Was away from TOF for a while, went back to post up my findings on the Xojo shell, noticed how little Xojo staff post now.
I wonder if some more staff have left, or they’ve just decided to do their own thing and avoid customers?
Who knows. It is so sad to see what Xojo choose to become. I would say they’ll write about Xojo and how its demise, but no-one knows about Xojo to begin with…
I also see consulting requests are just slapped up for anyone to see, glad I don’t pay for “Pro” to get consulting leads.
Leads are suposed to go to the public forum when they have no replies in the “pro” section. Maybe the many pro users leaving xojo has something to do with that.
Entirely possible since their Pro listings have lots of people that haven’t been seen in more than a year (is discourse you’re “seen” if you log in and peruse the forum)
Testers is similar
218 of 794 Pros not seen in 1 year (27%)
322 of 794 Pros not seen in 6 mos (40%)
247 of 914 Testers not seen in 1 year (27%)
360 of 914 Testers not seen in 6 mos (39%)
There is less “newbie” questions that appeared these last monts…
(excepted for some few first computers users questions; their knowledge is far below the average developer newbie)
I guess while there are less newbies. Why should they buy Xojo? When they can have for zero money Java, VAADIN, CODENAMEONE or one of the Many JavaScript based frameworks? So I guess: the market is shrinking for a solution like Xojo.
I posted a lead to take over one of my consulting clients. I had 0 developers from North America contact me about it. 1 in Europe and 1 in South America. So it’s not surprising that the leads go to public after 2 weeks.
When I was consulting I answered nearly every one of them and was surprised at how often a client would say I was the only one that ever contacted them. I can’t imagine it’s any better now.
Yeah I have a similar thing going on right now. Third day on a very nice new gig – greenfield project – all because my former employer, always putting process over progress and risk avoidance over intelligent action, terminated me for no better reason than a company policy that you can’t be a contingent employee for more than 2 years (the scrappy 13 year old former startup I was with had been bought by a giant MegaCorp), and they “had to” honor a FTE hiring freeze. This despite that I was absolutely critical to keeping the lights on. Even once that decision was taken they took 2 weeks to bring in someone with near-zero relevant experience, by which time I was gone, so there was very little information transfer beyond the 90 page ops manual I gave them that they forgot I had written [sigh].
I put my consulting shingle back out … something I probably should have done a year or more ago but it was good pay and they mostly left me alone to do my job because they didn’t understand, or WANT to understand what was involved … so if they had just had their act together I probably would have just went with it for a couple more years. Path of least resistance. But even though I pressed them to get out in front of this six months ago, they simply didn’t have it in them to act in their own rational self-interest, much less mine. As it happens, though, I’m glad things went as they did.
There are so many unforced errors in corporate environments, especially large corporations. But sometimes in small corporations too. Consistently, the human condition being what it is, people can’t get out of their own way most of the time.
I had a gig once, about 20 years ago, where the owner understood, intellectually, that they weren’t equipped to run development (they had built a solution themselves in FileBreaker in the 90s but that was the extent of their experience). I was hired with just such a mandate. When the solution was ready for testing, they could not bring themselves to let go of the reigns and give them over to something they really didn’t completely understand and control. This kind of thing always boils down to control issues and the inability to delegate or trust capable people. It brings on a kind of panic in certain kinds of owners.
In that situation I had gone so far as to hire 2 developers to work under me, one of whom had quit his job in California and moved to Arizona for the role. They had been working for 2 months when the plug was pulled. I felt so bad, I gave them both severance out of my own pocket. California Guy went on to get T-boned in a car accident that left his body mangled and broken. While that wasn’t my fault, I certainly had changed his life so that it intersected with that other car, and so I vowed never to trust a client’s word to that level again.
My aversion to large corporations has also been re-validated, lol.
IRS and other tax authorities often take a dim view of “contractors” who are in positions for extended periods
ESP if this contract is your only / primary source of income
Too many years spent as a contractor have taught me this after many rounds with various tax authorities
THIS RIGHT HERE IS probably Xojo’s biggest issue !!!
Had similar experiences in a company I worked for on contract
They got audited and several contractors that had been there for 10+ years were “deemed” to be employees in fact
They were listed in the “Employee Phone book”, had business cards that did NOT say they were contractors, etc
Looked like an employee, acted like and employee, were treated like and employee for all intents & purposes
And so they and the company had top pay fines + all the back taxes employees would have paid
And the “employees” were now moved to be employees
And laid off some time later (2 years I think) as part of a corporate merger
I’ve always tried to be careful about making sure my major client was about 60-70% of my earnings - not 100%
Sounds very familiar to me. Be assured, smaller companies can have the same silly policies. Small corporation senior execs like playing like the big boys do. It’s just human, I guess.
Except that I was a W2 worker via a 3rd party HR management company anyway.
From what I understood, that was just to check all the IRS’s boxes – extending you beyond 2 years unchecks 1 or 2 but not most, and was a reasonable risk in my case. Especially since the stated objective was to shut down the acquired company anyway … although they were already nearly 2 years behind in that goal and from the look of things it was going to take at least another couple of years.
Actually 3 hours after I quit they suddenly decided an exception could be made. Too late though.
The new gig might be a little more questionable but I have a subcontractor under me, no one sets my hours or dictates my methods, so I think I’m probably okay but I will perhaps do a little side work as well from time to time. In fact I brought code and tooling along with me but reserved the right to use that piece in non-competing ways … which involves the public API I originally hoped to make some quasi-passive income from.
Prior to BigCorp (pre-acquisition) I was a captive contractor and that created no problems for me or the client for 13 years but I understand there was some dumb luck involved there. Really though I think it’s more a concern on the part of the client that I might retroactively claim to be an employee and want back benefits or something – which I wouldn’t do.
Fair - was just a “heads up” as I’ve seen this occur
It can be avoided fairly readily though - like a contract that is “project based” like shutting down company X which could take more than a couple weeks
figures
yeah I have seen this one occur as well
Working in a payroll dept for years revealed some amazing things
