The Bullet Points
- In the world of contracting, the entire hiring process can take place over the phone
- Knowing the right tool (even a little) can get you the job
- Per diem is a fixed daily allowance for meals and/or lodging
- Beach time is payment for staying with a company but not actually going to work until they find more work for you
- Benefits such as health insurance and paid time off (PTO) come at a cost, and sometimes they are negotiable
- Recruiters always make the job sound great
The Road Not Taken
The first phone call I received that week wasn’t for a technical writing job. It was for a web development job at the local newspaper. The job made sense. I had some newspaper experience and I knew HTML. They wanted somebody who could convert their articles into HTML using a conversion program that would probably require a few on-the-fly tweaks. They brought me in for a job interview and it went well. I met the editor in charge of the online edition and we liked each other instantly. He was a nerd, just like me. We prattled on about HTML for far longer than anyone should.
The downside was the pay. The job would be part-time (25 hours a week) and pay about twelve dollars an hour. That would be barely enough money to skirt bankruptcy, much less get ahead. Still, the job seemed well-suited to my skills and the journalist in me liked the idea of working for the largest daily newspaper in town. The editor promised to call me the next day and let me know whether or not I got the job.
A Bunch of Calls in a Row
I was still dressed in my suit when I got home and the phone rang. I was hoping it was the editor, calling me early, but it was another gig entirely. The company calling was Wesson, Taylor, Wells & Associates. They were a contracting agency out of North Carolina that specialized in placing programmers in the health care industry. They wanted to know if I could interview for a technical writing job that day. I still had my suit on, so I said sure, just tell me where to go. You don’t have to go anywhere, the man said, I’m going to have the head programmer call you in about ten minutes. Eight minutes later, I was talking to the head programmer.
Once again, the interview went well. The programmer wanted to know if I knew anything about Speedware. I answered honestly that I had never heard of it. How about Cobol? Sure, I told him. I knew a little about Cobol. It was a structured language used for building reports and such. Well, it turned out that Speedware was a lot like Cobol, a programming language I knew “a little” about. He asked if I could read Cobol. I told him I had programmed in Basic, Fortran and Assembly language. Reading code didn’t frighten me. Either my answers were good or they were desperate, because the next thing I knew I had an offer.
All the Work I Could Handle
Actually, I had two offers. While I was on the phone with the head programmer, the newspaper editor called (a day early) to offer me the web job. The recruiter for WTW simply had more to offer though. He could either pay me $20 an hour without benefits or $29,000 a year salary with benefits (paid medical, holidays, paid time off). If I took the $29,000 I would be considered a regular employee of WTW with a permanent job, even though I would be contracting for a local health insurance company. When this gig ended, he explained, they would find me another. It might not be in the same city, but if I moved I would get per diem, which is a daily (tax free) allowance to cover living expenses. In the meantime, if they hadn’t landed me a gig, I would be paid beach time. Beach time means that you keep getting paid even though you aren’t currently working on a contract. You could go to the beach if you wanted. He told me WTW had plenty of work to offer, and that I would probably be working steadily for years.
I took the full-time gig, and using the power of the other offer (without revealing the pay) I eventually negotiated the salary up to $35,000 with benefits. In addition, because I told him I might take the newspaper job as well (it would be nights) he offered to pay me to redesign the WTW web site, writing new web copy and creating a new visual look. Suddenly, I had all the work I could handle. I also had to fire up the fax machine…
Further Reading
- Evaluating a Job Offer by the US Department of Labor: Advice on researching a job or a company.
- Employee benefits by Wikipedia: A rundown of the general benefits that might be available for a job.
- How to Find Technical Writing Jobs by John Hewitt: My step-by-step guide to the process.
Questions
- Is money the primary consideration in a job search?
- If one job paid significantly less than another, what other factors might lead you to take the lower-paying job?
- What experiences have you had with job recruiters?
Next Time
I’ll discuss some of the things that happen after you take the job but before you actually start the job.
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{ 11 comments }
John,
I’ve been writing a guide for a client in the career transition business about negotiating a job offer. You did everything right in this negotiation.
Oooh, neat story. I like the bit about still having your suit on while the phone is ringing with Offer Number Two! I want the rest of the story, dammit!
Interesting story John. Let me know if you ever need help with the Speedware stuff. I’ve been with the company (Speedware – same name as the programming language) for 20 years now. Good luck with the jobs.
Nice work. Oh and speaking of designs, I like what you’ve done with the place here.
PS, Thanks for the link on my post about finding work.
Amy Derbys last blog post..How I Scored Two New Freelance Blogging Jobs While Waiting For a Train
@ Lillie
Thank you. Eventually we will discuss a much more difficult and stressful negotiation. I’ve been in this situation more than once, and it seemed to get worse every time.
@ James
It was quite a strange day, but it was nice to be in demand after such a long stretch of nobody showing any interest.
@ Chris
Thank you for the offer. I don’t have anything negative to say about Speedware, but it isn’t a product I use currently. I’ll certainly be discussing that later.
@ Amy
Thanks for the kind words and congratulations on picking up so much work because of a single conversation. That was great to hear.
So how many contracting agencies actually give paid beach time? I’ve never heard of that before. Maybe Canada is just behind the times? Inspiring story. It makes me realize I’m doing way too much volunteer work when I should be out there looking to get paid.
Tony Chungs last blog post..Days like these
@ Tony
It isn’t that frequent, and usually applies to consultants who do a lot of high-dollar work for multiple clients. I was lucky enough to start out at a firm that did a lot of that type of work, even though I was a relatively low-paid member of the team.
John,
The day of your interviews certainly seemed to be your day! Isn’t it nice to be so popular? It’s great, too, the way you leveraged that first offer into a higher salary at the second job! You’re obviously an expert negotiator!
Jeanne
Great post, John. I like these stories where one goes from famine to feast. My niece in upstate New York and a friend in Great Britain both have jobs similar to yours: they get paid beach time when their employer has no work to send their way. It’s sweet, but they are very nerdy (my Scotland friend got her master’s in math theory)
Regarding pay and job choice: I’m fortunate that I only once had to take a cut in pay when changing jobs, and it was a small amount. My husband twice took big cuts in pay (30 to 45%) when he moved from private sector to public sector jobs. In both cases, the benefits of lower stress level and greater intrinsic value in the public sector jobs far outweighed the loss in income. We are realistic: we want to save money as well as pay bills, but, at least in our experience, there seems to be a point of diminishing returns with the more salary we make. The choice often is not how much $$ we’ll make at a given job, but how much we’ll enjoy that given job.
Now, if you can command a high salary and enjoy what you do … that’s really sweet!
Tom Johnson pointed me to your series.
Your experience sounds very familiar!
Interesting expression: “beach time.”
At first I thought it was a typo because I’ve always heard it called “bench time,” meaning that you are sitting on the bench waiting for the next job.
Maybe all those people sitting on the bench said, “Screw this, I’m going to the beach.”
And so the language evolved.
@ Holly
There is some debate. Some people call unpaid leave beach time and paid leave bench time, but when it was explained to me they called the paid leave beach time.
@ Marie
Pay versus job satisfaction is always an issue. i love to blog, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I like technical writing enough that I am willing to do it to pay the bills.
@ Jeanne
I am a hard negotiator and it has helped me a few times, but I have negotiated myself out of jobs before too. Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t.