How procurement can create value for IT projects

Veröffentlicht am 2020-10-09 von bk1

We know this, in many IT projects we need to make use of services and software and hardware that needs to be bought.

Actually it often makes a huge difference, what kind of deals are made and how efficient the projects can work on this basis.

I will just briefly tell a few stories and tell a bigger story by that.

A common pattern is a „preferred supplier“. It is nice to be a preferred supplier and in the phase when the partner is chosen and the contracts are made, companies often offer their best people and services to show how good it will be later to have them as preferred supplier. And then, when the deal has been fixed, they send the juniors for the same hourly rate and make a lot of profit. Or the price has been made so low, that only the juniors can be sent. This can be a problem in the long run, because it might get really difficult to get enough really good people in order to progress with strategic long term projects and not just maintenance of the daily business. Another interesting pattern can occur, when the preferred supplier is very strong with their employees in a project. Now they are getting some money from the hourly rates and in order to make profit the salaries should be significantly lower than this. In order for this to make sense for the employees they can provide non-monetary incentives, like some kind of career steps. Being in a powerful position in the project, the preferred supplier has some possibilities to choose who is in the project and who gets more responsible positions. So there is a temptation to kick out people who are not from their company and to provide these attractive positions not to the person, who would be the best choice for the customer, but to those whom they want to give an incentive. This is on the expense of their customer. So in the end of the day it is usually good to rely on multiple providers for „external“ people. There are serious companies who behave professionally and correctly even when they have become a „preferred supplier“, but this is not always the case.

When the preferred supplier is providing software, for example a database, it may be possible to get a really good deal for five years. Then in five years the deal needs to be extended and becomes magically more expensive. Especially if the company knows itself in the position of a „preferred supplier“. And when this issue is discovered, maybe even a year before, it is already too late to migrate. And then the expensive software needs to be used for another four years until it is again too late… And being from a big, impressive company does not necessarily make the software good. Counterexamples exist. In the case of databases I have seen companies that follow a strategy of multiple databases and that require a good reason for using the more expensive solutions. And magically the position of the buyer becomes much stronger when the deal needs to be extended for another five years. Maybe the overly expensive database will even be kicked out at some time. And yes, this expensive database has some really cool and pretty unique features. Unfortunately they only come in some enterprise edition that would be even much more expensive than the regular one, while open source databases provide decent, but less sophisticated variants of these enterprise features for a price that is less than the base version of the expensive database product. But, since the DB product cannot easily be changed, it is important to make a wise choice and to consider different options, including the more expensive ones, when starting a project. And to pick what makes sense for the specific needs.

Some interesting observations where made, when some preferred supplier made a really tempting offer for operating all the servers of a larger company. The annual price was really low. Much cheaper than doing it with their own team. Now suddenly the need arose, to store some really large amount of log files. I mean, I am talking about what could be stored on a few USB-discs, that could have been bought in the supermarket for a few hundred Euros. But of course this was forbidden, because the servers had to be run by the preferred supplier and even putting Linux on a few PCs that were no longer needed and attaching a few cheap disks would have been ruled out by the cheap overall contract. But this cheap solution would have been absolutely sufficient for the purpose. Now the diskspace could be bought from this supplier. Or more precisely rented. It was not a few hundred Euros, but a few hundred thousand Euros a year. Yeah, trey needed to make some money somehow… And a few hundred Euros once every few years, or maybe even a few thousand Euros every year would have been totally acceptable to pay by the project. But there are limits. You cannot do certain things under such conditions. The deal kills important possibilities of the IT people. I am not going to write, how this was resolved…

Another story, with a really cheap preferred supplier: They actually ran an important database for a stunningly low fixed base price. And on top of that it was paid per query. So what did they do? They designed the software in such a way that it used an Oracle database as a cache for the pay-per-query DB2 database. So the same query had to be made only once to DB2 as long as the data did not change. And when the data changed, the Oracle database just had to be cleaned up. Since this happened only a few times a year, this technically stupid architecture saved really a lot of money every year. Big money.

Yet another example: The management had already bought clearcase licenses. They were really expensive and the money was already gone. Now the setup that was used for clearcase and that was allowed by the licensing was not really optimized for part of the team working remotely. To do that efficiently would have required a much more expensive license that no one wanted to pay. So every day synchronizing the software took like 30 to 45 minutes. And one team member had to work full time to maintain clearcase. There were some other pains, like it crashed when files contained only linefeeds instead of carriage return-linefeed and some other annoying details that I do not really remember. Just for the record, some of these issues have been fixed in later releases… And clearcase had a lot of really interesting features that were not at all used. The seriously useful features can all be found in git now, in a contemporary way, of course. But not in those days, when there was still neither git nor subversion. So some tests were performed and it looked like the free software CVS (which really sucks big time when compared with contemporary systems like git) would have worked much much better for the concrete project. But clearcase had to be used because it was so expensive and the money had already been paid.

