[dkulakowska]

Hi,

My name is Dominika, I am a Scrum Master and I work in I.T. industry.

5 years ago I moved to London for a year (yup!) and fell in love with this city.

I am working currently as an entrepreneur on a potential business idea and wanted to find out:

What is your #1 single biggest challenge preventing you from starting contracting work right now? What are your fears and worries?

Cheers,
Dominika

This post has been edited by astonecipher: 21 February 2017 - 02:05 PM
Reason for edit:: Removed your LinkedIN link... No one cares

[jon.kiparsky]

Well, the main reason I don't start contracting work right now is not a fear or a worry or a challenge - it's just that I really like the company I work for, I really like the team I'm working with, and I see a pretty good upward arc in my career development from staying right where I am for at least a few years's time.

[tlhIn`toq]

Working is all about money. Simple as that. Its why we work.


I did it for a decade. Simple truth is when you make money, its good money. Then the rest of the time you're unemployed.
If I make US$50,000 for a 3 month project that's good. Then I go 2 months looking for the next contract. The only way I was able to keep going for the long term was to build in maintenance/upgrade agreements to the contracts.

Cheap contracts that would take a month for $5k-10k aren't worth doing. The employer wants $25k of work for $8k of pay. They don't understand that things not in the contract aren't just simply included for free: Like social media integration. Everyone thinks is just automatic these days. You either add another 2-3 weeks of work for free or they want to sue or ruin your reputation.

Trying to educate companies that hiring off-shore developers from India is a waste of money just sounds like sour grapes because they don't understand. They constantly want you to meet the prices of people working for 5 ruppees a day.

You're constantly waiting for payment if you don't build in milestone payments for each phase of work completed. Companies that want to pay you all at the backend always wait 60-120 days before cutting the check because they wait for installation before testing the software and they want to hold payment until they see it work.

Then of course as a contractor you have no benefits, no company insurance plans, no paid holidays/vacations. If you aren't actively working and beating the bushes for the next contract then you aren't putting food on the table. Coders like being coders. They don't also want to be their own website manager, salesperson, accounts receivables person.

In the end, I just want to be a software developer for a company knowing that someone else is the sales person... someone else is getting the contracts or whatever drives income... someone else handles payroll and taxes... I come to work and concentrate on architecting the best code I can without the distracting 'noise' of staying employed.

This post has been edited by tlhIn`toq: 21 February 2017 - 04:33 AM

[astonecipher]

This looks like a way for you to drum up LinkedIn views and poll for workers. We have a subforum for that too.


Where do you find a SCRUM Master that isn't in IT anyway?

[jon.kiparsky]

astonecipher, on 21 February 2017 - 04:07 PM, said:

Where do you find a SCRUM Master that isn't in IT anyway?

Presumably in a non-IT company or team that's using Scrum to organize their work. There's nothing about Scrum that's particularly limited to tech firms. It's useful for any team that has people working independently to meet stakeholder goals. For example, our marketing team has explored using it to better meet their deadlines. So far they haven't adopted it, but there's nothing about the methodology that prevents them.