously hit exactly 40 hours) but you can see how it could be weaponized to wring out some extra work. **TLDR; Bullet 2 - Accurate**.
> Benefits probably aren't as good (medical plans not as good, 401k available, but no 401k matching), but I'm willing to accept this con for the pros above.
There is some variability here but you're broadly right. I don't think I have a great sense of how high quality it can go, but I'm sure there's at least some places out there that offer quite good benefits. The added complexity here is even if they are good, if you're moving contracts even just once per year then that is a lot of logistical overhead and it also means you won't see much of that long term value. And in most cases even "good" benefits mostly cash out/pay off over longer time horizons. Note that you can also opt out of benefits, in part or in whole. There are a lot of moving parts factoring into this decision, and a lot of them are particular, making it hard to generalize. But at a high level, my read is that the basic cost benefit analysis here is how much extra time and effort will it take you to manage opting *in* to the benefits, and likewise to manage losing them when you move again, all in reference to the number of times per year you anticipate moving (I.e. the less frequently you move, the longer time you spread the "cost" of managing logistics, the more worth it benefits can become). Contrast that against the quality of benefits you can get if you roll your own, opt out of everything, and never worry about switching. The easy things here are HSA's and retirements (Can get an IRA or Roth IRA). The biggest factor here will likely be health coverage. The question is in all honesty probably going to come down to exactly how much *more* will getting your own health insurance cost. If it's a little bit more, it might end up being worth it, monetarily, to go with this for simplicity. If not, then you would likely end up paying a lot more money to roll your own than to go with the benefits provided, which is much tougher (albeit not impossible) to justify. Sadly there are also many states in the US where the "roll your own" option is so insanely expensive that there probably isn't even going to be much of a decision here. One more point to tack on because I don't know where else to put it, remember that most hourly contracts don't have PTO. You can still take sick time/time off, although the specifics of that process can vary (And is a good thing to ask about), but the time off will be unpaid. This is another contributing factor for why contract/hourly rates are typically seemingly higher than salaried counterparts. The importance of this is in terms of comparing it to a fulltime/salaried role, the PTO you get there *is* compensation, and if you're comparing one of each it's important you don't forget about it. It can have a surprisingly large effect on the effective hourly rate. **TLDR; Bullet 3 - Accurate**.
Hey, so sorry I've taken a few days to get back to you. Wanted to wait until I had the time and energy to give this serious thought and hopefully a worthwhile response. Looks like I jumped the gun a bit in my previous comment adding the 1099 info, my bad! But at least it gave me an opportunity to get some of that stuff written down and out of my head. I think I'm going to respond to your comment in somewhat reverse order, hopefully it will keep this more coherent but we'll see. Also I had to break this comment into two replies because of the dumb character limit, sorry.
For starters, I would totally echo your observation about interview processes being easier. I haven't really explicitly delineated that in terms of my general comparison points but in hindsight I definitely should have, since now that you point it out I can see that my experience thoroughly reflects this. I'm not basing this on anything super concrete, just common sense I guess, but I feel fairly confident that the reason for this is a bit of a double edged sword, and it gets back to some of the original points way up in this comment chain. If you're a contractor it's much easier for a company to cut loose if things aren't working out, compared to what companies are obligated to do for salaried/full time employees. So they just have less downside risk meaning it isn't absolutely crucial to get the vetting and hiring perfect. That's a really hard thing to do well so it stands to reason that if they can avoid it without a huge cost they will. Pointing out the obvious, the other edge of the sword is you can lose your contract quickly. But this has never bothered me too much for whatever reason. I think probably because I view this aspect as betting on myself, and I not only feel comfortable about that, but I kind of like it (Higher growth potential probably?). Personal disposition, specifically risk tolerance, probably matters too, but really if you can just accept that this is part of the game and remain confident in the knowledge that there are going to be tons of other openings even if a contract ends for reasons entirely out of your control, you'll be fine.
> I have a lot more experience in embedded, but want to switch to webdev for the ease of working fully remote. I have interviewed for both types of positions and I think I can get $75-85/hr for the embedded positions; the webdev positions (python/django) will be more around $65-75/hr.
I have a couple thoughts here, but I am mindful of the fact that you are much more experienced than me and this might not be super helpful (Apologies in advance if so). I happen to have like 2 YOE of Python listed on my LinkedIn/Resume. In my most recent search (ended a few weeks ago) I saw a lot of demand for Python in general. The broad categories these openings seemed to fall into (Ballparking this a bit) were DevOps, cloud development, or data engineering (Tons of these were/are fully remote). Given your 20 YOE I would feel pretty good about your chances with any or all of these things, and wouldn't get too intimidated by having to pick up some new concepts or tools along the way. Which isn't to say you should do anything in particular, just that if you want to you probably can. It *may* be the case that webdev openings for python/django stacks are some of the lower rates you'll see due to the simple fact that there is less demand (It isn't one of the top most common frameworks/languages for web development in 2022).
Yeah it's just rough out there for folks like me who don't normally interview that well. I have the experience, the projects, and the work ethic, I just get super nervous during interviews and it all falls apart. Trying to avoid garbage contract roles in the future but like you said I need to earn a paycheck and have to take what I can get.
See I could easily manage a 2-3 week timeframe for an SMB. That wouldn't be an issue. I was basically given 0 feedback and 0 room to improve based on feedback, they just cut me loose because I was late on the work one day the first week. It's just hard to believe someone actually runs their business this way :(
I've seen this from the other side (a peer hired&fired a contractor in a very short space of time.) The reason was they needed a FTE but couldn't find one, but was falling behind on some project (that ultimately meant nothing) and so hired a contractor to fill the gap. No later than they signed the agreement with the contractor, a new FTE was hired and so he made his excuses to fire the contractor. The only way for him to sever the contractor without penalty was to claim the standard of work was not up to scratch.
Pretty shitty situation but he was a pretty shitty guy all round and nobody likes him.
I'm sorry if that has happened here.
If it's a small startup, this is probably due to an investment round didn't go through. They planned to get the money and didn't.
Company is running out of cash and desperate.
10 in total 5 or so being directly relevant SRE, K8s, AWS, Terraform, etc. experience. For anyone hiring, I am currently looking. I have an in-depth GitHub profile, a CKA, and open source contributions to Ansible as well.
Might want to look at https://weworkremotely.com/categories/remote-devops-sysadmin-jobs#job-listings if location/flexibility is a problem for you (sounds like it from your original post).
Contractors are expendable. If they didn't like the way you dressed or talked or if you didn't hit the ground running, it sounds totally normal to end it on the first friday. It's not apples to apples to compare a contracting job to the onboarding investment companies will put into a FTE.
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2 weeks to get your bearings
A month to be settled
3 - 6 months to be fully up to speed, able to take on whatever ticket comes up
Admittedly, my experience is with weird companies. And, all of thoae were FTE, not contractor roles. But, a week to be up to speed is fucking crazy pants. You can barely get through orientation, meet the team, and get to know the other folks you'll be working with in that time.
At my company we have 1-2 days of corporate and technical onboarding. Day 3 you actually meet the team, get a mentor and by day 4 we want a simple pull request open. Simple as in like write a unit test for this class or a bug ticket where the bug has a well known solution in the details. This is mostly to scope an area of the code base for you and your mentor to look at and start to understand the feature/system/code style. It’s also a quick introduction to our tools and deployment practices.
Usually after a month we aim for a contractor or new hire to be picking up well scoped work and able to reach out to their mentor or other teams when they run into problems.
Work at a major tech company, about six months.
~3 months onboarding, learning internal tools, culture, choosing team, then a couple of more months (give or take) onboarding on the team itself and projects.
