You probably don’t think of contracting as a lonely profession. The truth is you can be lonely even when surrounded by people. Lots of people, day in and day out. From the moment you leave your home to the moment you return.
I’ve contracted for the best part of three decades, and while it has been a profitable and rewarding experience, you make friends with loneliness. With each new contract comes a new location, building, and people. You say hi, maybe chat by the water cooler or coffee point. No conversation is too deep and no friendship too real. Eventually you will move on. Your contract has an end date.
After a while you get used to it. With each new contract comes a new location and new people. You start spotting personality types, management styles, office politics. You spot patterns. It becomes a game. You find the best places to eat or get coffee, and for a while you become a regular and are recognised. But it’s fleeting. Eventually you move on to the next contract and your face is forgotten.
Maybe you’ll return to a previous role on the recommendation of someone and the people there may even recall your name and ask how you’ve been. Sometimes you return to find the only constant is you. Same building, same office, same desk, different project, different manager, different team. It’s a strange feeling but after a while you can get used to anything. Like ending up working on every floor of a particular building over a ten year period, working for different companies on different floors. It felt like I’d completed a weird goal when I was hired by a company occupying the only floor I had yet to work on. Reward unlocked! Set complete!
Contracting can be a lonely profession. You leave your home, commute to a location, put in the hours, commute home, and repeat. The location changes often so even the people you see on your daily commute change. Variety can be fun and you are certainly never bored. But you rarely make any real connections.
Fingerprinting and profiling
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about digital fingerprinting and profiling, how bad it’s getting, all of us becoming easily tracked, digitally.
You could be emailing a friend about going camping and the next minute your phone apps are serving you adverts about camping equipment and camp sites in your area. Or maybe you are considering a holiday to Greece and you look at a few travel sites. Then every web site you seem to visit afterwards is serving you Greece-related getaway adverts.
It’s getting out of control. Not quite Minority Report, but not far off. Web sites are able to capture data about your device via user agent strings, cookies, through third-party arrangements, and other methods, and they can knit-together your surfing history to build a picture of your habits and interests to better target you with product and service advertisements.
We are being tracked, fingerprinted, and profiled digitally without our explicit consent. And it’s getting worse. Smart TVs and devices listen and buffer your conversations waiting for you to provide instructions. Are they recording what we say? How come when I spoke about maybe going to buy a new car with my wife in the comfort of our own home, that when I checked my web mail on my mobile later I was served car adverts? Or how come when I bought some beer, chicken, and BBQ sauce at the local supermarket where I used my loyalty card with cash, the adverts on my phone and PC are now trying to sell me BBQs? A coincidence? Or am I being digitally tracked across multiple devices and accounts?
Am I being paranoid or are we being digitally tracked, fingerprinted and profiled?
Lego
In my youth I saved my pocket money religiously to buy Lego. Small spaceships, cars, trucks, minifig sets. You name it, as soon as I had enough saved I would make the trip to the toyshop to purchase a set. I would assemble it straight away then throw away the box and instructions. How was I to know that vintage Lego would appreciate in value? To me I appreciated its value right there and then. I would play with it, I would collect it. I would create my play areas and feed my imagination. It was one of my favourite creative toys (Meccano being second).
Decades later and my collection of Lego remains at my parents home. It’s there for any child that visits to play with. I worked out once, just for fun, that my box of vintage Lego is worth four figures based on the sets it contains and their box-less, instruction-less value with collectors.
I have no intention of ever selling it. To me it is a means to stimulate the young mind and I am happy that it continues to do so long after I have stopped playing with it.
These days I have children of my own and they have a Lego collection far greater in size than the one I had. Of course yours truly gets the opportunity to play with it, to continue to stimulate my own mind and to create with my children.
TV and Film news before the masses
I’m often asked by friends and family how I know when a new TV show, season, or movie is coming out, as well as its UK release date, before everyone else does.
You see I’m an avid fan of certain TV shows and movies and I just have to know when the next season of my favourite show is coming out, if at all, and what my favourite actors are working on.
So I’ll let you in on a secret, how I find out before most people.
- I follow actors on Instagram. Actors love to boast about what they are working on and they leak information. Whether it’s teasers via photos or texts they can’t help themselves!
- I follow the sites run by geeks and journos that are obsessed with learning what actors and TV and film studios are up to. Sites like Geek Town.
- I have set up RSS feeds and app notifications to inform me about network and studio deals, actors contracts and coming soon notifications.
There you go. Easy! Now you too can find out when a new TV show or movie is in the works and when it is likely to be available in your area and on what platform.
Thoughts on LinkedIn
Musings on LinkedIn.
I’ve been using LinkedIn for many years and I keep changing how I use it. Below are just a few of my notes on how I’ve made use of the social network for work and networking.
– You don’t need to get to 500+ connections. There’s no game or points that you win if you do.
– You don’t have to connect to everyone you meet. Quality over quantity!
– If you’ve connected to someone and the only way you can contact them is through LinkedIn and they don’t respond to any messages over a period of 3 months, remove them as a connection. If you can’t communicate with them or introduce them to anyone then what use are they? Unless you want to follow their posts that is. Quality over quantity.
– People change jobs. Sometimes often. If you are using LinkedIn to connect to people in a certain field or industry and a connection changes to something you have no interest in, consider dropping the connection. It may sound mercenary but this is LinkedIn not Facebook.
