paul and corinna and lucas' blog

Woo – I thought he looked familiar: CAP won the small company category – started by a guy in our church! "one of the most dominant performances by a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the five-year history of this list."

Though funnily enough – the client I'm currently working for just won a Best Place to Work in IT award... (and not for the first time I think) – makes me wonder how they choose!!

And ain't it amusing how if you half-kill yourself and somehow miraculously manage to reach 130% of your targets, you get 130% of your bonus?! (As opposed to your salary.) So that extra 30% of effort (or extra 70 days a year if you prefer to think in those terms) on a 2.5% bonus gets you an whopping extra 0.75%!! Almost 1% extra cash you wouldn't have got otherwise!! (Not taking tax or NICs into account of course...)

I've accepted a short-term contract over in Halifax starting on the 16th! I'm still my own boss, but will be working mostly on the client's site so it will be a change. I just hope I don't do this!

It's with Thomson – though apparently not the one that's the sworn enemy of Yellow Pages (who I used to work with), or the travel agent, or the people who made our TV, hmm, there's quite a lot of Thomsons! And I'm not even talking about The Thomsons (The Simpsons on the run from Sideshow Bob: "Hello Mr Thomson" ... "I think he's talking to you...").

(Again.) I'm still Paul Parkins the self-employed company, but I'm also now a director of 01274.net Limited to allow me to work for a wider variety of companies.

Paul Parkins the company that is. I'm thinking of making little Paul action figures and tea towels. Neat eh? No, it's just so I can do software for people really. I had a little trouble with the company name. Apparently it's in the rules that it "must not be offensive", the problem is, I know if I chose anything with my name in, Matt would no doubt find it offensive... He he...

My first job was giftofthegabs.com. Admittedly, I didn't do any of the pretty visuals you can see. I did the code behind it that actually does stuff. It's not that complex really, but it has some nice features, like it uses SSL to make all the potentially sensitive data transfer secure (we got the cert signed by these guys for only £14/year), it emails people at various points (using templates), it hides protected (i.e. paid for) content so you can only get it if you're logged in and your account has the necessary privelidges for that content, it has an administration back-end so non-techies don't have to use SQL (!), and loads of other standard website stuff.

I think the niftiest thing is it's entirely MVC which is easier said than done in PHP. I used a code generator I wrote a couple of years ago. It outputs all the necessary infrastructure, database schema and base classes for the controller and model, including all the boring stuff like accessors and mutators, validation, CRUD stuff and queries. Generating all that saves a load of hassle. You have to write less code. The code you write is cleaner. It's guaranteed (kind of) to be bug free. (Especially important in PHP with its scripting nature and weak typing.) Also means when you want to change the structure, it's less work/bugs too. This is the first time I've used it to write something for someone else, and its worked well!

Oh great. I've just got the letter I was expecting about my CODA pension. I've not got a great history with pensions anyway (e.g. this and this) so I wasn't holding out much hope for this one. And I was right not to.

There was a clause in my contract saying that I had to stay 2 years to keep the company's contributions I had earned. Because I was only there 96% of that (1 year 11 months) they have taken them all back. I calculate they have taken just over £4200 out of my savings pot.

So as you can imagine I'm rather peeved at that. I feel like I've just had four grand nicked! Or maybe it would be better if I saw it as I just found out I've been given a big retrospective pay cut for the last two years? Er, no.

To be fair, I was fully aware of the 2 year clause, but I kinda hoped they would reduce my benefits (say by the 4% I didn't stay for) rather than take them all back.

It reinforces what one of my bosses said - you have to look after yourself, the company couldn't care less about you. It typifies the kind of management I hate - totally short-termist, couldn't give a stuff about people, money is all that matters. But even then, 4 grand means nothing to them (I could show them loads of places where they could save far more than that!) but it's a big deal for me!

So yes, I'm peeved about it. But I've decided not to complain (other than this rant, he he...). Because of how unfair it is, I was going to write some letters - mix things up a bit - but I've decided not to. I knew coming on this course would cost sacrifices, especially financial ones. I am choosing to see this as just another one, one more than I was expecting.

Accepting the sacrifice is one thing, but unless I forgive I would be holding on to the peevedness until it turned bitter. So I choose to forgive them too - CODA, no hard feelings ok? <shake/> He he... Seriously though, I was leaving the door open to return to CODA after my course but I'm not sure where this leaves that possibility.

Ahh well, it's just a few grand more on the pile... I think I'm up to £9400 in pension losses now - nearly two grand a year! Anyone do better than that?   :)

Doh! I just realised what I said about tax before was wrong. On the Inland Revenue page it quotes the tax bands without including the Personal Allowance - which makes sense because it's variable - but because of that I forgot to take it into account. So those figures I worked out before were a load of baloney!

So no, I'm nowhere near the higher rate (thank goodness!) and there is no overlap of 11% NIC with the higher rate income tax.

I can't be bothered to work out what new the figures are now, but you get the idea anyway...

