About Me
Hi all. Well here I am on WordPress, this is my first blog. I hope that I will be able to keep it updated in a timely manner. Well a little about me. I am a 42 year old software engineer. I have been in this line of work for the last 8 years. I ventured into software development after my then wife and step-kids decided it was time to relocate to a new state to be closer to family. I was working in Law Enforcement at that time and relocation would have meant that I would have had to start at the bottom again, even after 17 years in the profession. I really didn’t want to start over being a boot rookie again, so with the helpful nagging of my wife I went back to college to obtain a degree in Computer Science and Computer Programming. I completed my associates degree in 18 months and was very fortunate to find a job at a company here in Richmond before I graduated college. That was in 2000, the nasty Dot Com Crash era. Within the first year at the company I was promoted to Software Programming Manager. Three years later the company sold out to a larger company from Alabama and that meant I was out of a job. I began looking into consulting work. I initially wanted to use it as a way to interview a company and give them a probation period to see if I wanted to work for them. I picked up my first job within a week of beginning my search. What a lucky break that was, jobs were so scarce at that time you couldn’t beg someone for a job. They were just non-existent.
After I started consulting work I began to like it more and more. I decided to be more focused on the consulting aspect rather than searching for full time employment. I found that there were more benefits for me to work as a consultant then working directly for a company. I have been fortunate to work with some very fine companies over the few years like Wachovia Securities, Saxon Mortgage a Morgan Stanley Company, Dominion Virginia Power, G3 Systems Inc and various others. I have grow to really like the 6 month and 1 year contracts. It gives me a chance to take some time off in the summer to relax if I want.
I have found that most companies today are either assimilated by other companies or assimilate other companies. Either way this is leaving their full time employee wondering what they were going to do next. If company “A” takes over company “B” then they will want to consolidate services and that could mean that you may potentially lose your job. If Company “A” is taken over by Company “B” then the same thing could happen. Let’s face it Corporate America does not care about their full time employees like they used to. As a consultant I have the attitude that “I was looking for a job when I found this one, so the next one won’t be hard to find either” and I am sure the company has the same attitude towards me.
American companies are cutting back on or eliminating all together their benefits, retirement, and bonuses. Companies would rather pay 3 or 4 times the hourly rate to a technical staffing firm for consultants, then to take care of the people they have internally. It all boils down to tax breaks and write offs. Let’s face it America. If you don’t think that you need multiple streams if income to survive in this day and age you need to wake up and smell the coffee, Starbucks Coffee that is. But that’s a whole other story.
Great to have you here
Tim
tim at conradventuresgroup dot com