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aBagorn
Aug 26, 2004
Master Services Agreement

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Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell

aBagorn posted:

Master Services Agreement

YES! That's the one I was thinking of.

baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
Anyone worried about the h1b politics?

sarehu
Apr 20, 2007

(call/cc call/cc)
Keeping the total annual number of H1B's fixed, I think auctioning off H1B's or increasing the price floor is bad for good developers, because it means that all the H1B's will have to be high quality developer spots, instead of being worthless $60K retards. Thus lowering the demand for good non-H1B developers. So I'm kind of worried.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

I think no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, it is clear that the H1B program needed some serious overhauling. Chop shops like Infosys or Tata abuse the system by grabbing a ridiculous number of H1Bs, and then they underpay them. These aren't the "best and the brightest", they're cheap labor that can easily be abused. Take a look: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

I'm not worried about Google, who has about 60K employees and only 3K H1Bs at an average pay of $125K. Take a look at some of those other numbers though. The vast majority of Tata's workers are "computer programmers" in cities like NYC, Atlanta, Chicago...making 67K.

Forcing a minimum salary is a good start to ensuring that the program is truly being used to find workers they otherwise can't find in the US and not just cheap slaves.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug
Wasn't the $60K number picked like a hundred years ago?

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

sarehu posted:

Keeping the total annual number of H1B's fixed, I think auctioning off H1B's or increasing the price floor is bad for good developers, because it means that all the H1B's will have to be high quality developer spots, instead of being worthless $60K retards. Thus lowering the demand for good non-H1B developers. So I'm kind of worried.

Actually, the highest paid H1Bs are doctors - like you can have a cardiologist, radiologist, etc. Only approximately 1000 H1Bs in the history of the H1B program were filed for software engineers that made >130k.

sarehu
Apr 20, 2007

(call/cc call/cc)

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Actually, the highest paid H1Bs are doctors - like you can have a cardiologist, radiologist, etc. Only approximately 1000 H1Bs in the history of the H1B program were filed for software engineers that made >130k.

You don't seem to be contradicting what I am saying. What I'm saying is, if nobody can get cheap $60k H1B's, that'll leave expensive H1B's which come in and compete on the high end of the market.

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

sarehu posted:

You don't seem to be contradicting what I am saying. What I'm saying is, if nobody can get cheap $60k H1B's, that'll leave expensive H1B's which come in and compete on the high end of the market.

Surely changing the h1b law will will these mythical 130k+ h1b software engineers into existence.

oliveoil
Apr 22, 2016
Big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. are all constantly hiring. They don't get the amount of h1b visas they want because, despite willing to pay way more than $60k, they're not lucky enough to win the lottery for every employee they want.

If they could get all the engineers they want just by paying $130k (remember that typical compensation packages at these companies goes from $150-300k depending on, essentially, whether youve got 0, 3, or 5 years of quality, relevant experience) then they will not need to pay top dollar (I.e., $250k for an engineer with just 3yrs of experience who did nothing more than decide to interview with more than one top company) for the limited pool of competent people for them to choose from.

I always expected that compensation would fall due to the field's reputation of being high-paying attracting more entrants, but this sudden shift has really taken me by surprise. I had hoped to save enough money in the next 5-10 years that I wouldn't care or be affected, or at worst would be senior enough to be at the top of the pyramid of new entrants. Now? Looks like I need to find a backup plan way earlier than expected.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug
There's still a worldwide shortage of developers. Everybody is still trying to drive the price of quality dev talent down but lol good luck with that, guys!

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

oliveoil posted:

Big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. are all constantly hiring. They don't get the amount of h1b visas they want because, despite willing to pay way more than $60k, they're not lucky enough to win the lottery for every employee they want.

If they could get all the engineers they want just by paying $130k (remember that typical compensation packages at these companies goes from $150-300k depending on, essentially, whether youve got 0, 3, or 5 years of quality, relevant experience) then they will not need to pay top dollar (I.e., $250k for an engineer with just 3yrs of experience who did nothing more than decide to interview with more than one top company) for the limited pool of competent people for them to choose from.

I always expected that compensation would fall due to the field's reputation of being high-paying attracting more entrants, but this sudden shift has really taken me by surprise. I had hoped to save enough money in the next 5-10 years that I wouldn't care or be affected, or at worst would be senior enough to be at the top of the pyramid of new entrants. Now? Looks like I need to find a backup plan way earlier than expected.

This is the most elaborate and confounding form of impostor syndrome I have ever seen.

lifg
Dec 4, 2000
<this tag left blank>
Muldoon

oliveoil posted:

I had hoped to save enough money in the next 5-10 years that I wouldn't care or be affected, or at worst would be senior enough to be at the top of the pyramid of new entrants. Now? Looks like I need to find a backup plan way earlier than expected.