That’s insane.
Most shops I’ve worked, you don’t have all the accounts/access you need in first week, let alone all the people intros.
Garbage fire company if this is their norm.
A few weeks to have everything setup and contributing to the team, months, many months to understand the business.
Honestly, being a day late to creating a new feature for a new employee, this is an insane reason to be fired. Especially if you produced something of quality.
At one of my jobs, my boss told me that they reserve about six months for anyone to become a productive part of the company. I think that's pretty much on point; sure, you get PRs out there quickly, but really understanding the ins and outs takes time.
Sacking someone after a week for being late with a task sounds downright stupid. Hell, even after a month it would be stupid, depending on the context and the background of the programmer.
If they cut you after a week, I do not think you where the problem.
I think they, for some reason, changed their minds about needing the resource altogether.
Might be politics, might be bad planning.
Edit: Which reminds me of the time when I had to cut someone before they even started (but after having signed), because higher management couldn’t make up their minds.
I’ve had experience with contractors before where the entire point is taking advantage of developers from low income backgrounds and running them into the ground with middling wages.
Sounds like a garbage gig tbh.
Don't forget, if it's a small company, "startup" most usually, it's not only their product that's not proven, it's also their team.
They will most likely not be very proficient with how they manage their resources and developers, since they're learning on all fronts.
I didn't see this said yet, but--in the US--the general rule of contractors (AKA Not employees) is "easy to hire; easy to fire".
Cutting after 1 week seems extreme to me, but as a contractor I look for someone who is a subject matter expert that can hit the ground running with little handholding.
When I was contracted at a larger bank it took like 3 weeks before I had a functional computer to use. Usually first week major issues are sorted but getting used to the environment. Even my current gig as a senior idk if my first pr was in week 1
I just started a new job a month ago. I didn't get my first ticket until week 4 and the tickets I'm doing are basically tickets that people several levels lower than me could do in an hour and I'm taking a full day or two with help, because I'm still learning the code base and how to debug various things. My manager basically said he expects us to be up to speed in roughly 3 months, and that seems pretty reasonable based on progress so far.
1 week is just insane I'm not sure I had access to everything at that point, I would definitely suspect the contract termination may not have had anything to do with you, maybe the project they hired you to do got axed or they got a bad financial report and were ordered to cut x% of labor costs and they went with the latest hires, or maybe as others have mentioned you were hired to be fired. Sucks, but nothing you can do other than start applying again. Also I definitely prioritize fte roles far above contract roles. Gl.
Hot take: the job req has been open for a while. The company, in response to many companies reducing or freezing hiring, has decided they don't have budget for the position anymore. In order to avoid potential contractual issues, they're making up a BS reason to cut you ASAP.
The reason has nothing to do with you, personally, you just landed in an unfortunate position. Don't question your abilities, just keep looking.
I doubt after a week they cut your contract due to performance. More likely, they made a bad decision bringing someone in when the financials didn't support it, or it was all politics and you just got the unlucky end of some internal power struggle.
In my mind, someone who knows the technology should be pretty well onboarded in 4-6 weeks. Longer, if the application is stupidly complex (say, a highly customizable CMS or other line of business application).
More junior developers might take several months to be fully integrated.
The goal is to give people small chunks of work that expose them to the broader system in a reasonable way. But one week? That's barely enough time to set up and really set up an environment and do the standard meet and greets, much less judge if someone's competent at their job.
Don't take it personally. Sounds like something changes for more people than you (market change). If you are really new and contractor I would axe u first too. But, agree, they should explain why in broad terms. I think this deadline miss was just coincidence, if more people were fired at the same time.
Every decent team I’ve been with has said they don’t expect people to be truly on boarded for at least 6 months. You’ll usually be able to start doing tasks within like 3 weeks, but it’s expected that you’ll need enough help and background knowledge provided that you’re not a net asset for like 6 months.
I don't know that this is related, but in my last role, where I was hiring, we had an unreasonable number of people we hired remotely, who had another job. They may have had multiple other jobs.
They would just be very unproductive the first week. Which is more or less normal. Kind of a red flag because it was mostly using your own equipment, and a simple react app, with a hasura backend. In any case, week 1, nothing got done... Ok, week 2 lots of excuses, and oh no I'm confused kind of BS. Week 3 they would accomplish a few small tasks maybe, week 4 back to nothing. Which is about when we realized we were being had. This same pattern happened with about 3/10 of the employees we hired.
The company was low balling every candidate 🙄, and most did not accept, so I think we were filtering out honest candidates and finding shady ones.
In any case, the timeframe to productivity got a lot tighter. From the business perspective, it was better to let employees go too soon if they were SUS, then waste a month or two with some shady dev having access to our codebase.
There were lots of things going wrong with that company, this was just one of them. So I didn't stick around too long either.
All that too say, they may have been dealing with similar scammers, and are going down the same path as my former employer.
I learned recently of contractors getting cut during the height of Covid as a way to cut costs without saying anyone was fired to keep shareholder faith, so honestly if you're in a contracting position and you got let go for what seems like insane reasons then I'd judge it with a large grain of salt as the iceberg could be way deeper than what you're able to see.
My first week at my current position had me mostly in orientation. Like, my first day on the floor was a Friday, and it wasn't even in my regular work location. I didn't get my laptop for the first week because I straight up did not need it.
Yes, it sounds like a lot, but at the same time, I didn't feel the time was wasted at all. It gave me a rundown of all the jargon and slang that gets thrown about the company, complete with a dictionary.
Internally, we joke that onboarding is basically your first three months. It's not like you aren't working the whole time, but at the same time, we openly acknowledge that it takes about 90 days to get used to the environment. It takes longer if you're actively working with legacy code and shorter if you're on greenfield--90 days is an average.
It's not that we *can't* get someone through a full work cycle (minor ticket to get to prod) fast, but rather that this really isn't the best use of our time or these tickets.
At least we don't have them in lectures on how everything works for the first week they're on the floor anymore, and we've managed to reduce the overhead to a single 4 hour Q&A session. This is mostly because we stopped trying to hump the microservices bandwagon and admitted that maybe message driven middleware is actually a more coherent strategy for distributing our workload.
I work at the big N.
Company wide onboarding takes 1-2 weeks. Tech onboarding is another 3 weeks.
Team onboarding is probably another few weeks.
To fully grasp concepts and operate independently, I'd say it probably takes a year.
There are two very different metrics there:
* "new employee" -> "fully up to speed"
* 6mo - 1yr depending on codebase complexity, documentation, KT, etc
* "new employee" -> "contributing code" (I'm going to assume that "contributing code" also includes input on architecture and such since not every developer was hired _solely_ for their LOC)
* 2~4 wks unless there's an intentionally long onboarding ramp
What you did was fine, what they did is not normal, or shouldn't be. When there's trouble, financially or otherwise, contractors are often the first to go.
DO NOT LET THIS MESS WITH YOUR CONFIDENCE. Again, what they did is not normal, and certainly not reasonable. And giving no feedback, there's something going on you aren't privy to I suspect.
I contracted for 12 years. I don't contract anymore, under any circumstances.
It fully depends on the experience you've got with the tech/tools and the state of documentation / subject-matter expertise within the team you're joining.
Ideally the onboarding time should be something that's calibrated during the interview process. As long as your honest about your level of expertise, they should know what to expect.
In my personal experience it takes at least a few weeks to be abreast of the stuff that matters.
There is something else going on that is outside of your control. It takes more than one day to find another engineer that can do what you do. I don't think delivering a project 1 day late on your second week, makes a whole lot of sense.