So in the end of the day, when the procurement does make good deals, this can create a lot of value for the project and allow for efficient and innovative work and for solutions that make sense technically instead of finding tricks how ot bypass the worst parts of the contract.

So a good procurement team and a good communication with the technical staff that knows what is needed for their work is a big plus for everybody, for the project and for the company.

How bad can a bad IT be for a company?

Veröffentlicht am 2020-09-11 von bk1

Antworten

Just a funny story that happened some years ago…

I wanted to buy some lamps in a stored somewhere 100 km away from where I lived.

So I went to the shop, ordered them and bought something else already.

Now I went there again when the lamps were there. I had ordered six lamps, but actually wanted to buy one more. A bit of money I had already paid when ordering…
It was a bad day. They told me that the lamps were probably there, but they were not able to process the purchase or even find them because the IT was not running. I was kind of upset about wasting so much time and money to get there and so they paid me the train ticket..

Next time I went there. It took a long time until I was able to pay. And then it really took an hour.. Six lamps ordered, plus one more, minus the sales tax from the previous sale minus what I had already paid plus some other stuff that I had actually bought during this visit. So many numbers all had to be added together with the right sign… After about an hour and many false attempts they got it right. It took an hour from the time when it was my turn to the time I had actually successfully paid and my credit card did work correctly… Then I got a piece of paper and I had to go to another entrance of the building, quite far away from where I was. There they had another understanding about how many lamps I should get then what I thought I had paid for. So I went back to the lady where I had paid and asked her to come with me to help me get the right number of lamps. She did not want to help me in that way, but I got her to write a not on the piece of paper that she had given me, that this means that I was entitled to seven lamps and she signed it. Then after having spent at least two hours I was able to go home with seven lamps and whatever else I had bought.

Now the question is, what is wrong here?

Obviously the IT did not work too well… It did not work at all on the second visit and it did not help getting the job done during the third visit.

But was that really the problem? Or just the symptom?

My impression is that the top management of the company was really bad. The processes were bad. And they were not able to find good employees, to train them and to motivate them. And then the IT was showing the same standard as the rest of the company.

Fixing the IT would not fix the problem. The business has to be fixed, the processes, the management, the employees need to be trained well, selected well and most of all motivated to work well… Then, when there are decent processes, it is a good time to improve the IT to support these processes instead of retaining the bad processes by implementing an IT before understanding the business well enough.

Company „Skillsmatter“ stops operations

Veröffentlicht am 2019-11-10 von bk1

The company Skillsmatter in London has been put „under administration“ and basically stopped its operations. The web site seems to suggest, that everything is still ok, but that is not the case and I have heard so from several sources. The owner Wendy Devolder writes on Twitter and on Linkedin. Or here are some more news from cbronline or from theregister. The adminstrator is Resolve. They had put a deadline on 2019-11-05 for potential buyers and nothing indicates that such a buyer could be found.

There are some hopes expressed, that either 10’000 people will donate 250 GPB each or that someone buys the company and keeps it afloat. Reasonably it is probably not going to happen.

Now it is hard to obtain further reliable information. Have the employees already been layed off? Have all conferences been cancelled, for example Clojure Exchange (ClojureX) and Scala Exchange (ScalaX)?

The websites mention nothing about it, but simply the fact that there is nothing mentioned indicates that the employees, who could update the site, are gone and that the conferences will probably not take place. Otherwise I would expect an update on the site mentioning that it is taking place in spite of the situation. In case of Clojure Exchange I have been informed by other participants that Clojure Exchange has been canceled and that there will probably be a „community conference“ instead. Being a speaker, I volunteered to perform my talk on this community conference instead.

In case of Scala Exchange there was a strange story. A keynote speaker, John de Goes, was „uninvited“ because of „inclusiveness“. As a result, he decided to create a competing conference, Functional Scala, at exactly the same time as Scala Exchange and also in London. Some speakers have reportedly decided to speak at Functional Scala instead of Scala Exchange and speakers were encouraged to do so. In the end this might come out as a good thing, because Functional Scala will probably take place and might be an option for those who have already booked their visit to Scala Exchange.