Your looking for a backup plan to being an experienced developer?

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Like if Indian body shops suddenly can't dump a bunch of bad engineers on MegaCorpShittyBank's data processing division, that means either a) They don't bother, leaving the number of available jobs more or less the same, or b) MCSB data processing adds a lot of demand against an inelastic supply, driving up wages.

The March Hare
Oct 15, 2006

Je rêve d'un
Wayne's World 3
Buglord
Yeah, wages across the board of whatever Forbes calls "tech" were up 8% last year. I don't really think the (relatively) low # of jobs being impacted by this visa change will result in a 'sudden shift'. And even if wages do drop like 30% across the board, you will still be making more $ than most people working an actual job.

oliveoil
Apr 22, 2016
The bottom end of the market will move up. The top end of compensation will fall. I don't benefit from a rise in the middle where big crappy bank has to pay more for Amazon, Google and Facebook's rejects. I aim for the top end, which is high precisely because Facebook etc don't have access to as many people as they want.

Jaded Burnout
Jul 10, 2004


hendersa posted:

Under US contract law, "statement of work" means more than just a schedule. From the legal standpoint, it is an addendum to the original contract (like leper khan mentioned). Thermopyle asked what this type of document is called, so... there you go.

Ah, UK law must be different, as a "schedule" takes that role in many of the renewable contracts I've worked under in the UK.

Edit: also I wasn't suggesting you were wrong there, I meant "yes this, which can also be called a schedule sometimes".

Jaded Burnout fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Feb 1, 2017

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

mrmcd posted:

Like if Indian body shops suddenly can't dump a bunch of bad engineers on MegaCorpShittyBank's data processing division, that means either a) They don't bother, leaving the number of available jobs more or less the same, or b) MCSB data processing adds a lot of demand against an inelastic supply, driving up wages.

Or c) MCSB just moves everything to India

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Jose Valasquez posted:

Or c) MCSB just moves everything to India

True, although any company that is able and willing to do that doesn't have to wait for a change in the H1B regulations. Even today it's not cheap between the fees and legal work. Plus it's not like the body shops are billing anywhere close to cost to the client companies.

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Jose Valasquez posted:

Or c) MCSB just moves everything to India

Realistically you can pay like 40k for someone offshore that you could get onshore for 100k salary as a h1b worker (and that isn't including full loaded cost of having the dude in the office.) It'll be cheaper to offshore in most cases.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

oliveoil posted:

The bottom end of the market will move up. The top end of compensation will fall. I don't benefit from a rise in the middle where big crappy bank has to pay more for Amazon, Google and Facebook's rejects. I aim for the top end, which is high precisely because Facebook etc don't have access to as many people as they want.

I just don't see the concern. Going by the numbers, the new H1B minimum being kicked around is $130K. The average base salary for an engineer at Google is $128K. If you're the type of engineer that is worth a standard deviation or 2 above the average at one of the best paying technology companies in the world, I doubt you will have a ton of competition from H1B workers. I certainly don't have any proof, but I would strongly assume that Google would love to hire as many 2-sigma engineers as they could, there just aren't that many of them, at any price.

Doubling the minimum salary doesn't do anything to prevent other abuses of the H1B system like gaming the requirements to prove there aren't local candidates, and the difficulty a H1B worker has moving jobs to stop abusive working conditions, but it would cripple the 3-4 biggest abusers of the system almost immediately.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



sarehu posted:

You don't seem to be contradicting what I am saying. What I'm saying is, if nobody can get cheap $60k H1B's, that'll leave expensive H1B's which come in and compete on the high end of the market.

I have trouble believing there are enough of these high end devs outside of the US to make a huge difference because I assume bigger tech companies would have already hired them into their offshore offices, basically. Are you worried about competition for senior jobs in better-funded startups that pay more money than lottery tickets?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Munkeymon posted:

I have trouble believing there are enough of these high end devs outside of the US to make a huge difference because I assume bigger tech companies would have already hired them into their offshore offices, basically.
If not in their native countries, where there might not be offices, then certainly in countries with more lax immigration standards for skilled tech workers like Germany or Ireland. That's the thing people keep forgetting in this whole debate -- we're living in a globalized world, and it's not just us versus someone's home country. Workers can go wherever they're needed.

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


This might not be a dev-specific question, but how does overtime work? According to my manager, the company considers me a non-exempt employee which means the government considers me to be making too much per hour to warrant requiring my company to pay me for any more hours than 40 per week. That's not to say nobody pulls more than 40 hours per week, that happens pretty regularly, but we just aren't compensated for it. This more or less came up in the context of me letting the rest of my team know that I had a doctor's appointment in the morning yesterday, and a talk afterwards about how to properly handle flex time (i.e. us Boston developers are allowed a non-contiguous block of working hours as long as we get at least 40 by the end of the week).

