———> "I am a professional consultant! — Say NOW I'm pretty!" <———
@Ian Michael Gumby:
You continue with your self-serving presumptions: "No sorry. The top tier [contractors] are the ones who actually spend time after the 8 hour billable day working on R&D and reading about the technology and what's coming down the pike."
That "professional consultant" self-aggrandizement is the typical load of horse manure shoveled: No professional full-time I.T. employee does any of the above, outside of the eight-hour workday. How many of you full-timers (especially, in R&D departments) reading his salesman trash now would like to buy a pair of steel-toed boots (see my initial post)?
As for vacation, of course, contractors are not paid for it: That is the whole point that resonates with scum management: Hire mercenaries to whom benefits will never be paid. The inflated rate more than compensates for the lack of vacation, but, in the U.S., well, good luck finding top-tier health insurance: That is usually where young rubes sold on contract work, if they stay in it long enough, eventually learn the real value of full-time employment, because they cannot even get into such a plan or afford the high premiums and deductibles thereof.
You admit to customary, after-hours dining-and-drinking "networking." Gee how sharp are those post-eight-hour-workday "R&D" hours you claim to spend, with your senses dulled by a full dinner and alcohol? No U.S. corporation of which I am aware conducts its "R&D" from evening to night, after boozing up its staff at dinnertime. Your claim is so full "professional consultancy," I can smell it.
Unions were created to protect workers from scum employers. Corporations and their shills pointing fingers at union abuses should rotate the tips of those fingers back to those corporate faces, which have been responsible for illegally and immorally "driving cost out of" employment: The scum has not gone away, but simply become more clever, by using such games as hiring benefits-eliminated "professional consultants" and claiming that they have, as you pretend, magical skills.
Unless you are a slave-wager in India, China, etc., the cost of your homegrown, overpriced snake-oil show is the next priority. That you serve this scum but are harder to extract from their matrix, than, say, a tax-paying full-timer they canned and replaced with a slum-dweller in Bangalore who costs one cup of truck-stop coffee per hour, should make you ashamed of yourself, not delusionally proud.
So, the "bad attitude" is entirely yours, because, in the non-union U.S. I.T. sector, you are the foolish scab who crosses the line at the dismantled, soon-to-be-closed plant in the deteriorating neighborhood in the corporately pilfered country. The "damn" that you say you give is truly for yourself and no other.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