Wow, I just worked this out. I'm not at the higher rate Income Tax band yet, but I'm not far off. And for a few hundred quid, that overlaps the normal 11% National Insurance rate. So if I was at the higher rate and I was to get a pay rise of £273 (wow! I wish... he he), we could buy £100 of stuff with it! This is where the money goes:

Income Tax	£109
NIC	£30
Pension	£16	(it's £240 without this, but I count Pensions as a social tax)   :)
VAT	£17.50
Left over, to spend	£100

Plus there's other taxes like Council tax, savings tax, petrol tax and stamp duty that are difficult to factor into this kind of equation.

I've never thought about it like that before... And if you include tithes and offerings, which I do, the rise would be more like £405 to pay for £100's worth of stuff, hmm, interesting...

Edit: these figures were worked out wrong. See this page.

He he, Matt was just telling me about 'freedom day', the day you stop working for the government and start earning money. Nice!

I wonder what your freedom day is if you factor in things like mortgage payments, house/contents/car insurance, car, petrol, car servicing? It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "You're living for your car, man!" (The Simpsons - I forget which episode, but I'm convinced that everything in life relates to at least one episode...)   :)

I found it amusing that my company's 'Corporate Responsibility' is being managed by our PR department, but it looks like they are doing some good.

CODA has so far donated £2,500 to the Tsunami Disaster Fund and has said it will match donations given by us employees. They've even setup a monthly scheme where donations are handled (including automatic Gift Aiding) by payroll.

I thought that was unusually generous for a company, especially for one that has no business interests in the area (to my knowledge anyway). The matching is limited to £10/month/employee for 6 months, which kinda takes the edge off it, but there are a lot of us so that could add up to a decent amount...!

Actually, we have Bing Crosby in the background now...

BBC Test the Nation: The Geeks. We've been asked by the production team if any of us CODA software developers want to join the "IT Programmers and Developers" team for the January 2005 programme!  :)  He he...

I've had my appraisal at work. That went quite well, my boss had only good things to say about me, and said I had made his job easier (by fixing a few things). I should be having a pay review sometime soon too, which should come in handy considering our mortgage has risen £60/month since I started here!

This is cool. My bid on this project was accepted! It's a company in Hawaii looking for a Java developer to help them with their Mobile Phone Chess game. Just off the cuff I put in a bid because it sounded like an interesting project (similar to stuff I've done in the past) and I won! It's just a minor bug fix really, but should be interesting...

I'm pretty sure it's this: ChessEverywhere but I haven't got my hands on it yet...

Neat eh?

What's more frustrating is that after I joined Pindar we all had to increase our contribution by nearly 20% (in addition to normal increases) because the pension fund wasn't doing well (the company increased their contributions by that much too I think).

However, I've just worked out that even though I was contributing nearly 20% more, that hasn't added even a single penny to the actual value of the pension at all. So that extra money I paid has just been lost (from my point of view anyway).

What I can't work out though is why we had to increase our contributions, when clearly the value of the pension was already miles less than the total contributions?!?!

Pensions seem to be a more acceptable form of pyramid scheme.

Well, I'm rather peeved at the outcome of my pension from my last company, Pindar. It was based on 'final salary' which is good if you stay in the company until you retire, but as I've just found out, it's not necessarily good if you leave 41 years before then as I did.

It turns out that because it was a final salary arrangement, the transferrable value is based entirely on the cost of providing benefits equivalent to those you would get at retirement. I.e. it is unrelated to the level of contributions, and in my case the value is only just over 45% of the actual contributions made by me and Pindar.

Now I wouldn't have really minded if we were talking a couple of hundred pounds here, but that missing 55% actually amounts to nearly £5200! Now I know I probably knew the rules before I joined, but that doesn't stop me feeling ripped off... I must have assumed that the value would at least resemble the contributions made. But now it turns out that if, instead of contributing to the pension, I had just invested my own contributions myself wisely, we could have been better off now.

We haven't actually lost any money as such, but we're effectively never going to see any of the money Pindar contributed to my pension, so there was little point being in the scheme at all. It's not Pindar's fault as such but I think the "we'll contribute x% to your pension" on the job advert was a little unfortunate. Maybe there should be a footnote saying "we can't guarantee that you'll see any of it though".

It seems like the pension industry is just one big ripoff. What with Maxwell, Equitable Life and rubbish like that. Some people must be raking it in but they don't seem to realise (or care) what they are doing to other people. I really feel for these people who lose their life's worth of savings.

No way! Pindar Systems has gone bust (not my old company, but one closely related), losing 50 people their jobs, which must include one guy I worked with who moved there not long after I moved here... So they were recruiting as recently as that!

I thought the budget was a bit of an anti-climax. Not what I was expecting. And you've got to feel for those people who's jobs are threatened too. I did a bit of simple maths and assuming each employee were costing £50k a year (salary + NI + tax + office floor space + other supplies, etc.) sacking 40k of them would only save a total of £2bill (not counting their redundancy payments), so not all that much (in relative terms). I suppose it all adds up though.