Today was a much better day than yesterday, I still have a big downer on the snitch – but as one of my friends has said “Revenge is a dish best served cold”. So I’ll just bide my time and be ready for him to crow about his abilities in the culinary accountancy area, then It’ll be my time to stitch him up.
Today was quite productive, I was in the office at 06:45 and left at 17:45 and although lunch was a bit longer than normal I managed to achieve all the things that I set out to do almost. Due to interruptions this is not the norm, however I did manage to concentrate on the work in hand and managed to complete most of it. There was also a moment of brevity, when one of the other contractors sent me a link to the BOFH a story that is so pertinent that it feels like Deja Vu.
Gradually over the past few weeks so much has become apparent to me, I have slowly realised that the UK IT arm of the company will gradually die off over the next two to three years. And that not only will the servers and applications relocate to Europe, the jobs will also move there in quite a short time frame. I’d love to see the jobs stay here, I’d also like to say that the contract staff were being beaten off by the permanent staff for the prime jobs. But it seems that the prime cuts of the work do actually involve work and none of the permanent staff want to get involved, still they all have long service records and a good pension to look forward to.
I can’t really determine who the winners and losers will be, but what I can say is that there was no need to employ a divide and conquer strategy as every one was already divided enough. You may think that I’m now being cynical after recent events, possibly I am but recent events have caused me to become more detached and analytical in respect of this contract. There is a new objectivity in my viewpoint, the permanent staff from fairly senior management down are still looking to “what will I get out of this”.
There are several indicators that you can look at, up until recently the security team in Europe were adamant that there would be compliance with a standard – yet today total reversal of that. The team in the UK is supposed to be leading the Pan European team, yet they are not communicating effectively with the European members of the team and are almost certainly causing a degree of resentment because of it. I’d like to say that I have the answers to all that ails the company that I work for, I’d also like to say that the situation is still reversible but I don’t actually think that it would be an easy task to correct the wasted opportunities. It would seem that corporate decisions are being made, someone makes the decision and some one else just blissfully sails along with it.
When will it become obvious to these people that there is no chance of saving the situation, probably the first time that they can have a long lie and not bother going into work. All because the people at the top are waiting for leadership from the people at the bottom, when that happens it’s all a bit like Animal Farm! Everyone will start to resent everyone else and the winners will be the farmer, in this case there isn’t a farmer – just a board of directors based in a European country. They are concerned about the share price, probably about the morale of the employees – especially the ones that can come and knock on the office door.
Completely agree. Contractors work hard and use their experience from many different environments. However so often the only view of us is as money grabbers. It’s a shame because many of us would go permanent if companies had a reasonable career plan for those of us who want to continue in our technical excellence.
I agree that all too often the view that permanent staff have is that we are just grabbing the money and running, yet any permanent member of staff on just 40% of our rate is usually better off in the long run. Here you have people on much better terms than that with a final salary pension and many other perks, but still they view the contractors as money grabbing trash! For the most part, when any work of substance comes along – the permanent staff seem to be conspicuous by their inability to even turn up!