– If you want certain people to reach out to you or be reminded of your existence without appearing to reach out first, look at their profile. LinkedIn will tell them you looked and your name will appear in their notifications list.
– You can silence spammy connections.
– You can subscribe to interesting newsletters and unsubscribe when they become boring.
– You can follow interesting people and companies and unfollow when they cease to provide whatever made you follow in the first place.
– LinkedIn is not for stalking but it is useful for OSINT.
– People post too much information. People leak sensitive data!
How do you use LinkedIn? Any tips?
A Shazam for languages
I’m addicted to Shazam. The app is installed on my mobile and when I’m out and about and hear a song I like but don’t recognise, I Shazam it. As long as I have a signal I’ve soon presented with the song title and artist details.
As I travel more, enjoying cosy nooks in cafes and bars nursing a beverage as I write, I tend to overhear snippets of conversations in foreign tongues. I try to guess the country of origin but I’m never sure if I’m correct. This got me thinking about a shazam for languages. Unsure of a language being spoken? Just open an app and it will tell you. Maybe even including the dialect or region. Would that be useful to anyone? Beyond satisfying a curiosity of mine that is.
It doesn’t need to interpret what is being said. I’m not asking for a universal translator. Besides, that would technically be eavesdropping. No, I’m just interested in knowing what languages are being spoken around me.
It’s just a thought.
The art of exploratory testing
As a tester you learn various formal processes in your approach to testing. Component, System, Integration, Interface, and distributed testing techniques both positive and negative paths. You learn the V-model and agile, test strategies, and iterative testing. But all of it is structured with a well-defined path and focus. Usually there is very little fun in the actual testing. It’s all regimented and strict with little deviation from the frameworks and methodologies in play. Rarely do you get a chance to just play.
During one contract I was having a conversation with the programme manager and he said that testing had 100% coverage and there were hardly any bugs left.
“Oh” I said. “How about a challenge?”.
“Like what?” was his reply.
“How about I take the weekend to do nothing more than unscripted exploratory testing? I won’t follow any test scripts. I’ll just play with the software.”
He intimated that that won’t work and I wouldn’t find any bugs without proper structure and method to my testing. I’ll be using decades of experience I said.
So confident was he that I suggested that for every high severity bug I found I was paid one hundred pounds. For every medium, fifty pounds, and low only ten pounds. He thought about this and finally said no as my reputation proceeded me and he figured this bet may prove expensive.
What I had suggested actually exists today but mainly for the finding of security bugs and is known as Bug Bounty programmes.
The art of exploratory testing is becoming a lost art in the QA field. I highly recommend that every IT project under test introduces exploratory testing. Not only will it most likely uncover bugs that you didn’t know were there, it will do wonders for your test team’s morale as it will allow them to have some fun and to just play with the software unscripted, allowing them to use their skills and experience to find bugs quickly. It may also help identify paths that are not covered by existing tests. It’s also useful to do this at the start to identify test cases needed.
Give it a try. Allow your testers to explore!
Time and Travel
When looking for work I look at the location and have to factor in the time to get there, and back, plus the cost of travelling.
If it’s not too far then I generally travel by car and factor in fuel, insurance, and parking. Further away and I look at trains, which in the UK are very expensive.
If the role is very far away and requires a long train journey, maybe with one or more changes, then I need to factor in both the cost of the tickets and my time spent travelling as this is lost time that must be compensated for. After all, employment is you selling your time to someone, including your time getting to and from the work.
What tends to happen IMO is that the company looking to hire you only factors in the salary as they assume the individual they hire will either live locally or pay to get there themselves. This is fine as long as the salary reflects this, which often it does not.
Companies want to hire from a larger pool of candidates but often do not want to pay the higher cost in bringing in someone from further afield. They either do not want a remote or hybrid worker, or wish to compensate for the commuting costs, either as expenses or within the salary.
Agents have gotten angry with me when I won’t entertain a role that is far away on the grounds that the rate being offered is too low after factoring in the commuting costs and lost time.
When recruiting from the wider market you need to consider both the costs in terms of time and travel.
Conversations with the dead
The older you get the more conversations you can recall with the dead. I’m not being morbid here, I’m just remembering conversations I’ve had with people that are no longer here.
I can recall being sat at a table with four other people discussing the latest mobile phone screen technology, demonstrating a video of waves hitting a beach playing smoothly in the palm of my hand. Yet I am the only one of the five present for that conversation as the others have all since passed.
I can remember conversations with friends and colleagues over the years where I’m the only one still around to recall it. Like a failing RAID server with my mind the last media in the array, still holding onto the data, those memories.
It’s both a sad and happy thought at the same time. It’s sad that the others are no longer with us, but happy that I have those memories of them.
Occasionally my mind will trigger such a memory and I’ll recall conversations with people that are no longer here. No one else has those memories but me. The older I get the more such memories I share alone.
Friends come and go
I’ve been let down by a few ‘friends’ recently and it got me thinking (again) about friendship. Friends come and go but family is life as they say, and this is generally true. As a freelancer I’ve worked many contracts where I’ve met some great people. We’ve sat next to each other five days a week for months on end, gone to lunch and for a drink or two together. We’ve talked about everything and consider each other friends. Then something happens. The work comes to an end, they move away or onto something else, and you never hear from them again.
It’s sad but it’s best not to dwell and to move on yourself. Friends will come and go. Don’t take it personally, it’s just life.