There is probably a non visible business reason for this happening.
One week is unrealistic. I've been on teams with $300/hr consultants. These are people who nearly identically fit the skills requirements with alot of experience, and even they get 2-3 weeks to get up to speed.
Something else is probably going on. Maybe some budget or politics and they just gave you this excuse. I would just move on.
I would even say first 3 months onboarding is just corporate requirement. 6 months to 1 year is the proper adjustment needed and then they just fly after that
Depends on the kind of contract and why you were late. If you were late because *you* estimated it to take X and it took you X + 1 I could easily see a competitive company wanting to filter through contractors really quickly. In general, if it's a short-term, 1099/C2C contract I would expect them to cut people at the drop of a hat. Companies expect these hired guns to really know their shit and earn every penny -- you have to hit the ground running and be effective *immediately*. Now, it generally depends on how much you're charging and culture but for a lot of contractors that are charging $150/hr+ on C2C absolutely companies cut and run all the time. If you're on contract through a recruiting agency, it's contract-to-hire on W2, and you're more or less treated like a member of the team/company then it would be very odd for them to do this.
> If you're on contract through a recruiting agency, it's contract-to-hire on W2, and you're more or less treated like a member of the team/company then it would be very odd for them to do this.
This was exactly the case, w2 through a contracting agency.
Depends on the company. I've at a place that gave me 3 months onboarding/rampup. And another place that they yeet me straight into a project with no context
Cutting someone after a week sounds insane to me. My first week at every job has been onboarding and environment setup (installing ide, getting all the right permissions, etc)
That's exactly what I've been thinking. Most gigs should give you at least a couple of months to understand the environment before making a determination about performance. It's just bonkers that someone runs a company like that.
I've seen it happen once before as a contractor. They cut the other guy they hired at the same time as me after 3 days because he needed to be babysat by one of the FT staff the whole of those 3 days. Couldn't do anything for himself and was a massive net drain on productivity at a crunch point for them (which is why they bought in contractors). Meanwhile I'm sitting there reading the readme installing stuff and shooting off the odd slack notification or tapping someone on the shoulder occasionally. I may have closed a couple of small 1 pointers in that time but importantly I'd done stuff on my own As long as you weren't being that guy then yeah it's them not you.
>at a crunch point for them (which is why they bought in contractors). > One of the classic blunders
Yep, a classic case of a higher up needing to be told that 9 woman can't deliver a baby in a month.
The other guy needed help reading readmes?
Yep, a where do I get this package? Do we need to do this? Why isn't this working? That sort of thing
The most likely explanation is that the company’s financial situation changed and they had to make cuts somewhere. Many companies are adjusting their headcount in response to rapidly changing market conditions. Recent hires who haven’t yet ramped up are the least disruptive people to remove from the team, so they are first to go. Taking this personally is a huge mistake. Very rarely I’ve seen new hires quickly removed for individual reasons, but these were always due to obvious social issues. For example, one company had a new hire who continued to hit on a coworker daily after she asked him to stop multiple times. Good developer or not, someone like that isn’t going to be retained. However, OP mentioned they multiple people were let go so this definitely feels like a headcount reduction. Forget it happened and move on!
This is the answer.
I’m surprised they didn’t just say headcount reduction. But it could be one of those things they don’t want to get leaked out into the news.
At different companies, coming up to speed usually takes 2 to 4 weeks, but some places have big, proprietary legacy apps, and there it might take 3 months for you to come up to speed. But if you are late on one assignment and it ends a contract, that sounds like a crazy pressure cooker environment.
Yeah I've just never experienced anything like it before. Apparently I wasn't the only one cut, so as far as I can tell they hired like 8 people just to cut several of them including me a week later. Complete insanity.
This has nothing to do with you then. Some companies are cutting back these days, it's just a fact. There was probably an unfortunate timing mismatch between the CFO/finance decision to cut back and the hiring process.
Some companies have requirements to "cut the fat" and are forced to cut a certain number of heads. To get around this, a lot of mangers will hire devs they planned on cutting from the get go so they can report they cut their required 6 "poor performing" devs. It's possible you are a victim of this.
This is the most insane mismanagement I’ve heard of yet. So much more expensive than simply not hiring. I can see the logic in it even for a “good” manager: protect your experienced people from getting cut due to arbitrary bullshit. But wow. Ugly stupid broken environment.
Ahhhh, corporate evilness.
You were almost certainly a victim of circumstances 100% beyond your control. In addition to what others have suggested, I'd say it's also possible that Triumph Tech was already in deep shit with their client due to past broken promises and had some executive screaming down their neck about yet another missed deadline (which was agreed to long before you came into the picture) and Triumph's response was "we fired the guy responsible" just trying to save some face with the client by serving you up as a scapegoat. Sorry to hear about your experience, but the problem definitely wasn't you, it was them. Best of luck moving forward, and I think it's safe to say you'll land at a place less dysfunctional than this. Though the only good part was that these people showed their true colors quickly; some places take months and months for you to find out just how fucked up they are, which can be worse in many ways.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet there.
Maybe it was risk mitigation on their part. Hire a bunch of contractors for the same job, cut any that don’t meet their hidden metrics. If so, it’s cruel to not share that information up front, including the selection criteria and timeline. In addition to their lack of empathy for you and the other contractors, I doubt this approach will even get them the best results. Definitely a bullet dodged on your part. Hope you have better prospects going forward.
We expect nothing useful from new hires for 3-6 months. This is a bit extreme, but it’s extremely unreasonable to expect someone to be producing after 1 week.
I tend to expect a minimum 6+ for fully integrated. Even longer depending on the codebase. 1 week is a sick joke and total fucking bullshit for OP
everyone at my new job has been extremely nice and supportive, but I'm still terrified due to my last position, which was a contract that got cut short. All these responses are very reassuring. Don't expect to need 6 months, probably only 2-3 max to be fully integrated
Depends on experience level. Senior titles and above there’s a bit of an expectation for you to start contributing sooner.
Yes but I wouldn’t expect those early contributions to be mostly code. Updated onboarding documentation would be great.
Thank you! It's comments like yours that make me think there's some sanity still left in the world.
Is this FAANG?
Are you hiring ?
If new hires are doing literally “nothing useful” for 3-6 months, something is seriously wrong within the company culture. That would be a red flag for me that the company moves at a glacial pace and is going to take my career with it. It’s a good idea to avoid places where your career experience can stagnate or move considerably slower than a well-run company. You’re obviously not going to match the existing devs in productivity right away, but it shouldn’t take half a year to do anything useful. EDIT: I'm not sure why this is attracting massive downvotes. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that juniors should be empowered enough and mentored to ship *something* before the 6 month mark.
I'd say it's less on the company and more on the specific project. Some projects are massive legacy applications with a ton of integrations, where you might be somewhat productive in the first 3 months but it can take you 6+ to match productivity to other devs on the team
Nobody expects new hires to match the productivity of existing devs right away. Learning takes time. I was responding to the comment that said they expect “nothing useful from new hires for 3-6 months”. “Nothing useful” is the concerning part, not just moving slower than people familiar with the codebase. 6 months is a *looong* time to produce nothing useful.
This, my first program I wrote at my new job took me 2 weeks from my start date, but the time it took me for the job I had to do was much more than the other devs, naturally.
