Never fails to amuse me when I get calls from contractors for positions that I've not only applied to but interviewed for and know were filled by someone else.
@FalconMomot yeah. I've gotten to the point that I usually do not bother talking to recruiters anymore except for the one that I'm with now. These guys are a boutique firm and they take good care of their people and their customers.
Most places I've talked to would have paid me between $30 and $50 per hour, with some as low as $25 or so and others closer to $55. I would be willing to bet that they would have been hiring me out for $125 to $150 an hour.
So the short story: companies should just hire me direct at $100 an hour and cut out the middle man. =)
but when I think of the fact that they are doing nothing, and someone is willing to pay for what I am doing three times over... all I can think of is that there is no proper reason that money isn't mine.
@FalconMomot The biggest advantage is that the recruitment firm is a safety and liability buffer. Also, a talent buffer to hopefully outsource the HR nonsense of finding people that are clueful.
I actually get the need for recruitment firms, I just don't see recruitment firms actually doing it right and making it worthwhile for the companies that contract them and the contractors that work for them.
Ha! Here, the standard thing is that you incorporate, and then contract under those people, who provide no benefits, sick time, or vacation; you are responsible for the business tax and paperwork, and even usually insurance
@Adrian Pay me $150 an hour and I can provide my own benefits, vacation, sick pay, etc. That's why contractors have to charge so much. (As you know; not telling you this, just venting)
@FalconMomot I thought Canada had less suckage than that.
oh, yeah, that's what I was forgetting- until very recently, this type of IT contractor couldn't claim EI, and also the government reformed taxes so we'd all have to pay double what anyone else would if they were an employee
@Adrian Yeah. If I got a theoretical 40 hours billable time in a month at $75 an hour, that would be $12,000 cash. Chip away taxes, liability insurance, health insurance, some saved for a training budget... now my take-home is maybe $4000
So, and I'm not joking, one of my "plans" is a percentage ownership in a business that might have a good shot at being acquired. I've put in hundreds of free hours for it and own 10%. The plan is to sell in two to four years. That could help me, but that's a pretty shitty savings, retirement, and growth plan.
@FalconMomot I know, I just have this bad own-your-own-business hereditary disease.
Except I did not inherit the "successful at your own business" gene like my forefathers.
@FalconMomot You get reamed if you're single or filing separately, and have no dependents. I don't have much to deduct except business expenses, so sometimes it's a matter of "spend it or lose it"
So if I theoretically got a wad of cash like that, at the end of the year I might buy a few ten grand of training credits at RedHat or Juniper as a investment just to give it to something worthwhile rather than write a check to Uncle Sam so he can buy more monitoring nodes for the NSA
Maybe I'd finally be able to afford VMware licensing CAN WE TALK ABOUT VMWARE LICENSING FOR A BIT?
@FalconMomot Plus, you can't spin up VMs that customers touch, even if it's just a service running on the VM that an external client / customer would touch. Need a transient FTP server? Want to make a virtual server for a client to drop his VOIP PBX on? NOPE. Gotta be in the VSPP program.
@Ward you have to make it capital gains and dividends, which is what it is (and in that case, it's still income, but the ETR is very low thanks to some reforms made in 2011)
I don't mind the concept of taxes, but let's apply taxation fairly across individuals and businesses, and also spend it decently, not be led by the nose in front of Monsanto and Cargill while the NSA pisses away shipping cartons of cash on fiber optic duplicators.
@Ward I'm pretty sure that if you start a company and sell it, the tax consequences are the same as for common stock, except better as the stock will be in a CCPC
I'd like to see a very simple tax code like this: 20% of all the money you bring in, less $2400 (just in case you're poor)
I don't really want to have so many pieces of paper in my taxes that I feel like I should bind it in a book, only to have most of those papers come to net $0
I'm also not convinced the CRA has a legal mandate to collect some of the information they collect. Why should I have to itemize things like partnership and farming income separately?