Is this common practice among dev organizations? I don't know if it's because my company isn't specifically about software, but it's vastly different than what I was used to when I was working for a startup.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Pollyanna posted:

This might not be a dev-specific question, but how does overtime work? According to my manager, the company considers me a non-exempt employee which means the government considers me to be making too much per hour to warrant requiring my company to pay me for any more hours than 40 per week. That's not to say nobody pulls more than 40 hours per week, that happens pretty regularly, but we just aren't compensated for it. This more or less came up in the context of me letting the rest of my team know that I had a doctor's appointment in the morning yesterday, and a talk afterwards about how to properly handle flex time (i.e. us Boston developers are allowed a non-contiguous block of working hours as long as we get at least 40 by the end of the week).

Is this common practice among dev organizations? I don't know if it's because my company isn't specifically about software, but it's vastly different than what I was used to when I was working for a startup.
In the US, if you have substantial autonomy in how you do your job, like most engineers do, you're exempt if you make above a certain amount. If you were, say, working on an assembly line but making the same money somehow, you would not be exempt.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Pollyanna posted:

This might not be a dev-specific question, but how does overtime work? According to my manager, the company considers me a non-exempt employee which means the government considers me to be making too much per hour to warrant requiring my company to pay me for any more hours than 40 per week.

I think you may have your terms mixed up. Typically, exempt employees aren't required to be paid overtime. These include most "white collar" professionals, explicitly including computer professionals. Non-exempt would normally mean you are entitled to overtime for >40 hours.

baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

Pollyanna posted:

This might not be a dev-specific question, but how does overtime work? According to my manager, the company considers me a non-exempt employee which means the government considers me to be making too much per hour to warrant requiring my company to pay me for any more hours than 40 per week. That's not to say nobody pulls more than 40 hours per week, that happens pretty regularly, but we just aren't compensated for it. This more or less came up in the context of me letting the rest of my team know that I had a doctor's appointment in the morning yesterday, and a talk afterwards about how to properly handle flex time (i.e. us Boston developers are allowed a non-contiguous block of working hours as long as we get at least 40 by the end of the week).

Is this common practice among dev organizations? I don't know if it's because my company isn't specifically about software, but it's vastly different than what I was used to when I was working for a startup.

If your company is tracking your individual working hours, you're automatically in a lower-tier company/position or in a company with bad HR in general. As an employee, that is, contractors of course track every hour.

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

baquerd posted:

If your company is tracking your individual working hours, you're automatically in a lower-tier company/position or in a company with bad HR in general. As an employee, that is, contractors of course track every hour.

Employees of defense contractors typically have to track hours as well, at least in my experience.

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

Jose Valasquez posted:

Employees of defense contractors typically have to track hours as well, at least in my experience.

Or 1/10th of hours as I recall at Ratheon (6 minute intervals!)

As far as Dr Appointments, the best advice I ever have was from my first manager, "Try to work about 80 hours about every two weeks, there will be times when you work more so don't sweat it too much." I've relayed that down to people who report to me as much as possible.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

baquerd posted:

If your company is tracking your individual working hours, you're automatically in a lower-tier company/position or in a company with bad HR in general. As an employee, that is, contractors of course track every hour.

Or you work as an employee for a consulting company or similar where they need to know who to bill for each hour.

hendersa
Sep 17, 2006

Arachnamus posted:

Ah, UK law must be different, as a "schedule" takes that role in many of the renewable contracts I've worked under in the UK.

Edit: also I wasn't suggesting you were wrong there, I meant "yes this, which can also be called a schedule sometimes".

Not a problem! :britain:

Jose Valasquez posted:

Employees of defense contractors typically have to track hours as well, at least in my experience.

I have to do this for my government research work. Even though I am salaried and exempt from over-time, I still have to track hours worked for bookkeeping and billing accountability. Direct labor costs (paychecks) are only something like 35% of the costs associated with a program. If you're working more hours, you don't get paid more, but you are technically using more company resources during that time that have to still be paid for. IT and housekeeping services, electricity, insurance, etc. get proportionally paid out of the remaining piece based upon the hours billed to that project versus total hours across the company.

The government requires these details to be tracked. It's ironic that this is done to avoid wasteful spending and fraud, but it is one of the major sources of expense in many programs! It's even more ironic that doing it this way is still way cheaper than the government research labs taking on the work themselves.

Your tax dollars at work.

Hughlander posted:

Or 1/10th of hours as I recall at Ratheon (6 minute intervals!)

It was 6 minute intervals at Lockheed Martin back when I worked there, as well. LMCO's project overhead makes our overhead look like a rounding error (though we still track hours in 0.1 hour increments).

Jose Valasquez
Apr 8, 2005

When I was at Lockheed we did 30 minute intervals, anything over 15 minutes was rounded up.