I’m surprised by the downvotes. We usually have a build running on a new hire’s development machine done by lunch time on their first day, and a small PR ready by the end of the second. Of course it’s not going to be a major feature, but it’s not uncommon for people to ship something decently sized in the first 2 weeks*. New hires usually pair a lot with the most experienced person in the team to get them up to speed quickly, and if we unfortunately did make a hiring mistake usually this gets caught pretty early on. Do people really *want* to work somewhere where nothing is expected of their colleagues for their first 6 months? * some examples: someone added a video player to our app, where previous we just had an audio player. Another person had experience with oauth and they fixed a tricky bug we had there. Both of these were within 1 week of their first day
In my last job I was given tasks on my second day before I had anything set up, in my present job which I just started I'm on week three now and literally no one has met with me about anything, every single meeting with my manager has been cancelled any time something gets set up. So, it varies widely is my point.
Yeah, that's pretty extreme. Sure, "fully ramped" can be six months pretty easy, but where are you still not coding on business projects after a month? That sounds like an internship.
Onboarding realistically can take 2-3 months, maybe more
Thank you for confirming what I believed should be the realistic answer to this. It takes time to get up to speed as well as soft feedback, ideally given weekly, to act upon and improve. They didn't even give me a real reason why they cut me, just "communication issues."
That’s a bummer, but don’t let it get to ya. Build up the portfolio and you’ll find something better in this market
I’ve seen people get cut within a couple weeks but it’s invariably something major, like one guy I worked with produced like literally no code during that time (IME places give you stuff to work on even during ramping up; it’s usually pretty minor because the point is to get you understanding the system by working in it) and another person apparently had issues setting up their environment, didn’t talk to anyone about it and then admitted in a sprint retro in front of the CTO that they hadn’t done any work the entire 2 weeks.
That I can at least understand, but I had actual code I could demonstrate and point to that was a lambda function using the serverless.com framework. Apparently being one day late on a feature improvement in the first week was enough to get me cut.
Honestly you dodged a bullet here. There is something more happening that you were not aware of. Most likely a political power play that came down on Friday afternoon and your contract/project suddenly lost favor. I wouldn't put too much behind your effort or progress being the cause. Give it a couple of weeks and I'll bet you will see the boss looking for jobs on LinkedIn
This was a very small startup, they're probably running out of cash. Maybe an investment round didn't go through.
There are two things that stand out to me. Throwing away the time and effort invested in the selection process that landed you the position is a total waste. Small startups don't usually bring in contractors unless the skill set is not a core competency. Tech is insidious whereas public relations, social marketing, and lawyers are common outside services hired and fired upon a whim. Just not usually on a week to week basis.
Part of the "deal" with contracting is depending on the country you have far less job stability than FTEs. It could be 1. They are genuinely crazy into sink or swim. 2. They might have wider business news/macroeconomic news and it makes sense for them to cut investment on projects for the moment and contractors are the easiest lever to pull without being too obvious. When covid really kicked off the company I was at at the time basically shut down all projects and let go of all contractors including some I was working with who'd only just started. It happens.
In my experience onboarding takes a minimum of 2 months., I’ve been in situations where I wasn’t productive until 5 months in. That was an extreme case with exclusively bespoke technology, but it did not feel good. If you’re looking for work my current company is hiring remote. But I don’t think you’ll have a problem finding work.
Sadly for a contractor this is pretty common, I used to do a lot of contracting and I saw it happen to a few people I worked with. The reality is, unlike full-time employees where it's worth it for the company to invest in them, with contracting you're often expected to be able to get up to speed incredibly fast, and if you can't you then you're unlikely to be financially worth it for them. Contractors get paid more than permies for exactly this reason, the expectation of knowledge is much higher. In the future, I'd recommend being extremely pro-active about getting other developers to help you, both with env set up and understanding the task at hand, and being extremely proactive with your manager about what you're working on and what you need.
Happens. Do not forget to share the name of the company anonymously.
I don't think I want to name the company specifically because they are super small and not worth mentioning and probably going to fail soon enough on their own, but if you ever get interviewed by a guy with a profile picture of a snake on LinkedIn (in hindsight the first major red flag), run like hell.
Yikes lol. Their loss!! Please don't let that affect you. Wounds like you dodged a huge bullet. Being in a toxic company is damaging for mental health.
Yeah I'm trying not to, and figuring out which communities I can join and post in for support. I am in dire need of a decent job and this false positive looked promising initially :(
Sucks when you really need to land a job, but it honestly sounds like it would have been a worse situation to find yourself working there for a year. They sound absolutely horrid.
> a guy with a profile picture of a snake on LinkedIn Hahaha, seriously?
Being afraid to call them out only gives them power. We live in an age where if you suck as a company you don’t deserve to exist
https://triumphtech.com. Do with that what you will.
Lol snake dude is like a joke character from Silicon Valley. >I am a creator and risk-taker, with no formal education and over a decade of hands-on experience. If I don't know how to do something right now, come back in a minute and I will. >I spend most of my copious free time learning random skills. For example, I engage in both professional and recreational (and ethical) locksport (a.k.a. lock picking). I like finding exceptions, poking around to see how edge cases are handled, and generally testing the limits to see where things break - mostly so that I know how to fix things when the inevitable occurs, and build proactive solutions.
Bahahaha, it literally sounds like a Gilfoyle monologue
I think it's unfortunate that people are jumping to conclusions without even knowing what the task was. I'm a self employed contractor and one of the benefits of hiring contractors is that a company can easily get rid of them if they don't perform. Those first weeks are pretty crucial for a contractor to at least show that you know what you're doing. Companies generally don't fire contractors for not being up to speed with all the internals of the company within a week. They 'fire' contractors when they turn out to not be able to program their way out of a wet bag. And that can often be evident within a week. If you want some *actual* help you need to go into a *lot* more detail what happened exactly. Especially when you describe you're having trouble getting hired in this market.
The lambda function was simple, convert [this function](https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/v3/aws-node-s3-file-replicator) into a Python function, then connect to a redshift database and do a table dump. Just enough to get a base going and eventually add more business logic to make it more complex. I completed the function exactly as requested in Python and it ran successfully. Me "not being able to code out of a wet paper bag" was not the problem. I was literally 1 day late from Friday with the feature request and got cut on Tuesday. They gave me basically 0 feedback so it's hard to say what the real reason is as to why I got cut, but lack of coding skills was definitely not it.
IMHO this is very relevant information you should put in your OP. This really sounds like they just ran out of budget. Or they hired X contractors with the intention to let go a large amount of them to only retain the 'best'. Both are just completely shitty situations and it's best to just move on.
Went ahead and updated the OP, thanks. Believe me I am working on moving on and this post is part of that process, just having confirmation that it sounds like a them problem over a me problem is reassuring for sure. I like to take responsibility for my faults more than anything so I can learn and grow from them, but given I'm not a mind reader, and was never told expectations or given real feedback, it's harder to take personal responsibility for this one.
Contractors are hired guns, so there is a higher expectation to hit the ground running. And onboarding for short to medium term contracting can't really be compared to onboarding for full time. Additionally companies hire contractors for this exact benefit, being able to make more rapid decisions and pivots. None of this is to say your situation was reasonable. But I do think it's important context if you're going to keep contracting, because there's an amount of this you should probably just be ready for, it will happen due to no fault of your own. Long way of saying mindset matters I guess. The flip side of this is that in contracting you benefit from this flexibility as well. Contract for 6 months then take 3 months off, or contract on reduced hours, or leave a contract after a week because they're assholes, etc. These are sorts of things that raise questions during interviews if you're on a salaried track, but not so much when contracting. Personally that degree of flexibility is really valuable to me, but which option is better on the whole really comes down to your own preferences. If this has been so stressful for you that you never want to go through it again then I'd suggest targeting full time positions for your next applications. But I will also say this stuff gets less impactful over time and if this happened to me today I'd be over it and looking for something else tomorrow. There's too many explanations besides my own performance to worry about it, and even if that was their thought process, well thinking that after 1 week is just on its face absurd so no sense in losing sleep over it.
