Computer Sciences Corporation

My company recently hired a developer who used to work at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). This guy had stellar credentials. He had a PhD in computer science. It just so happened that he worked for our customer before. He also had the security clearances we needed. So we snatched him up.

Today my boss told me I could interview another candidate that worked at CSC before. So I was excited. We really need strong developers on our project. I work extra hours, and I still keep falling behind schedule on our contract. Unfortunately the guy I spoke with was a dud. Good thing I did a phone screen interview first.

The thing that caught my eye was that CSC seems to be on the losing end of contract recently. This is causing their work force to be chopped. Their loss is our gain, at least for the good workers. Another buddy of mine was worried that his contract was under recompete, and he feared CSC might not win the work this time around. Let me finish with a positive note for CSC. They just won a $50 contract to support the United States Air Force. The total contract has a base year, plus three option years. My company likes to crush its competitors. But I still hope CSC gets a few contracting crumbs to keep its employees, well, employed.

Cost Plus

I work on a medium sized government contract. Previously it was a five year contract. However the latest one is three or four years in duration. It is a maintenance contract. We fix software problems and add small new features to a big system.

My relationship with my company is that I am a full time salaried employee. I am supposed to work at least 40 hours a week. However I get paid the same amount of salary regardless of how many extra hours I work per week.

In the old days, I thought I would put in a little extra time each week. The project always had a lot of work for me to do. My thinking was that if my company billed me out at say $100 an hours, I would be making my company an extra $100 for each hour I worked past 40 per week.

Just this week I went to some training for my company. The course I took was an overview of the company I work for. We did not get into details for any of the subjects we covered. One such topic was working on government contracts. I am now under the assumption that most of our contracts are based on a cost plus profit billing.

What this means is that the company charges the customer (the government) the actual costs it incurs during the work, plus some percentage of profits. I mentioned earlier that I am salaried. My cost to the company is fixes regardless of how many hours I work. Therefore working extra hours does not make my company any more money.

Since I am salaried, I know working more hours reduces my effective dollars earned per hour. However it also reduces the hourly rate my company charges the client. This is just a metric however. The amount of profit the company makes is not changed by the number of extra hours I work each week.

The conclusion of this discovery is that I should not work more than 40 hours a week. If I can get my job done exactly within the first 40 hours of the week, then it would be best to then go home. Working extra hours will not generate any extra dollars for me or my company. It would be a waste unless we were behind schedule. How novel.

Contractor Identification

When a contractor is doing work for a government agency, the client is going to want to know who are the employees that shall perform the actual work. There are many levels of validating these employees. At my company they requires that contractor employees get fingerprinted. It seems this is the same as the author of the Software Maintenance blog.

In the past I had to go to the police station to get a set of current fingerprints. Then I would take this to the government agency that issued the contract to my company. This was a messy business, with the ink for my fingers. It was also a bit disturbing to go into the police station. I felt like I was getting fingerprinted next to all the criminals that were getting processed.

Luckily my government client handles all the fingerprinting. And they have modern machines that can take the print digitally. No more need for messy fingerprint ink. The digital fingerprint scanner does not always work on the first try. But it is a big improvement over the old technique.

Who Pays For Software

I work on a good sized development contract. The customer wants us to accept input files in a different format next year. To assist in this, I think we are going to buy a product called XMLSpy to get the job done. The enterprise version of this product costs over $1000. Here is the challenge. Who pays for this software? And how do I get them to buy it for the project?

My company would like the client to pay for the software. However procurement is a lengthy process. It seems to take forever just to get the client to buy the software they need right now. It may be even harder to get them to pony up the funds to purchase a product they might need in about a year. I think this is a job for our Software Development manager. He actually knows how good a product XML Spy is. So I do not think it will be hard to get him on my side. Unfortunately he is the decision maker.

Things like this seem to vary from contract to contract. In some arenas, procurement of up to $1 million or more is no sweat. But you need to be talking with the top man, the decision maker. Right now I do not have the ear of such a person. I guess it is time to make those contacts. They could only help our company and project out in the long run.

