Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Cutting all ties with showbiz…

No updates on the plan yet. Two weeks to go and we’re starting to realise just how broken some of the deliveries we’ve been receiving have been – dammit software development is a difficult thing to do right, patch on patch, miss one and the whole house of cards caves in. This has to be one of the most complex distributed software development systems in the world and we’re stuck +6 hours or more from the rest of the world on the end of a small pipe across Siberia, no wonder things panic us from time to time.

And my agent is getting pushy about finding me another job…I’m not keen, given the amount of trouble they’ve given me over the last year, but what are the chances that if I don’t pursue the opportunities they give me that they’ll find some reason to not pay my final month?


Categories: Memories.

/ 10 Comments

10 comments

  1. stompyboots

    what are the chances that if I don’t pursue the opportunities they give me that they’ll find some reason to not pay my final month?

    That’s certainly not legal! I don’t think they’d try it, given the damage that bad word of mouth can do to a business, but just in case, I’d keep a file of all of your correspondence with them (in both directions), and make sure that you’ve got at least one letter in there that says something along the lines of ‘while I would be interested in using your services at a later date, I would like to have some time off between this contract and the next, as I have family obligations to fulfill in the UK in the short term, and these will demand all of my attention for the foreseeable future’. They can’t argue with that!

    Reply
    • venta

      You’re not 33 1/3, surely ?

      That sounds pretty sensible – I have no experience of job agencies, but the idea that they’d fail to pay you because you didn’t take the jobs they offered does sound rather extreme.

      Reply
      • neilh

        Re: You’re not 33 1/3, surely ?

        To the day. Not as cool the who was 33 1/3 on 1/1/2000.

        I’m not actually expecting them to *not* pay, just that they’ll take longer than normal to get around to it.

        Reply
    • neilh

      I’ve told them I’ll be taking a break when I’m back, and to mail me in a couple of months once I’ve had a chance to relax a bit….but I’m not really expecting them to not pay, just that there’ll be a bit of a faff over it, they’ve started already by raising questions about my November timesheets….conveniently enough I only worked three weeks in November (since I was in Whitby) which is about the same as my final month here…so they’ll just drag out the questions for long enough that they turn around with a ‘well, we’ll withold the final payment until this is sorted out’, and then never bother. Not that I’m cynical or anything.

      Reply
      • stompyboots

        Cynicism is healthy – it keeps you on your toes for such behaviour. That does sound ghastly, though – surely the impetus should have been on them to sort out any November-related issues before the tax year ended in April?

        Reply
        • neilh

          Or before they actually paid the invoice, perhaps…tax year is irrelevant ‘cos I’m paying myself through my own company, so I’ve got to figure all that out (which is mostly done apart from actually getting the right forms to fill in…grrr)…But I can’t see that stopping them causing trouble, they’ve been reasonably well behaved, apart from a few late payments, for the last few months, but they started with a bad impression, taking something like 8 attempts at ripping me off in the first two months of my working out here.

          Reply
  3. meryc

    Sounds like this are just anoyingly complicated.
    Well i have just started on the complicated an evile road of contracting.

    So this is all intresting and worrying stuff. Is it that your contract is up and they wount renew?

    Or just that you want soem time off and they are pushy bastards?

    Reply

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