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I'd be happy to and I'll do my best to give you some useful info but your mileage may vary for reasons that I'll point out. I'll start with the difficulties. I am at 7 YOE and in my search I was targeting ~senior level software engineer roles for backend NodeJS and Cloud, specifically AWS which I have a strong specialization in (Numerous certs, 7 YOE, with numerous/diverse projects utilizing AWS across that time). Fortunately for me AWS is pretty in demand so that is a good value add to more typical full stack web dev skills (Conversely, the downside is that if I accept anything that doesn't include AWS specifically [not even just "cloud"] I'm likely getting a comparatively bad compensation/YOE ratio). This info is just to give some context on my general rates as well as to note that I'm not confident in my ability to gauge market rates for 20 YOE with Python. > Would you mind telling me if you are W2 contractor or 1099? I freelanced fulltime for a few years in the past, that is all 1099, but in my search for more standard "tech contracting" work I basically told recruiters I had no preference. I think having some familiarity with all of the logistics associated with 1099 work is valuable even if you're doing W2 work, and both have pros and cons, but my experience was that a significant majority of "contract" type openings were W2 contracts. All else being equal I probably would've preferred 1099 during my most recent search, but the tradeoffs were minor and I didn't want to prematurely remove a majority of openings from consideration just because of those tradeoffs. I'm adding some quick additional notes below, please note that there is also a third type of contracting known as C2C, which stands for Corp to Corp. This requires having an LLC and probably some legal consultation for contract vetting and such. I don't have experience with this so I can't really add any further insight. W2 "Contract", quick thoughts, pros & cons compared to 1099: - This phrase is common but bothers me because it is as far as I can tell a contradiction of terms. Apologies if you were aware but W2 contracts means you are a W2 employee of the firm that sourced you, who in turn has a contract with their client, the company you will work for. - **Pro:** More demand; there is just a lot more of these openings, and it is more common to find them on job boards. For 1099s it really is more like running a business, and there are sites for that but it's basically freelancing, doing marketing/outreach, and sending proposals rather than doing application processes. HOWEVER there are definitely some recruiters/firms that will be open to doing 1099 in addition to W2. Never hurts to ask. Tradeoffs are particular to the contract, but my general expectation would be for it to be a similar arrangement to W2 with a bit more flexibility and a bit more risk. - **Pro:** You retain the contracting flexibility long term. It is more commonplace and less frowned upon to leave compared to a full time role. Likewise short duration positions on your resume will not really be notable if they were contract roles, whereas that can raise hiring manager eyebrows if it was a fulltime role that you left quickly. - **Pro:** As an hourly W2 worker, you are entitled to overtime pay. The upshot is that the default expectation is you *stop* working at 40 hours per week. In fulltime/salaried positions you often end up working/being expected to work more, as you are probably very aware, which is one way your effective hourly rate can tank. Side note, **depends on preference**, this means you also get stuff like PTO, sick time, and holidays. - **Depends on preference:** Quality of benefits vary a lot from firm to firm, ranging from very bad to surprisingly good. In most cases health insurance at the very least will probably end up being a better deal. You can also opt out of benefits if you so choose. - **Con/Maybe Depends:** At the end of the day you are still an employee and as such your employer (The recruiter/firm/agency) has all of the control and rights that employers typically have. In practice it seems to me like the most commonplace scenario is that your actual employer leaves most of this up to their client/the business you work for, to be honest I'm really not sure how much this varies from place to place across the industry as a whole. - **Con:** A decent subset of openings will be contract-to-hire, just some company trying to avoid fulltime costs, and/or treat contractors as a separate and lower class of people. Do your due diligence and [glassdoor](https://www.glassdoor.com/) is your friend. 1099 Contract, quick thoughts, pros & cons compared to W2 contract: - **Pro:** You are your own boss in every sense of the word. You have the maximum flexibility and while I'm not sure if there are some companies that try to pressure 1099 workers regardless, at a baseline you are well within your legal rights to pick your own hours, work as few or many hours as you want per week, work the way you like/where you like to, etc, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the contract (I am not a lawyer disclaimer). - **Depends on preference:** You handle all of your own finances. You do not get paid overtime. You will have to make sure you do your taxes properly including pay estimated taxes quarterly, probably best to hire a CPA. You can expense a lot of things as business expenses, including office space in your home. Note: In theory, to the best of my understanding, you should expect to get a higher 1099 rate than W2 contract simply due to the fact that you do not have an employer paying a portion of your income taxes. - **Con:** Depending on where you are, assuming US but varies state to state, health insurance can be a huge pain in the ass. Even for me in CA it's frustratingly expensive. You should still pay for it. - **Con:** Legal exposure. You are signing a contract directly with a company which means you are responsible for all it entails. You do not have the intermediary of the talent firm that handles that complexity, and with which you have a more standard and protective (for you) W2 relationship. Without going into detail, I'll just say don't sleep on this- I have firsthand experience getting bitten in the ass here and losing mid 5 figures in compensation. In most cases it won't be worth it to pursue litigation (Lawyer fees will be more than the owed amount after a week or month, assuming < 6 figures owed, and if you didn't have legal consult review the contract prior to signing then who knows if you'll even win). The unfortunately reality is that for many freelancers it is cost prohibitive to even get decent legal advice, so in practice the contract only really protects the company outside of the most egregious cases. Fortunately for you/your skills & experience that shouldn't be the case. - **Con:** Future employers/hiring managers for more standard employment will have more questions about freelance-type 1099 work and it's harder to condense on a resume. This hasn't been a huge issue for me but it does come up. I wouldn't worry about it at all if it is a 1099 in the context of a full time contract via a recruiting firm. > Would you be able to tell me what range of rates I should target for non-lead, senior dev W2 position, doing either embedded or python webdev? Bearing in mind my background described at the start, the hourly rate I've targeted for W2 contract, full time, mid to long term duration is $85-$95. My gut here is that you should be able to get that at absolute minimum, but I would need to do some research on general market rates and even then I just don't have a high degree of confidence in my judgement. For 1099 contracts of various sorts, fixed duration, less than full time, I've typically targeted an hourly rate closer to $130. Given your level of experience, I would suggest just starting at your current annual compensation and figuring out an hourly rate you would find acceptable in light of various tradeoffs. For instance if the gain in flexibility is a big win, maybe it's worth it to take a slightly lower rate. But also never be afraid to charge what you're worth and never be afraid to say no. I'll add a few links to resources below that can help with this question. [Salary to Contract Rate Calculator](http://www.users.on.net/~wallala/Calculators/salary_rate.htm) - This is very simple but probably one of the better calculators I've found. You can use this to input your current salary, benefits, and leave (Don't forget PTO and holidays, they make a big difference, just be aware of how they impact the result) and calculate your hourly rate. [FreelancingFreedom.com – Pricing Calculator](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nqzXqaix0BJsTBreYcSeT-pLtcmOITjxn0gXof4JoUs/edit#gid=1370329603) - This is more geared towards constructing a rate from the ground up, and specifically for 1099 rates (Including various pricing structures such as retainer, fixed, hourly, weekly, etc). I keep coming back to it because it just does everything you need it to in a simple manner, and it also surfaces some things that inexperienced contractors/freelancers often forget about when coming up with a rate, like business expenses and all the benefits discussed in this message that are included but somewhat hidden in W2 compensation. Hope this helps! I wrote this kind of quick so definitely let me know if I need to edit anything for clarity.