So what does all of this mean? If we are heading for bankruptcy of Skillsmatter and if the conferences (Clojure X for sure, Scala X probably) are canceled, we as speakers or simply visitors are entitled to refund for our ticket or our non refundable travel expenses as speakers to the extent that Skillsmatter would have covered them. But reasonably there will not be enough money left for this. A company can go bankrupt and still have funds that is hard to access, but in practice banks will help out if these funds can be documented. So in reality bankruptcy usually means that there are many debts and little money already. Now the salaries of the employees get the highest priority. When they have been paid, other open payments can be covered, according to the rules that apply in the country. Possibly the price for the ticket, that has already been paid, is simply lost. Possibly travel expenses are lost if they cannot be redirected to another event.

If you like to Donate 250 GBP and 10’000 people do so too, the company could continue. I do not think that this is going to happen.

I will keep you informed if I learn more about the issue that is interesting to potential conference visitors and speakers of events organized by skillsmatter.

Update 2019-11-12: I got in contact with the administrators. They did not want to confirm or deny that the conferences scheduled in December would take place. They just do not know, but it seems to be depending on finding a buyer. If a magical buyer appears and decides to reactivate the events, they might take place. Meanwhile all web pages of skillsmatter show a text that the company is „under administration“, so I guess each day it is getting less likely that there will be anything a buyer can reactivate. I know for sure that at least some employees have already been asked to leave.

Now the good news: The replacements for Scala Exchange and Clojure Exchange are already in place, meaning a conference about the same programming language at the same date and also in London. So if you have booked your hotel and your trip to London already, you might want to check them out:

reClojure Monday 2019-12-02 (only one day)
Functional Scala 2019-12-12/2019-12-13 (two days)

Update 2019-12-09:
Scala Exchange is not going to happen. See web page.
And since so much time has passed, it is becoming unlikely that a buyer turns up, so the company will be gone.

Update 2020-02-12:
The company found a buyer and will start working again. (see comment)

Bring your own Device

Veröffentlicht am 2017-07-07 von bk1

Antworten

This issue is quite controversial and it applies to laptops, tablets and smart phones.
Usually the „bringing“ is not really an issue, you can have anything in your bags and connect it via the mobile phone network as long as it does not absorb the working time.
But usually this implies a bit more.
There are some advantages in having company emails and calendar on a smart phone. This is convenient and useful. But there are some security concerns that should be taken serious. How is the calendar and the emails accessed? How confidential are the emails? Do they pass through servers that we do not trust? What happens, if a phone gets lost?
This is an area, where security concerns are often not taken too serious, because it is cool for top manager to have such devices. And they can just override any worries and concerns, if they like.
This can be compensated by being more restrictive in other areas. 😉
Anyway, the questions should be answered. In addition, the personal preferences for a certain type of phone are very strong. So the phone provided by the company might not be the one that the employee prefers, so there is a big desire to use the own phone or one that is similar to the own phone, which depends on the question of who pays the bills, how much of private telephony is allowed on the company phone and if there are work related calls to abusive times.
Generally the desirable path is to accept this and to find ways to make this secure.

The other issue is about the computer we work with. For some kind of jobs it is clear that the computer of the company is used, for example when selling railroad tickets or working in the post office or in a bank serving customers.

It shows that more creative people and more IT-oriented people like to have more control on the computer they work with.
We like to have hardware that is powerful enough to do the job. We like to be able to install software that helps us do our job. We like to use the OS and the software that we are skilled with. Sometimes it is already useful to be able to install this on the company computer or in a virtual computer within the company computer. Does the company allow this? It should, with some reasonable guidelines.

Some companies allow their employees to use their own laptops instead. They might give some money to pay for this and expect a certain level of equipment for that. Or just allow the employees to buy a laptop with their own money and use it instead of the company computer. They will do so and happily spend the money, even though it is wrong and the company should pay it. But the pain of spending some of the own money is for many people less than the pain of having to use crappy company equipment.

This rises the question of the network drive Q:, the outlook, MS-Word, MS-Excel,…
Actually this is not so much an issue, at least for the group we are talking here. Or becoming less of an issue.
Drive Q: can quite well be accessed from Linux, if the company policies allow it. But actually modern working patterns do not need this any more.
We can use a Wiki, like MediaWiki or Confluence for documentation. This is actually a bit better in many cases and I would see a trend in this direction, at least for IT-oriented teams.
Office-Formats and Email are more and more providing Web-Applications that can be used to work with them on Linux, for example. And MS-Office is already available for Linux, at least for Android, which is a Linux Variant. It might or might not come for Desktop Linux. LibreOffice is most of the time a useful replacement. Maybe better, maybe almost as good, depending on perspective… And there is always the possibility to have a virtual computer running MS-Windows for the absolutely mandatory MS-Windows-programs, if they actually exist. Such an image could be provided and maintained by the company instead of a company computer.