Selling Source Code

I read posts on a software development message board frequently. Mostly these are guys that have started small companies to sell shrink wrapper software. One guy from Australia said he encountered a request from a United States state government agency. They wanted to purchase a license for his source code. They wanted to do their own modifications. The software author wondered what to do.

Here is a little more background. This guy sells an application for $150 a copy. This state government has a 1000 user license which cost them $5500. Some people commented that big agencies like to make sure they can continue to use the software even when the manufacturer goes out of business. This seems reasonable. But how do you come up with a price to charge the government for such a request?

You could calculate how many hours it cost to write the software. Then you could apply some hourly rate such as $100 per hour. Finally you could multiply that by a factor which represents the loss of you selling the license. Suppose it took you 1000 hours to write the software. At $100 per hour that would put you at $100k. From there you would apply some multiplier such as 2 or 3 to get the final bill.

Now I do not have any successful software selling for $150 a pop. But if I did, I would think that you could charge whatever the government was willing to pay for a license of the source code. This guy sounds like he is in business after all. It is just another type of business transaction. Of course he would probably have to go through some justification on how he arrived at the cost. But in the world of the government, there is probably a huge budget. A couple hundred thousand would be no big deal.

Work Locations Continued

In this post I continue a previous summary of places my current project has been located. The places listed in my previous post were sites leased by the client. They varied from good to bad. In this post I will review some other places our project has been located, including sites leased by the contracting company (my company).

An executive came to one of the bad sites we were located at. He decided this was no place for people in his company to work. So he pulled the project into a building owned by our company. This was quite an upgrade. You could tell the difference. There were people who made sure any problems we had got resolved. Phone not working? Somebody would take care of it right away. The network speeds were great. If I needed hardware, my boss could get it for me. An IT staff made sure all network printers were always up and filled with toner. The employees on the project felt good.

All good things come to an end. My company lost the maintenance contract on the project. I joined the new company that won the contract. However we went back to work at the client’s site. They did not have any cubicles for us to work out of. So we got placed in a big lab. I got the feeling that we were not invited guests there. People screamed whenever somebody pulled a network plug out of the jack. The door to the lab was locked, and it took forever to get access. So I spent a lot of time banging on the door to have someone let me in. There was a lot of noise in the lab. And it was either freezing cold or burning up. The only reason I stuck around was that the promised this was only temporary.

Once again my company came through for me. They relocated me to an office site leased by my company. I was required to dress more formally. But I can put on a tie for a good office. At the new location I have an office with a real door. And I have a window to the outside. I do share an office with one other company employee. However he must be away because I have not even met him yet. I have a lot of desk space in this office. I have a lot of room to put my books on a bookshelf. And I think I can request things for the office like a white board. This is the high life. I am expecting my morale to skyrocket. Parking is plentiful here. Sometimes being a contractor is not too bad.

Work Locations

When you work on a government contract, you work location is usually decided. I have been on my current project for a long time. So far we have moved six times. Some locations have been decent. Most of the locations were not optimal. When I talk about a location, I am talking about the physical environment. I thought I would share some of the places I have been stationed for my current project.

My first site for work on my current project was in a bad part of town. I guess they liked it because it was in the cheap rent district. However there were some advantages to it. Even though it was a building leased by our customer, there was hardly anybody from the customer organization there. We did have to go through metal detectors every day. But the atmosphere was relaxed. I brought in a bunch of toys to keep at my desk. I ran around without shoes most of the time. This environment allowed me to get a lot of work done for the project.

The second site for my current project was on site at the customer’s main building. It allowed quick access to the customer staff which was good. But it also meant that we were available for the customer to drop by our cubicles. We had to be on good behavior. The client did not want us making any noises that would disturb them. However we had a lot of noise pollution from other people. I will say this about the site – it had a darn good cafeteria. And even though we were in cubicles, the cubicles were decent.

We started to fail on a big new project for the customer. At that point we got moved to another site leased by the client. They put us in the basement of a remote office. The network was painfully slow there. People complained that nobody cleaned the bathrooms. We were still in cubicles. However they seemed smaller. We had trouble getting access to conference rooms. These were the gloomy days on the project. I don’t know if this location was chosen to punish us for failing on the big new project. It sure felt like punishment.