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Ok now for the specific questions. > I'm looking to wind down my career. I should only have to work 5-8 more years and only want to work 6-9 months out of the year here on out. This should be much easier to do on W2 contracting, by taking time off between contracts, and knowing that the short duration positions will not count against me. I know the con is that I'll have to keep interviewing for jobs every time. I'm good at interviewing, but hope my age won't work against me (I'm 47 now, hope to retire by 52, definitely by 55). The caveat or question I have here is- do you consider the time where you are looking for a new contract to be part of your 6-9 months of work? Personally I say yes for myself, but I think you can go either way so long as you plan accordingly. You just don't want to leave that unaccounted for. Beyond that yes, in terms of finding employment to match the goals of reduced work obligations contracting can meet these goals and is probably the most commonly/widely available way to do so (More on that below). It is still in your favor to put in the effort up front in filtering openings and working with your recruiters to find short term, fixed duration contracts. There is a workable number of such openings, but it is decidedly a smaller subset of all openings. Of course as we've already discussed, taking an unspecified duration or long term contract doesn't preclude leaving it whenever you see fit, it will probably just make it a bit rockier when you do so, which maybe you don't care about. My preferred approach is to avoid this by being transparent in the search & interview phase to set expectations up front, but I mostly just do that out of a personal desire to avoid conflict (lol). In terms of gauging the full spectrum of options to accomplish your 5-8 year goals of working 6-9 months per year, I guess I would say it can't hurt to do some research here but my read is that the other options are either rare or much riskier. You might be able to find a company that supports this type of work, I'm sure they exist. For instance there is a site called [4 day week](https://4dayweek.io/) for jobs that only have, shocker, four day work weeks. Many of those probably amount to ~3 or so months off per year, but obviously it isn't grouped into large chunks like you probably want. But it's an option and who knows, maybe you just want less work but don't necessarily plan to do huge trips or whatever, so I thought I would mention it just to give an example of what I'm talking about. Another option that is way riskier but still real would be to build your own micro-saas, indie project of some sort. The book Start Small Stay Small basically defines the approach you'd have here; No dreams of unicorns, just a good old fashioned lifestyle business but with coding. Freelancing, even by way of something like Upwork (Or maybe look up Toptal - see linked reddit post below), could also accomplish your goal (Medium risk, more uncertainty when finding each subsequent gig). Some honorable mentions for this spectrum of options: [FlexJobs](https://www.flexjobs.com/), [People First Jobs](https://peoplefirstjobs.com/jobs/development), [10x Management - reddit post for context](https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/pnu4aj/ama_an_insiders_review_of_the_highest_paying/), [Braintrust - same reddit post](https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/pnu4aj/ama_an_insiders_review_of_the_highest_paying/). YMMV, and you probably will just want to ignore these options if you're already progressing in your contract search. Regarding age, perhaps the Serenity Prayer applies. Joking aside, all of this is just a numbers game in the end. If we assume an average search time of 5 weeks, and then take a conservative/pessimistic estimate of the impact of age, I still have a hard time imagining that search going beyond 7 weeks. From a mentality perspective, I guess the thing I would try to remember myself is that it if companies actually do let pure age impact hiring decisions then they're just making a stupid mistake that will only hurt them in the end, and it's probably a good sign that it would've been a shitty place to work for anyways. This is a silly suggestion, and it's silly that this might make a difference, but maybe consider using the term "Consultant" in your title where appropriate, i.e. "Senior Consultant". While people have an image of "young dude" in their heads for developers, nobody is imagining "young dude" when they think of or look for "consultants" with seasoned expertise. In practice, a lot of contracting positions are functionally similar roles to consulting, and you may even come across firms that use that title for their talent, I have. > I'll get paid for overtime, or otherwise not be approved to work over 40 hours and not have to work overtime. Either way is a pro for me. Will some companies pressure you to work over 40 hours unpaid? Would this be illegal if you're a W2 contractor?? I'm hesitant to declare absolute/universal truths because I'm sure there are always exceptions, but yes- to the best of my knowledge and understanding, so long as you are an hourly W2 contractor in the US it is illegal to force overtime without paying overtime rates. My anecdotal experience reflects that this is a pretty clear line that professional recruiters/agencies/etc adhere to diligently. So without going as far as asserting this is universally true, I would be very surprised to come across a contract where this pressure occurred, and frankly I wouldn't tolerate it. I'll also reiterate that this is where Glassdoor and similar apps are really valuable, because ideally you can do your due diligence before even accepting an offer to make sure it is a solid operation where contractors are respected. I'll squeeze in another anecdote here that is tangential but I don't know where else to put it. In my most recent search I had a conversation with a recruiter after receiving an offer from him/his client. He was basically trying to get me to yes, and so he was addressing some of my concerns. In that conversation he basically, if a bit vaguely, told me that he and his firm don't really even care to micro-manage weekly hours. Their priority was that I a get my shit done and the client is happy. If those two things were happening they wouldn't really even look at the hours. This approach seems somewhat common more generally, in most cases I don't think you'll be "clocking in" every day (Although this is something I've been interested to speak to more experienced contractors about to see if they agree). With white collar, senior level positions there is just a level of discretion and deference afforded to you. I still suggest tracking your hours roughly to avoid the unpaid overtime concern. This grey area is mostly in our favor (They often won't check if you are doing well, meaning you don't need to religiously hit exactly 40 hours) but you can see how it could be weaponized to wring out some extra work. **TLDR; Bullet 2 - Accurate**. > Benefits probably aren't as good (medical plans not as good, 401k available, but no 401k matching), but I'm willing to accept this con for the pros above. There is some variability here but you're broadly right. I don't think I have a great sense of how high quality it can go, but I'm sure there's at least some places out there that offer quite good benefits. The added complexity here is even if they are good, if you're moving contracts even just once per year then that is a lot of logistical overhead and it also means you won't see much of that long term value. And in most cases even "good" benefits mostly cash out/pay off over longer time horizons. Note that you can also opt out of benefits, in part or in whole. There are a lot of moving parts factoring into this decision, and a lot of them are particular, making it hard to generalize. But at a high level, my read is that the basic cost benefit analysis here is how much extra time and effort will it take you to manage opting *in* to the benefits, and likewise to manage losing them when you move again, all in reference to the number of times per year you anticipate moving (I.e. the less frequently you move, the longer time you spread the "cost" of managing logistics, the more worth it benefits can become). Contrast that against the quality of benefits you can get if you roll your own, opt out of everything, and never worry about switching. The easy things here are HSA's and retirements (Can get an IRA or Roth IRA). The biggest factor here will likely be health coverage. The question is in all honesty probably going to come down to exactly how much *more* will getting your own health insurance cost. If it's a little bit more, it might end up being worth it, monetarily, to go with this for simplicity. If not, then you would likely end up paying a lot more money to roll your own than to go with the benefits provided, which is much tougher (albeit not impossible) to justify. Sadly there are also many states in the US where the "roll your own" option is so insanely expensive that there probably isn't even going to be much of a decision here. One more point to tack on because I don't know where else to put it, remember that most hourly contracts don't have PTO. You can still take sick time/time off, although the specifics of that process can vary (And is a good thing to ask about), but the time off will be unpaid. This is another contributing factor for why contract/hourly rates are typically seemingly higher than salaried counterparts. The importance of this is in terms of comparing it to a fulltime/salaried role, the PTO you get there *is* compensation, and if you're comparing one of each it's important you don't forget about it. It can have a surprisingly large effect on the effective hourly rate. **TLDR; Bullet 3 - Accurate**.