It is better to let the people work. To allow them to use useful tools. To pay them for bringing their own laptop or to allow them to install what they want on the company laptop. I have seen people who quit their job because of issues like this. The whole expensive MS-Windows-oriented universe that has been built in companies for a lot of money proves to be obsolete in some areas. A Wiki, a source code repository, … these things can be accessed over the internet using ssh or https. They can be hosted by third parties, if we trust the third party. Or they can be hosted by the company itself. Some companies work with distributed teams…

It is of course important to figure out a good security policy that allows working with „own“ devices and still provide a sufficient level of security. Maybe we just have to get used to other ways of working and to learn how to solve the problems that they bring us. In the end of the day we will see which companies are more successful. It depends on many factors, but the ability to provide a innovative and powerful IT and to have good people working there and actually getting stuff done is often an important factor.

Automation and its Limits

Veröffentlicht am 2015-10-02 von bk1

What we do in IT is programming and implementing and maintaining automatism. The general usefulness is not really challenged these days, but it was quite a big deal a few decades ago.
Many routine tasks can be done more efficiently and more reliably or become feasible at all with IT…

Just think of getting money from your bank account. Banks typically offer the possibility to do that at the bank counter without extra charges or any questions. But such a trivial operation can be done at the ATM, even while the counter is closed and I guess it is quite uncommon to go to the bank counter for that. There are more complex issues in banking that do require human interaction and they can be addressed with a human.

Buying a railroad ticket can be as trivial as getting money from the ATM, if the software of the ticket vending machine is really good, the tariff system is somewhat transparent, understandable and simple or at least the complexities can be covered well by the software. Most tickets are bought from the ticket vending machine, but the human at the ticket office in the railroad station is still important for more complex tickets that are not covered at all by the machine or that are too complex to buy there. It is interesting to see what can work and what not, maybe in another article in the future…

Phone lines are more and more answered by a machine, which has been given a beautiful voice by a human speaker… „For ABC press 1, for DEF press 2,….“ and so on. That works well for the trivial and most common cases. No matter how good the software is, usually at some point a limit is reached and we do want to find a human. I wanted to find out if there is a packaging service at some airport. It was possible to call, but there was no possibility at all or at least not within one hour of trying, to get to a human through these menus. So in the end the question remained unanswered. For the railroad ticket this can be an issue, if a more complex ticket is needed in a minor railroad station, but that can be solved nicely by providing a phone number (with real humans in the call center) that can be called and getting the ticket printed in ticket vending machine. This is possible in Germany and quite useful and basically covering most needs, even if talking with a real person is maybe nicer than a phone call with a dying battery… In Switzerland the ticket vending machines have a VOIP connection to the call center, so you do not even need to use the phone, but I think they are constrained to what can be done on the ticket vending machine GUI, so it does not help to solve the more difficult cases… Maybe in the future as well.

More delicate issues are the nanosecond trading. Trading (they do not like to call it gambling) on the stock exchange, with foreign currencies and all kinds of derivatives is done by algorithms automatically. Using software that is faulty, using the same software in many places, more or less. And also the risk management is done like that. It could be seen positive, because some traders tend to lose the sense of reasonable risk and machines kind of eliminate the emotions that can be counter productive in trading. But the risk takers are still there, setting out more automated trading systems… Will these systems one day create the real stock market crash by running into weird directions because of having the same software bug or because a situation not anticipated when the software was programmed occurs? Is it good to take such high risks without human control? Or it is even more delicate, if algorithms decide who is a terrorist and send drones, off course without a court order…

An issue that is mentioned quite a lot these days is motor vehicles operated automatically. While I do question the excessive use of cars of our time, I do think that that is an improvement, because human drivers are not very good and too risky. For rail transport this is much easier to achieve and many modern subway system operate automatically without any known problems.

We should always ask the question, does this IT solution and the automation it provides serve the humans and provide an advantage. That is the stuff we should build and operate.