@FalconMomot They look at so little of that stuff... I've put down intentional gibberish a few times. Or one time when I was behind and had a few simple returns to do, I did them all with the same year's verison of QTax and let CRA sort it out.
My fave RevCan story: my wife goes in to sort out her GST payments, spends a long time with a guy who ends up saying "all you need is this guide, it's all in there." She asks how to get one, they go down the hall to another department and the guy there says "Oh, that guide is completely out of date and wrong, you can't use that..."
First time network engineer here. I don't have a large budget, so I need to learn all of the skills necessary without pulling in a bunch of vendors. I'm charged with building out a 350port network in a new location. I planned on using a few gigabit switches from cisco small business.
I noticed n...
@FalconMomot no...I'm not...I was a network engineer (now IT Manager)...not a P.Eng...but the guy calls himself a Network Engineer and he's never even hooked up basic SMB switches (and if you look at a previous rant of mine in Meta I have no issue with the term "network engineer - meta.serverfault.com/questions/5340/…)
I tried the internet. I have added the printer drivers to the Citrix server to match exactly what is on the user PC. Thinking is that it will pick up the printer. No errors, just not seeing the printer. — Michael31 mins ago
Of course he may be running some other Citrix thing that isn't that, but hey, it's his fault for not providing enough information. Also for not using google.
@voretaq7 Unpatcheable OS, unpatcheable tomcat, unpatched java, app that can't be updated, and even when the app does get updated the vendor has to remote in to do it... oh yeah, and we have a job that deletes tomcat's logs hourly because the app sometimes logs user passwords in plaintext, depending on the configuration of the desktop app. Did I mention that it's chock full of SSNs and other such sensitive information?
@ewwhite At first I'm thinking "oh, hey, I recognize that chassis. We had two and are halfway to retiring the second one", then .... I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to look like that...
@voretaq7 On the other hand, I finally picked up my bottle of Bruichladdich 10 and bottle of Port Charlotte 10, so at least i have something nice to comfort myself with...
I am trying to get users at home using Citrix to print to their local printers through the application. How would be the best way to go about this? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
I recently bought a WD Red 3TB harddrive and installed it in my home ESXi machine. The hardware of the server is not VMware certified but everything works perfectly. I want to add the complete 3TB HD to a Windows Server 2012 Storage Space. Using VMware supported methods the only way I see I am ab...
@voretaq7 yeah :( just before I stepped down there was some discussion in dmz about direction etc and jaydles suggested a hangout to discuss some concerns SE have - did it ever happen ?
I've been searching the way to have connect to two VPNs at the same time so I don't have to be switching from one to another all day
I tried using VPNC Front End in Windows 7 x64 but no go.
Anyone has tried any other software or maybe any of you was successful using VPNC Front End
thanks a lot
heh, on the bright side, I've figured out what that probe to my Bacula server every 15 seconds thats filling up my log is. It's the stay alive query from Azure's LB service
@WesleyDavid Good. I have noticed that one some of my boxes having the GATEWAY declaration in the interface config doesn't work though. Haven't really bothered to track it down.
So I could describe a support issue I'm having right now...
device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 8:240.
device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 65:48.
sd 5:0:0:2: alua: port group 02 state A supports tolUsNA
sd 6:0:0:2: alua: port group 02 state A supports tolUsNA
sd 6:0:0:2: alua: port group 02 state A supports tolUsNA
sd 5:0:0:1: alua: port group 02 state A supports tolUsNA
Those errors are from a VM running Oracle... inside of a 6-host vSphere cluster... on an EMC SAN exporting NFS... where the multipath errors are coming from a direct gigabit connection on the VM to an iSCSI LUN presented from the same SAN.
I am trying to get users at home using Citrix to print to their local printers through the application. How would be the best way to go about this? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
I've been searching the way to have connect to two VPNs at the same time so I don't have to be switching from one to another all day
I tried using VPNC Front End in Windows 7 x64 but no go.
Anyone has tried any other software or maybe any of you was successful using VPNC Front End
thanks a lot
