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Comment by ctide | Hacker News Reader

Do you doubt your skills? Why are you interviewing if you're employed at a good company?

I hear this position often when people talking about contract-to-perm, and I just don't see it. If you're good at what you do, and people enjoy working with you, why wouldn't you take a contract to perm position? The only reasons I can see are that you are afraid you don't get the job (well, then you wouldn't have been a good fit if they hired you) or you end up not liking the team/company as much (same as if they had hired you.)

So, why wouldn't you? And I don't buy the 'I have a good job' line, because you wouldn't even be entertaining offers if you weren't interested in leaving your current role.

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> you are afraid you don't get the job (well, then you wouldn't have been a good fit if they hired you)

Or, you rubbed the wrong, politically-connected person the wrong way. Yes, this is always a danger, but a contract employee is more expendable and easier to get rid of.

Or, they weren't really looking for a permanent hire and this was just a means of tricking someone into a contract who wouldn't otherwise take one.

Or, the company hits a rough patch and decides to freeze hiring to avoid layoffs.

There are a whole host of things that could go wrong in a contract situation that are either tempered or nonexistent when you are permanent.

And ... you don't get stock. And ... when you go perm, your vesting schedule starts after your contract. And ... if you get hurt/sick while you're a contractor, you're fired. And ... you often don't have full facilities access as a contractor. And ... after you go perm, half your co-workers still think you're a contractor, and blow off your email requests.

> Do you doubt your skills?

Not in my field, but perhaps the CtH position doesn't actually want quite what I am good at, and we didn't figure that out beforehand.

> Why are you interviewing if you're employed at a good company?

Because I've been there a long time and I'm bored, or because my boss isn't bad but isn't the best, or because opportunities for advancement seem slim, or because I want a shorter commute, or because the prospective company has a great reputation, or because I think I could work with better engineers somewhere else, or because...

I wouldn't take the chance at a CtH job because there's a significant probability that I end up totally out of a job, rather than employed in an OK (but not great) job.

Of course it's possible that I would accept a FT position and it would turn out just as poorly as a CtH that didn't work out; I would just expect that the probability of it not working out is much higher in a CtH scenario because the company I'm working for has invested far less in me than one that has hired me full time.

It isn't a foregone conclusion that if you have good skills, you will be permanently hired out of a contract position. If it were a foregone conclusion, they would just hire perm.

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