Microsoft laying off 18000 employees after announced loss

Veröffentlicht am 2015-07-26 von bk1

Deutsch

It looks like Stephen Elop’s und Steve Ballmer’s idea to take over the mobile phone branch of Nokia in order to bring MS-Windows as mobile operating system on the success road has failed and will be stopped now.
For the mobile phone branch that is now part of Microsoft, Microsoft-CEO Satya Nadella announced, that billions are deprecated and up to 18000 employees will be layed off. This will be more than half of the remaining former Nokia-employees, but also other parts of Microsoft will experience major lay offs. As an irony these layoffs will also include Stephen Elop.
On the other hand it looks like Nokia will get into mobile phone development again. The deal with Microsoft forbids that for a certain time, but that will end in 2016. Some expect that Jolla might be bought by Nokia in the future. Nokia will become a niche supplier, not more. The market leading position they had before Elop will not be regained and it is also unlikely that they become one of several major suppliers, which might have been a reasonable outcome without Elop. Their own production won’t come back to Finland, but will be given to the well known Asian manufacturing companies.
Such fusions and takeovers of departments always have their challenges. Company cultures tend to be incompatible and markets are used to a brand and will not easily switch to the new supplier. Taking over of Pentax by Ricoh has been relatively successful, as it seems, but in that case they have carefully worked on mainting the brand in an area where consumers are kind of sticky to their traditional brand. Microsoft did not go that road, but they deliberately changed a lot and thus lost customers who might have been loyal to the Nokia-brand. The strategy in these two takeovers was completely different.
Probably Steve Ballmer and Stephen Elop will be remembered as incapable managers for a long time, for first destroying Nokias core business and then losing billions on the takeover that was obviously the original intention behind the whole game.

Links:

Future for IT-Contractors

Veröffentlicht am 2015-06-26 von bk1

Deutsch

Some of us are working in IT.
And there you can finde some working models. You can work directly as employee of the company whose work you are doing. You can work as contractor (freelancer), with one of several slightly different setups, depending on the country. Or you can work as an employee of a larger company that lets you work for its customers. I am just briefly mentioning that some hybrid models exist.

I have worked all three models and I prefer the second one, working as contractor via my own Ltd-company. I think that people are different and have different preferences. And for staffing IT-projects it is good to have team members with different strengths and experiences that form a great team and not just resources that add up to the estimated number of person days during the project duration. It is good to combine permanent employees of the company doing the project and contractors. They are usually interested in the success of the project, while external team members employed in larger organizations often, but not always, bring in some own dynamic about interests of that organization that are not necessarily so congruent with the interests of the project. I do know positive and negative examples of this. For example have I seen that they bring in highly qualified people in an early phase, negotiate high rates and later replace them with juniors. I even heard of a case where such a company had to provide a couple of hundred people and brought a team consisting partly of office workers who had never done software development and who just edited program files in a way they were told by their more experienced team members by email. They did learn how to use the editor. Often they also bring people with good marketing skills to do the further acquisition during time paid by the customer. Generally working for this model requires an unusually high level of loyalty to the employer, so that working in another team, seeing the company getting relatively high rates, getting relatively low salaries (depending on the company, of course) will be continued for a longer period of time. It can be a reluctance to take risks or it can be loyalty or conservativeness or some combination. This is not a bad thing by itself, but building a team of people who are all too similar in this aspect could be suboptimal. Some organizations do send technically highly skilled people who are there employees. I think it is good to see who is actually joining the team and to make sure that the company sending them and the actual team members are good and trustworthy. Usually smaller companies tend to be better than international corporations for this, but good and bad examples exist in all combinations. To have a good mix in the team it is useful to have at least some contractors working for themselves among the external team members. Going through checklists of qualifications and capacity planning against some estimations is not enough.

A good mixture of internal and external team members, which can very well be with a majority of internal employees, is a great chance. It helps being flexible about the team size without having to do layoffs, which are neither common nor popular in Europe. For the loyalty of the permanent employees it is good if layoffs are a rare exception. Long term employees usually know the structures, the requirements, the customers, the IT systems and the tools very well because they have been around for several years. External team members have seen relatively many teams and companies and projects and have seen things that might not ring a bell for long term team members who have gotten used to certain things. So they can bring in new ideas for improvement and new knowledge.

I do observe how things in Switzerland are evolving and I am hearing some things about Germany. The problem is always that in other areas a contractor status is supposedly used to give employees suboptimal conditions and the government tries to stop this. In IT the contractor status is a good thing and works well and there are enough opportunities to become a permanent employee for those who prefer that. But if rules are formulated in a wrong way they make it very hard to be working as contractor.