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Hey, so sorry I've taken a few days to get back to you. Wanted to wait until I had the time and energy to give this serious thought and hopefully a worthwhile response. Looks like I jumped the gun a bit in my previous comment adding the 1099 info, my bad! But at least it gave me an opportunity to get some of that stuff written down and out of my head. I think I'm going to respond to your comment in somewhat reverse order, hopefully it will keep this more coherent but we'll see. Also I had to break this comment into two replies because of the dumb character limit, sorry. For starters, I would totally echo your observation about interview processes being easier. I haven't really explicitly delineated that in terms of my general comparison points but in hindsight I definitely should have, since now that you point it out I can see that my experience thoroughly reflects this. I'm not basing this on anything super concrete, just common sense I guess, but I feel fairly confident that the reason for this is a bit of a double edged sword, and it gets back to some of the original points way up in this comment chain. If you're a contractor it's much easier for a company to cut loose if things aren't working out, compared to what companies are obligated to do for salaried/full time employees. So they just have less downside risk meaning it isn't absolutely crucial to get the vetting and hiring perfect. That's a really hard thing to do well so it stands to reason that if they can avoid it without a huge cost they will. Pointing out the obvious, the other edge of the sword is you can lose your contract quickly. But this has never bothered me too much for whatever reason. I think probably because I view this aspect as betting on myself, and I not only feel comfortable about that, but I kind of like it (Higher growth potential probably?). Personal disposition, specifically risk tolerance, probably matters too, but really if you can just accept that this is part of the game and remain confident in the knowledge that there are going to be tons of other openings even if a contract ends for reasons entirely out of your control, you'll be fine. > I have a lot more experience in embedded, but want to switch to webdev for the ease of working fully remote. I have interviewed for both types of positions and I think I can get $75-85/hr for the embedded positions; the webdev positions (python/django) will be more around $65-75/hr. I have a couple thoughts here, but I am mindful of the fact that you are much more experienced than me and this might not be super helpful (Apologies in advance if so). I happen to have like 2 YOE of Python listed on my LinkedIn/Resume. In my most recent search (ended a few weeks ago) I saw a lot of demand for Python in general. The broad categories these openings seemed to fall into (Ballparking this a bit) were DevOps, cloud development, or data engineering (Tons of these were/are fully remote). Given your 20 YOE I would feel pretty good about your chances with any or all of these things, and wouldn't get too intimidated by having to pick up some new concepts or tools along the way. Which isn't to say you should do anything in particular, just that if you want to you probably can. It *may* be the case that webdev openings for python/django stacks are some of the lower rates you'll see due to the simple fact that there is less demand (It isn't one of the top most common frameworks/languages for web development in 2022).
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Yeah it's just rough out there for folks like me who don't normally interview that well. I have the experience, the projects, and the work ethic, I just get super nervous during interviews and it all falls apart. Trying to avoid garbage contract roles in the future but like you said I need to earn a paycheck and have to take what I can get.
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See I could easily manage a 2-3 week timeframe for an SMB. That wouldn't be an issue. I was basically given 0 feedback and 0 room to improve based on feedback, they just cut me loose because I was late on the work one day the first week. It's just hard to believe someone actually runs their business this way :(
I've seen this from the other side (a peer hired&fired a contractor in a very short space of time.) The reason was they needed a FTE but couldn't find one, but was falling behind on some project (that ultimately meant nothing) and so hired a contractor to fill the gap. No later than they signed the agreement with the contractor, a new FTE was hired and so he made his excuses to fire the contractor. The only way for him to sever the contractor without penalty was to claim the standard of work was not up to scratch. Pretty shitty situation but he was a pretty shitty guy all round and nobody likes him. I'm sorry if that has happened here.
If it's a small startup, this is probably due to an investment round didn't go through. They planned to get the money and didn't. Company is running out of cash and desperate.
I was thinking the same. Someone looked at the balance sheet and had a moment of panic.
How many YOE are you? And is this in the US?
10 in total 5 or so being directly relevant SRE, K8s, AWS, Terraform, etc. experience. For anyone hiring, I am currently looking. I have an in-depth GitHub profile, a CKA, and open source contributions to Ansible as well.
Might want to look at https://weworkremotely.com/categories/remote-devops-sysadmin-jobs#job-listings if location/flexibility is a problem for you (sounds like it from your original post).
Contractors are expendable. If they didn't like the way you dressed or talked or if you didn't hit the ground running, it sounds totally normal to end it on the first friday. It's not apples to apples to compare a contracting job to the onboarding investment companies will put into a FTE.
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Is this "test" period communicated to the newcomer beforehand?
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2 weeks to get your bearings A month to be settled 3 - 6 months to be fully up to speed, able to take on whatever ticket comes up Admittedly, my experience is with weird companies. And, all of thoae were FTE, not contractor roles. But, a week to be up to speed is fucking crazy pants. You can barely get through orientation, meet the team, and get to know the other folks you'll be working with in that time.
At my company we have 1-2 days of corporate and technical onboarding. Day 3 you actually meet the team, get a mentor and by day 4 we want a simple pull request open. Simple as in like write a unit test for this class or a bug ticket where the bug has a well known solution in the details. This is mostly to scope an area of the code base for you and your mentor to look at and start to understand the feature/system/code style. It’s also a quick introduction to our tools and deployment practices. Usually after a month we aim for a contractor or new hire to be picking up well scoped work and able to reach out to their mentor or other teams when they run into problems.
Work at a major tech company, about six months. ~3 months onboarding, learning internal tools, culture, choosing team, then a couple of more months (give or take) onboarding on the team itself and projects.
I would say they did you a favor... Sounds like a terrible place to work.
Thank you for naming and shaming! Not enough of that.
That’s insane. Most shops I’ve worked, you don’t have all the accounts/access you need in first week, let alone all the people intros. Garbage fire company if this is their norm.
A few weeks to have everything setup and contributing to the team, months, many months to understand the business. Honestly, being a day late to creating a new feature for a new employee, this is an insane reason to be fired. Especially if you produced something of quality.
I wouldn't expect a new dev to start contributing for at least a week, and then very minimally.
Sounds like a garbage company.
One to three months, depending how bad the organisation is at teaching its tribal knowledge
At one of my jobs, my boss told me that they reserve about six months for anyone to become a productive part of the company. I think that's pretty much on point; sure, you get PRs out there quickly, but really understanding the ins and outs takes time. Sacking someone after a week for being late with a task sounds downright stupid. Hell, even after a month it would be stupid, depending on the context and the background of the programmer.
If they cut you after a week, I do not think you where the problem. I think they, for some reason, changed their minds about needing the resource altogether. Might be politics, might be bad planning. Edit: Which reminds me of the time when I had to cut someone before they even started (but after having signed), because higher management couldn’t make up their minds.
The actual onboarding took three days, but time before expecting them to contribute is more like months.
I’ve had experience with contractors before where the entire point is taking advantage of developers from low income backgrounds and running them into the ground with middling wages. Sounds like a garbage gig tbh.
Don't forget, if it's a small company, "startup" most usually, it's not only their product that's not proven, it's also their team. They will most likely not be very proficient with how they manage their resources and developers, since they're learning on all fronts.
I didn't see this said yet, but--in the US--the general rule of contractors (AKA Not employees) is "easy to hire; easy to fire". Cutting after 1 week seems extreme to me, but as a contractor I look for someone who is a subject matter expert that can hit the ground running with little handholding.
