On Friday I had an interview for a year long contract (240 days over 52 weeks). To be honest I didn’t think I had any chance as I knew I was the third candidate to be interviewed and was being interviewed on the Friday afternoon before the Monday that they had to have their decision made (so the agent told me).
Guess what, I only went and got the bloomin’ job!
It was the most relaxed and low key interview I’ve been to, although that doesn’t mean much as I’ve only been to a couple of interviews in my entire working life, and only one for a contract, usually I get my jobs through recommendations.
The two guys that interviewed me were really nice, friendly and easy to talk to, in fact I thought I’d blown it because I rambled on too much a couple of times. The whole thing was more like having a chat about this and that to do with what they do, what I’ve done, what I thought about methodologies and so on.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I left the office at about 3:30pm and drove home. When I got in I started telling Mandy about the interview, how nice the people and their new offices were, that the project sounded really interesting … when she cut me off and said “have you not listened to your messages?”
“No”, says I, “I’ve been driving.”
“Your agent called, you’ve got the job! He called your mobile, left a message and then called the house.”
Turns out my agent left the message on my mobile at 3:45, just fifteen minutes after I left the interview. Now that’s a quick decision!
I won’t say where I’ll be working, I’ve never talked about clients on my blog, probably never will, plus I have no idea whether they have any policies about that kind of thing.
I’ll be starting on July 3rd, which gives me two weeks to get the wrinkles ironed out of CaseDetective 1.1, and then I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks.
It’s a real relief to know I’ve got the job, one of the worst things about the last few months has been not having the disposable income I’ve become accustomed to.
Finally I can satisfy my iTunes addiction again! 
It’s a shame you couldn’t keep going solo. But I totally understand the need for a regular income. I’m still at my day job, and I probably won’t leave until I can replace my salary with the income from my venture.
Good luck, and plugging away. Freedom is only 1 hit product away.
Posted by Michael Sica on June 4th, 2006.
(EDIT: and “keep” plugging away.)
Posted by Michael Sica on June 4th, 2006.
You say you have an agent. I have always been wondering how one would go about doing contract jobs, especially doing work in RB, how ?
Posted by Trausti Thor on June 4th, 2006.
Michael, thanks for the comment, sure is a shame I couldn’t keep on going solo. I’ve come to the conclusion that what you and many others are doing is the right thing, do it in your spare time until it becomes a significant source of income so you can then take the much smaller step to going full time. Although you’d have to be careful not to get too accustomed to your day job wage plus extra!
Trausti, an agent is what we call the “middle man” here who finds a contractor by advertising the post for the company that actually needs the work done. Sometimes called an Employment Agency, sometimes Recruitment Agency, sometimes “leeches”!
Contractors submit their CV (résumé) to the agent who then submits the best to the client, who then sifts through them and asks the agent to get their candidate in for interviews etc. Once you get the job, your client is actually the agency, but you’re working on their behalf at the real client’s site etc.
Although this means you’re going to lose a percentage of your potential earnings because the agent always adds a little to what you want to what they charge the real client, it works quite well because agents in general pay your invoices pretty quickly, usually within a week or two, and at worst within a month if they keep to some sort of payment schedule. This is quite different to if you were working directly with the client, they may not pay you quite so rapidly. The agent acts as a buffer, and if things go terribly wrong can help sort things out with the client. There are pros and cons.
Also, I’m not doing REALbasic, I’m doing Informix 4GL, I should have mentioned that.
I did have a little project underway for someone I met at REAL World 2006 in REALbasic, but that kind of collapsed as they weren’t really quite ready to dish out the work, they didn’t really know what they wanted me to do. It was an interesting project, so it’s a shame it didn’t quite work out as it would have also given me some commercial contract experience with RB, but such is life.
Posted by ianmjones on June 5th, 2006.