Only Suicide Bombers Need Apply

Criminal fraud in the technical recruiting industry is nothing new. It starts off with wire and mail fraud and migrates forward through a list of crimes which would make even John Gotti blush. We’ve always had to put up with the FBI and Postmaster General not enforcing the truth in advertising laws. We have always had to put up with bottom feeder companies running advertisements on-line and in the newspaper help wanted section stating “competitive salary” when they knew damned good and well they were offering a salary which was 30% below the bottom end of the legal range published by the Department of Labor. No matter how many of us complained or filed charges, they never bothered to go after them. Of course, that has been changing lately now that every government in the country is skint broke and the fines for wire and labor fraud are quite high. Now that vendor management systems have been put in place that allow a company to block submission of any resume with a bill rate or salary requirement above the posted rate prosecutors can also nail them with Racketeering and Price Fixing.

Lately, I’ve been noticing a new trend. Having done some work as a Business Analyst (BA) and migrating my career more towards writing with a focus on technical writing, I’ve been paying more attention to the BA and technical writing contracts. The fraud is really running rampant now. I’m pretty jaded. I thought I had seen it all. I’d lived long enough to have seen Union Carbide slaughter roughly 25,000 civilians in Bhopal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster), a President blatantly commit perjury for reasons other than national security without getting thrown out of office ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton), and another president order a friend to out a deep cover CIA operative in the press without the reporter, editor, or person who did the outing suddenly having fatal heart attacks or an even more sudden case of lead poisoning in the brain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair). I didn’t think there was any crime one could commit which would phase me. I mean we’ve watched every large consulting company with an offshore division fly workers over here by the tens of thousands on tourist visas to do billable work for clients without paying one red cent of taxes on them and without any concern over the fact they were committing multiple federal crimes while doing it.

I must say, I’ve been floored lately. It appears that some of the companies who were the worst offenders of the published salary/rate ranges of the Department of Labor have been getting some official contacts over the matter. They are now committing an even bigger violation by down classing all postings. Here are the traditional roles:

• Business Analyst - $90-$250/hr – attends all meetings and gathers all data for project. Assembles all information and some of the resources needed by technical writers and technical analysts. Responsible for drawing out the high level system flow diagram and creation of the Work Initiation doucment. BA will also assemble critical test cases for the Project Manager and QA group to use. Note that critical test cases aren’t all test cases, just the business critical few which define success and/or failure in the eyes of the business. (i.e. stopping a customer with an account 180 days past due from placing a new order, not how the application/system handles alpha characters in a numeric field.

• Technical Writer Category 2 - $65-$180/hr depending on cost of living for area. This group is sometimes called Junior Business Analyst, but that is a misnomer. These are people who were programmers, not necessarily good programmers, but programmers long enough to understand how specifications should be written. They are the ones receiving the information from the BA and writing the technical specification documents which the TAs and programmers will use to actually develop the system. In some situations they will write test cases the BA will use in testing the system. This technical writer is aware of internal library routines and best coding practices which have already been put in place at the shop. They will participate in code walk throughs and ensure library routine X was used to prompt for all numeric fields since QA has already certified library routine X handles all invalid entries correctly.

• Technical Analyst – (formerly Programmer Analyst) - $55-$185/hr depending upon location and skill set. $55/hr is for the most widely available skill set where the cost of living index is at most zero. No location along any coast qualifies for that rate no matter how widely available the skills are. The rarer the skill, the higher the rate. Yes Verizon, New Jersey is “along a coast”, not that you would ever consider even paying as much as $55/hr to anyone. Does most of the programming an initial system testing. Also guides the programmers doing the grunt coding.

• Programmer - $25-65/hr depending upon location and skill set. DOES NO ANALYSIS OR SUPPORT WHAT-SO-EVER. This title has almost disappeared because it was so widely abused in the past. A programmer is not on call for production or system support. They translate the specification they are assigned by the TA and run through the limited number of test cases documented in that specification. When QA finds bugs they are required to fix them. These guys leave at the end of the day and don’t think about computers again until the next time they show up for work.

• Technical Writer basic - $7-30/hr depending upon location and if there is a specific documentation tool involved like Adobe or RoboHelp. This person does absolutely no research. The don’t conduct meetings or interviews. They simply get familiar with the document template and plug things the BA provides them into it. On later phases of the project, they will use the help creation tool to plug in grammatically correct help text for each field and/or screen, but the actual content will come from all of the previously created project documentation, not through any research effort on their part.

These job titles and rate ranges haven’t changed much over the past decade. Yes, there is the occasional scam artist which manages to obtain a $250-400/hr billing rate, but those are isolated cases. These job definitions are universal and undeniable. So, imagine my shock when I found the following:

http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=101&dockey=xml/9/5/95cbbb4f7c54654cddbe5a4278cac1e5@endecaindex&c=1&source=20

I actually used the phone number to call Sudin since they were looking for a C/C++ programmer with skills on OpenVMS able to do requirements definition and Java programming and somehow also do customer support even though that role does not fall into any definition of technical writer. Keep in mind the billing rate was set as negotiable. I would like to say that it was quite a shock when Sudin told me in broken English that they were looking to pay $35-40/hr and wanted 5-10 years of experience on OpenVMS, but it wasn’t. I informed him of the fact he was willingly participating in a crime and he made numerous promises to go fix his posting and list the shitty billing rate. You’re reading a blog about it because he hasn’t done it and Dice hasn’t taken the posting down yet.