8:14-3:46 workday :v:

Pollyanna
Mar 5, 2005

Milk's on them.


Blech. Truth be told, I don't like being the kind of employee where I have to fill in an hour-by-hour timesheet and have such restrictive policies and weirdness around it all. Maybe it's my millennialism and self-centeredness but I preferred my previous company's salary-based pay (as opposed to hourly) and more implicit rules.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



Salaried employees and contractors (*waves*) at the client I'm placed at right now have to track their hours per project because the company bills clients for pretty much anything they do for them.

Previous placement tracked hours spent on each project for metrics, I guess? Whatever - the boss wants to know where time is going and you want to get paid, soooo

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Pollyanna posted:

Blech. Truth be told, I don't like being the kind of employee where I have to fill in an hour-by-hour timesheet and have such restrictive policies and weirdness around it all. Maybe it's my millennialism and self-centeredness but I preferred my previous company's salary-based pay (as opposed to hourly) and more implicit rules.

I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure if you get paid hourly there isn't an overtime exception. If you work too many hours they pay overtime. Or at least pay you for the hours. Expecting employees to work for free is quite illegal. Salaried exempt employees are in a different territory entirely.

If you're getting paid by the hour and not getting paid for some hours it's time to get legal help. Talk to a lawyer or the government as I'm pretty sure that violates some laws.

It isn't millenialness really. Having a salary and no need to fill out time sheets to the minute is just way less of a hassle.

geeves
Sep 16, 2004

Hughlander posted:

Or 1/10th of hours as I recall at Ratheon (6 minute intervals!)

What the hell? How much time was wasted trying to figure out how much time was spent? Asking about time tracking is one of my interview questions, if I hear that tracking is done, I just end the interview. I won't deal with that bullshit.

2nd Rate Poster
Mar 25, 2004

i started a joke
I've seen places that track hours for R&D tax breaks, that seemed like a growing practice to me.

piratepilates
Mar 28, 2004

So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.



Time tracking only sucks when you have to do it in a very fine resolution, and when your boss cares about how accurate it is.

I have to track my time at work (at my last job too), every day I put 8 hours in to the one project I'm on. If I was on two I'd probably just split it evenly and it'd be fine.

When you do 6 minute increments and your manager will interrogate you over half an hour of work that they consider to be too much, now that's bad and a good way to make people want to leave.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

piratepilates posted:

Time tracking only sucks when you have to do it in a very fine resolution, and when your boss cares about how accurate it is.

I have to track my time at work (at my last job too), every day I put 8 hours in to the one project I'm on. If I was on two I'd probably just split it evenly and it'd be fine.

When you do 6 minute increments and your manager will interrogate you over half an hour of work that they consider to be too much, now that's bad and a good way to make people want to leave.

I had to track my time working on each project at my last job. It was a corporate CRUD factory and we did not ship products, it was purely internal.

My boss flatly refused to accept 8 hours of work on a project for a day, because that implied 100% time spent staring at screen with fingers hitting keys. No breaks, no bathroom time, no sitting back and looking at the ceiling or speaking with a co-worker. As if my brain immediately stops processing a problem the instant my eye line crosses the bezel of my monitor.

This was the guy who wrote me up (literally a written warning in my employee file) for clocking in (yes, clocking in) at 8:00 (when my shift (yes, SHIFT as a developer) started) because I wasn't technically at my desk until 8:01 therefore I was late. So I'm sure the sociopath wasn't forcing me to record less than 8 hours of work per day in order to gather ammunition against me. Surely not.

Joke's on him, I was so checked out by the time he started up with recording hours that I didn't give a gently caress and was less productive than I would have been working 4 hours a day for someone I respected who paid me decently.

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sunaurus
Feb 13, 2012

Oh great, another bookah.
Time tracking loving sucks.

A huge reason for me taking my current job was that they don't do time tracking. All the teams here are doing agile very seriously, and it's actually working out (surprisingly) quite well. A big thing that I really love is that as long as my team finishes all the stories we agree to do in a sprint, our PO and our clients are happy. This means that I can work on whatever schedule I want, so sometimes I sleep all day and work in the evenings, some days I just can't get in the zone at all and just read books all day, but then some days I'm super focused and just work 12 hours straight. This might sound terrible to some people, but it's really amazing for me.

My girlfriend's company is the exact opposite - she has to live-log every second of her day. She always has this timer running, she can select which issue it's ticking for or pause it if she needs to leave her computer. Just recently, her team was told that they're not doing enough work, because they're logging less than 95% of their workday. In Estonia, we actually have a law which says that if you work on a computer, you need to take breaks for 10% of your workday (included in the 8 hours you work), so the 95% thing is bullshit, but her team is doing it anyway now.

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