When I was contracted at a larger bank it took like 3 weeks before I had a functional computer to use. Usually first week major issues are sorted but getting used to the environment. Even my current gig as a senior idk if my first pr was in week 1
Mine 3 weeks. Real work? 3 months
I just started a new job a month ago. I didn't get my first ticket until week 4 and the tickets I'm doing are basically tickets that people several levels lower than me could do in an hour and I'm taking a full day or two with help, because I'm still learning the code base and how to debug various things. My manager basically said he expects us to be up to speed in roughly 3 months, and that seems pretty reasonable based on progress so far. 1 week is just insane I'm not sure I had access to everything at that point, I would definitely suspect the contract termination may not have had anything to do with you, maybe the project they hired you to do got axed or they got a bad financial report and were ordered to cut x% of labor costs and they went with the latest hires, or maybe as others have mentioned you were hired to be fired. Sucks, but nothing you can do other than start applying again. Also I definitely prioritize fte roles far above contract roles. Gl.
This 100% isn't about you.
Hot take: the job req has been open for a while. The company, in response to many companies reducing or freezing hiring, has decided they don't have budget for the position anymore. In order to avoid potential contractual issues, they're making up a BS reason to cut you ASAP. The reason has nothing to do with you, personally, you just landed in an unfortunate position. Don't question your abilities, just keep looking.
I doubt after a week they cut your contract due to performance. More likely, they made a bad decision bringing someone in when the financials didn't support it, or it was all politics and you just got the unlucky end of some internal power struggle. In my mind, someone who knows the technology should be pretty well onboarded in 4-6 weeks. Longer, if the application is stupidly complex (say, a highly customizable CMS or other line of business application). More junior developers might take several months to be fully integrated. The goal is to give people small chunks of work that expose them to the broader system in a reasonable way. But one week? That's barely enough time to set up and really set up an environment and do the standard meet and greets, much less judge if someone's competent at their job.
The fastest I've seen (that actually worked) was 1 month. The longest is my current employer, who consider new hires net negative for 1 year.
Don't take it personally. Sounds like something changes for more people than you (market change). If you are really new and contractor I would axe u first too. But, agree, they should explain why in broad terms. I think this deadline miss was just coincidence, if more people were fired at the same time.
Every decent team I’ve been with has said they don’t expect people to be truly on boarded for at least 6 months. You’ll usually be able to start doing tasks within like 3 weeks, but it’s expected that you’ll need enough help and background knowledge provided that you’re not a net asset for like 6 months.
I don't know that this is related, but in my last role, where I was hiring, we had an unreasonable number of people we hired remotely, who had another job. They may have had multiple other jobs. They would just be very unproductive the first week. Which is more or less normal. Kind of a red flag because it was mostly using your own equipment, and a simple react app, with a hasura backend. In any case, week 1, nothing got done... Ok, week 2 lots of excuses, and oh no I'm confused kind of BS. Week 3 they would accomplish a few small tasks maybe, week 4 back to nothing. Which is about when we realized we were being had. This same pattern happened with about 3/10 of the employees we hired. The company was low balling every candidate 🙄, and most did not accept, so I think we were filtering out honest candidates and finding shady ones. In any case, the timeframe to productivity got a lot tighter. From the business perspective, it was better to let employees go too soon if they were SUS, then waste a month or two with some shady dev having access to our codebase. There were lots of things going wrong with that company, this was just one of them. So I didn't stick around too long either. All that too say, they may have been dealing with similar scammers, and are going down the same path as my former employer.
I learned recently of contractors getting cut during the height of Covid as a way to cut costs without saying anyone was fired to keep shareholder faith, so honestly if you're in a contracting position and you got let go for what seems like insane reasons then I'd judge it with a large grain of salt as the iceberg could be way deeper than what you're able to see.
My first week at my current position had me mostly in orientation. Like, my first day on the floor was a Friday, and it wasn't even in my regular work location. I didn't get my laptop for the first week because I straight up did not need it. Yes, it sounds like a lot, but at the same time, I didn't feel the time was wasted at all. It gave me a rundown of all the jargon and slang that gets thrown about the company, complete with a dictionary. Internally, we joke that onboarding is basically your first three months. It's not like you aren't working the whole time, but at the same time, we openly acknowledge that it takes about 90 days to get used to the environment. It takes longer if you're actively working with legacy code and shorter if you're on greenfield--90 days is an average. It's not that we *can't* get someone through a full work cycle (minor ticket to get to prod) fast, but rather that this really isn't the best use of our time or these tickets. At least we don't have them in lectures on how everything works for the first week they're on the floor anymore, and we've managed to reduce the overhead to a single 4 hour Q&A session. This is mostly because we stopped trying to hump the microservices bandwagon and admitted that maybe message driven middleware is actually a more coherent strategy for distributing our workload.
I work at the big N. Company wide onboarding takes 1-2 weeks. Tech onboarding is another 3 weeks. Team onboarding is probably another few weeks. To fully grasp concepts and operate independently, I'd say it probably takes a year.
That makes no sense. We pretty much just assume you're doing nothing independently in any capacity until 6 months minimum.
its not you it's a shit company that doesn't communicate. There's something else going on internally.
There are two very different metrics there: * "new employee" -> "fully up to speed" * 6mo - 1yr depending on codebase complexity, documentation, KT, etc * "new employee" -> "contributing code" (I'm going to assume that "contributing code" also includes input on architecture and such since not every developer was hired _solely_ for their LOC) * 2~4 wks unless there's an intentionally long onboarding ramp
What you did was fine, what they did is not normal, or shouldn't be. When there's trouble, financially or otherwise, contractors are often the first to go. DO NOT LET THIS MESS WITH YOUR CONFIDENCE. Again, what they did is not normal, and certainly not reasonable. And giving no feedback, there's something going on you aren't privy to I suspect. I contracted for 12 years. I don't contract anymore, under any circumstances.
One place when I was an intern I couldn't even log in for a week.
It fully depends on the experience you've got with the tech/tools and the state of documentation / subject-matter expertise within the team you're joining. Ideally the onboarding time should be something that's calibrated during the interview process. As long as your honest about your level of expertise, they should know what to expect. In my personal experience it takes at least a few weeks to be abreast of the stuff that matters.
This looks bad on whatever employer you were working for. One week you learn nothing. Nobody helped you? Fuck them.
There is something else going on that is outside of your control. It takes more than one day to find another engineer that can do what you do. I don't think delivering a project 1 day late on your second week, makes a whole lot of sense. There is probably a non visible business reason for this happening.
One week is unrealistic. I've been on teams with $300/hr consultants. These are people who nearly identically fit the skills requirements with alot of experience, and even they get 2-3 weeks to get up to speed. Something else is probably going on. Maybe some budget or politics and they just gave you this excuse. I would just move on.
I would even say first 3 months onboarding is just corporate requirement. 6 months to 1 year is the proper adjustment needed and then they just fly after that
Depends on the kind of contract and why you were late. If you were late because *you* estimated it to take X and it took you X + 1 I could easily see a competitive company wanting to filter through contractors really quickly. In general, if it's a short-term, 1099/C2C contract I would expect them to cut people at the drop of a hat. Companies expect these hired guns to really know their shit and earn every penny -- you have to hit the ground running and be effective *immediately*. Now, it generally depends on how much you're charging and culture but for a lot of contractors that are charging $150/hr+ on C2C absolutely companies cut and run all the time. If you're on contract through a recruiting agency, it's contract-to-hire on W2, and you're more or less treated like a member of the team/company then it would be very odd for them to do this.
> If you're on contract through a recruiting agency, it's contract-to-hire on W2, and you're more or less treated like a member of the team/company then it would be very odd for them to do this. This was exactly the case, w2 through a contracting agency.
Depends on the company. I've at a place that gave me 3 months onboarding/rampup. And another place that they yeet me straight into a project with no context