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>> Our managers were afraid that we broke something, so they did everything to make sure that we didn't spend our time coding.

that's like hiring football players and not letting them on the field out of fear they'll score for the other team.

please write a book!

Yes its insane LOL Managers were non-coders themselves, and they looked at developers with suspicion.

This happens in a lot of projects, where developers are almost treated like children or assembly-line workers.

I realized through small hints and queues over time that the goal was to take over the maintenance of the project and make sure that we could fix things if something broke, but not add any new features.

They even had a management term for what we were doing. They called it KIR - Keep It Running! LOL

yes but happens a lot - if you dont change it, it won't break (expept it will, every time because the reason you don't change it is because it is crap in the first place)

> they refused to use their new shitty trouble ticket system (which was awful), and instead insisted in using JIRA

I can't even fathom how bad it must have been if using JIRA was preferable...

JIRA was quite nice until v4.0

could you elaborate on the negative effects on your career? were you a contractor or an employee? and why would someone blacklist you specifically? how was that consulting manager related to the project?

i mean as an employee, if i get put in a hard position, sometimes the only choice is to quit, so, in that case, the CV would have an entry that you would not look back at to happily, but other than getting out as fast as you could why would being stuck in such a situation harm your career?

Yes sure, already after a few months doing production support and reverse engineering instead of coding, you start getting questions on interviews about why are you not coding lately anymore.

This was a bad look, because hiring managers want active developers for coding positions. I ended up not even mentioning that the position did not involve much coding on later interviews, I left after 6 months.

You are put in a tough position because you will have an entry of 3 to 6 months on your profile, which is generally a red flag for hiring managers as it's too short.

An entry with a full year or more will not raise any eyebrows, but 3 months will. Also, because you leave against their will, they won't give you references to the next jobs.

I did end up leaving it was a real nightware, and never looked back, but to this day I feel that I was flat out lied to on the interview about the job content.

In other interviews at other places, I was left out critical details, like for example that the team is moving to another city in two months, and you are expected to go with them.

So this why I say, you never know what you are getting into with software consulting, it's a shady business.

With the high turnover rates and the difficulty to find developers, hiring managers are incentivized to embellish otherwise mundane positions in the interview process, leading to unmotivated staff and further turnover.

Several 3 months stints are a problem. One, bookended by reasonable work, is a filter. If a company is overly concerned with one, they just want a skill hire, which may or may not be your target.

You can describe the stint in several ways, such as "the strategic direction the consultancy took was away from software and into project management early in the project cycle. My personal strengths lie in..." or some such.

> You are put in a tough position because you will have an entry of 3 to 6 months on your profile, which is generally a red flag for hiring managers as it's too short.

As an employee, probably. As a contractor, I prefer short contracts (1-3 months is short, 6 months is average) with a clear deliverable. If I wanted to just "sit around and do whatever" I'd get employed.

agree, it's all a matter of how you look at it. in my CV i don't even make a distinction between contracting and employment. i have even been contracting with and was employed by the same company at different times.

Or just avoid consulting. There are plenty of other opportunities in software that AFAICT have better hours and higher pay.

Higher pay than consulting its hard, a consulting job pays usually almost twice as much as a permanent job.

I prefer it to permanent, because besides the monetary aspect you can also get into new projects just starting out more often, and that is were you learn more when compared to maintenaince projects.

What type of opportunities would you recommend other than consulting?

Contracting is different from consulting. As far as I understand when you are consulting you are a permanent employee of a consulting company that assigns you to various projects. When you are contracting you work for a temporary period of time exclusively for a client until your contract ends or you find better opportunities. The first case is paid double of the permanent to the consulting company, but the employee of the consulting company is lucky if he gets as much as a normal permanent. A contractor on the other hand gets paid much more than a permanent, especially counting the less taxes that he needs to pay. There is a 3rd option when you actually own the consulting company, but then it’s up to you to find clients and if needed additional resources to assign to the various projects, but in that case you may be paid even more than contracting if you have no down time between projects.

Contractors have to pay more in taxes, not less, since they owe both sides of social security and Medicare.

I guess it depends from the country and the type of contractor. In UK, with a limited company, you pay less taxes (at least until next April). If you are under an umbrella company you will pay more taxes because you’ll be paying all the taxes of a normal employee plus the taxes of the employer. No idea if it is different in US and other countries honestly...

What happens next April?

It’s a very good question, and a long story. As far as I know still no one has a certain answer. The back story is that in April 2017, if I remember correctly, all the contractors that worked for public companies were forced to be under the IR35 rule. This rule, in short, tells that the contractors are equiparable to permanent employees. So they had to pay taxes as permanent employees, without the perks, like paid holidays, sick days and so on. This caused a quite massive loss of public contractors, understandably. From April next year they are implementing the same schema in the private sector, with the difference that it will be up to the employer to declare who is inside IR35 and who is not. The mainstream theory is that employers will start putting everyone under IR35 to avoid problems with HMRC. Even if this won’t be the case at the beginning, after the first couple of high visibility cases in which hmrc punishes the employers for some wrong IR35 classification, all the others would want to avoid the risk and headaches and will classify everyone inside IR35. We’ll see next year how it turns out, but I’m not very optimistic. Luckily for now I’m shielded, but I’m paying an eye watering amount of taxes...

But if you're self-employed (or operate a business that's a sole proprietorship) you can deduct your expenses (equipment, rent on your home office, etc.) from your taxable income. In the U.S., you attach "Schedule C" to your federal tax return to do this:

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-schedule-c-form-1040

That's not what I understand those terms to mean.

A contractor is effectively a non-permanent employee: someone you hire for a fixed period because you have irregular work load and you need some extra people temporarily. I say effectively a non-permanent employee, but it's really skirting the edge here: if the relationship is too much like an employee, then the contractor is an employee for tax purposes.

A consultant is someone you hire for their expertise. They're a specialist; they tell you what you should be doing, rather than doing work you specify.

https://www.itworld.com/article/2801854/know-the-difference-...

https://www.crunch.co.uk/knowledge/tax/consultant-contractor...

IT contractors are also usually employed by contracting companies that take care of accounting and other overheads, and if they do things like marketing and referral, they'll eat a significant chunk of the fees too. I don't think there's a significant difference in organizational structure between contractors and consultants in this way. It's mostly that consultants address the problem at a bigger distance, and are more likely to be drawing up the plan, rather than working on the execution.

ok, it makes sense, but then the consultant is kind of the 3rd option in my previous post but his job is to advise rather than actually do all the work, right?

I believe maintaining software is great way to level up some of the most important parts of software engineering.

* How do you design software so that it is easier to modify over time?

* What will your software need that isn't specific to the business features requested when it is being operated in production?

You severely limit your experience when you keep yourself from being around for the aftermath of your software 3-5 years later.