About I year ago I posted this thread about getting a job after getting a felony. First, I want to thank everyone here for your great comments…they worked so well that I *did* eventually get jobs (it turns out that contracting, as several of you pointed out, is working for me) and that many job applications have a “7-year” limit for disclosing past felonies, something that I think is totally sensible. People with non-violent crimes should not be punished for the rest of their lives.
Anyway, since you guys were such a big help then, maybe you can help now. I started a contract with a PHP start-up in the Chicago area a few weeks ago, and another contractor and I represented the first ?non-core? programmers that this company has ever used. They are a young company (average age about 25, I am 40) and were recently acquired by [edited: xxxxxxxx]and are facing major growing pains as they ramp up their site to handle much bigger expected user counts.
Here is the problem?they seem to have totally unrealistic expectations about timeframes. As other contractors know, the first 5-10 days of a new assignment are usually spent learning the system, getting your environment setup, matching conventions etc etc. The first bump came on work day 6 (the second Monday), where I was confronted by the lead developer as to why this huge, complex page had not been completed yet..I was just getting my bearings together and had begun work, but here he was sweating me to have it done!
We had a meeting, and talked about it?I suggested that they, since they have never worked with 3rd parties before and I have been doing contracting for 15 years now, that they had unrealistic expectations about the complexity of coming into a large new project and getting really productive. The lead didn?t seem to like that answer, in fact it seems to me he just does not like me in general. Maybe it?s an age thing, maybe something personal, who knows?but I want to turn things around ASAP.
So now I am trying to overcome this, IMHO, false perception that I am not productive enough, and I bring this up only to try to help another contractor who is faced with a 3 month deadline on a job that would easily take a corporate team 6 months, and he is at a loss to talk to these company, too.
I really want this contract to work and to communicate to the team that I can get the job done, but also would like for them to realize that their view of the complexity of the project is skewed because they built it themselves and have no other experience working with other peoples code and the amount of time it takes to learn very complex web apps. Also, if anyone knows of some good software contracting BB?s that deal with contracting-specific issues, that would be great.
Whew?this is pretty long?thanks for hanging on.