In Switzerland it is getting more complicated. Some changes can be seen as „collateral damage“ or even „minor annoyance“ or as „effort by larger companies with good political connections to eliminate competition by smaller companies“. I leave that open for interpretation.

The VAT (sales tax) and the social insurance (retirement, unemployment etc.) needs to be addressed. This can be a chicken-or-egg-problem. To be able to pay VAT and to have a VAT number it is necessary to have some customers that justify the effort to provide a VAT number. Sending invoices with VAT usually does not hurt customers who are companies themselves, because they can pass it to their customers. Doing invoices without VAT is ok too, but becoming obliged to pay VAT later creates a problem because no customer wants to pay VAT on invoices that have already been settled. And nobody likes invoices with a text that says that the VAT-issue is still open and the amount to be paid might change later… Such customers simply do not exist. This is quite easy to overcome by just estimating the total amount of the invoices and writing a letter to the VAT organization prior to sending the first invoice. If the money in the start phase is not too scarce, the first invoice might even be delayed by a few weeks for this. In the end of the day the VAT-organization loves money and opportunities to get more of it.

The social security is a harder one. In Germany almost all contractors leave the social security system which is not very attractive and not very fair. In Switzerland at least the retirement system is slightly better and harder to leave, so the issue is more about finding a way to be part of this system and to work legally. Being an employee, the company and the employee pay half of the social security, respectively. Having ones own company implies paying both parts. If this company is not accepted by the social security organization, the customer is considered to be the employer and has to pay that half. This is a bad basis for sending invoices and if the status is not clear it is again almost impossible to have customers. Nobody likes working with a contractor if there is a possibility that the social security organization with come and collect some employer-half for some payments in an unpredictable future. This kind of customer simply has not been invented yet. Being a baker or a painter is no problem. Enough customers exist anyway, unless the business is a total failure. Nobody will find out who has bought bread and collect employer-parts for social security from the customer basis of the baker. If the painter does some smaller projects and not the really big million dollar contract for painting a skyscraper in the first year, things should be fine too.

Being an IT contractor the typical projects are more like painting a skyscraper. Many people are typically working on IT projects for many years and the contract might be extended for a year or two or in some rare cases even longer than that. So showing multiple customers in the first year can be hard, even though some smaller side projects, like trainings for other customers for a week or so, can help. Some people have managed to get this company status from the social security organization without incorporating their company. But in Switzerland that is an exception. In practice two ways are really working. Either you have to incorporate your company and get the social security issue resolved automatically by that or you have to become temporary employee of some intermediate company, usually the one who helped to acquire the contract. Conditions can be complementary to the contract and transparent.

There are basically two common ways to build a corporation in Switzerland: GmbH and AG. The GmbH requires a capital of 20’000 CHF (just think of around 18’000 EUR or 25’000 USD, but rates may change drastically). It was only necessary to bring have of that. The other half was only guaranteed by the founder, who had to provide another 10’000 from his money to pay debts of the company in case of bankruptcy. Later this was changed and the other 10’000 had to be added, which was reasonable by itself. But the bureaucratic effort was around one or two days and the fees ate up more than a third of the money. Was that necessary? Another change, that was in principal reasonable, was to change the size rule for more complex book keeping. Large AGs need another organization to check their book keeping while small GmbHs need only a professional book keeping. Small AGs where treated like big AGs and big GmbHs like small GmbHs. This was changed and the criteria became some metric about the size instead of the AG vs. GmbH-status, which makes sense. But it required some effort to opt out of the „big company pattern“, which was again expensive and time consuming.

The next step, a few years later, was the necessity to get a „Personalverleihbewilligung“. The paper work was around 46 pages and 50’000 CHF needed to be deposited as guarantee. Big companies have to deposite the exact same amount of money. It is for paying the salaries of the employees in case of failure. But this could be solved with time and money. Now it is hard to get the „Personalverleihbewilligung“ at all in some cantons, but in Switzerland companies play the game of moving to the most favorable canton.

There is always some risk that another problem is invented for small companies that cannot reasonably be dealt with. The factual prohibition for IT consultants working as contractors to do their job. I want to see many projects. I want to have the flexibility. I am willing to take the risk. But I do not want to become employee of a large organization and deal with the conflict of interest when loyalties with my employer and my projects conflict. I want to help the projects succeed.

In that case I will look for another country in Europe that allows me to work in the way I prefer. I am flexible with this and I will learn the language, if I do not already know it.

Karl Brodowsky's IT-Blog

IT Sky Consulting GmbH

Archiv der Kategorie: Economics & Society