The Second-Class Office Workers

wsj.com

4 points·frgtpsswrdlame··5 comments

> Few large companies are willing to manage thousands of self-employed contractors anymore, so they sign high-volume contracts with a handful of staffing or contracting agencies.

True - there remains opportunity in the SMB space. Especially early-stage companies in growth mode are more receptive to working with individual contributors.

So they interview a bunch of 60 year old people who are doing non-programming jobs that will be replaced by code soon... and all of them complain about "how they are perceived" at the office.

Not much substance in this article.

That's what you took from the article? Nothing about the increasing trend of corporations using contracters as a way to opt-out of all the benefits our society has come to expect companies should give workers? Nothing about the social stigma attached to these workers, or the human cost of having this permanent underclass of workers who can be laid off at any moment and don't have real paths towards permanent employment?

There's plenty of substance, you just failed to recognize it.

"Implied" substance maybe. I have been contracting at a huge corporation for years, so I understand the gist of the article. However, I think they could have made the point much clearer by interviewing people who have jobs other than administrative duties and are under the age of 60.

Like... even though I get treated blatantly worse than FT employees, what they don't mention in the article is how FTE's have their salaries and raises capped. They also don't mention that many contractors make much more money than FTE's and it is much easier to argue for raises as a contractor when you are re-negotiating.

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