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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

> It is forbidden to come to work after 9am. One day, the site manager stayed behind the main gates and fired on the spot every person who came in after 9.01am, including a number of managers and sales.

This surprised me. I thought it was extremely difficult to fire people in France.

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From another post in the blog:

"Among the many comments, some surprised me. Seems lots of people cannot believe you can be fired in France for being 1 minute late at work. Sorry to burst your bubble, mates, but this is what SSIIs (contractor companies) were invented for. You don’t lose your job, you immediately lose the contract you are working on (no justification needed, this is what contractors are for)"

So they were not really employees, but consultants.

Still, he also wrote:

"For people who have a direct contract with the company, same story. Nothing prevents the company from saying you have committed a major blunder, fire you on the spot, and see you a couple of years later in court (Prud’hommes). Yes, that will cost them money if people choose to sue (I hope they all did). When you are unemployed, are you really looking forward to two years of battle with your former employer, even though you know you will win?"

Link to the post: https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/follow-up-o...

> So they were not really employees, but consultants.

On places where it's hard to fire people, mostly everybody works as consultants and people tend see those positions as normal job positions.

In Germany it is hard to fire somebody. Almost nobody works as consultant, and consultants are not normal job positions.

Technically, using consultants as French SSII do is illegal, but nobody cares. In factories, it used to be the same until 10 years ago when labour inspection finally intervened. We can only hope it'll be the same for IT/CS jobs in the coming years.

I had a colleague from our big consultant shop (Alten) who had spent 10 year working for the same big Telco operator (Orange). From what I understood, it was illegal, but I don't know the exact limit.

From what I remember, the upper limit is five years, but most "missions" are limited to three years because justifying so much time becomes complicated for companies. But legally, missions should be very specific, short, with SSII-provided material, and no imposed office hours... so far, haven't seen a single IT/CS consultant used as required by law.

Iirc thelimit is two years. Where I work some consultant workers did more than that in the same position, sued and were obliged to be hired by the client as they were considered already de facto employees.

Bullshit.

I've worked as a consultant in Germany for 13 years, and pretty much every large project has consultants in it, often half the developers are consultants. IBM, T-Systems, Capgemini and accenture each have around 5000 people doing software consulting, and there'S hundreds if not thousands of smaller consultancies.

But those consultants are still regular employees of the consulting company, right They’re not independent contractors. I guess a client company can say that they don’t want person X in their project anymore but that doesn’t mean X is going to lose their job.

There are many independant contractors as well.

The thing is consultants are not "regular jobs". Developing with only consultants is very unusual, expensive, and consultants are the minority everywhere i have ever looked. Employers are not declaring employees to be consultants to safe money or to be able to fire them more easily. (At last on a large scale.)

It's the same thing in France, but it seems that the consultant/employee change from company to company. Currently I'm working for Alten, which has 28000 employee, but I don't know how many work in IT.

Skilled consultants are to some extent mashed together with unskilled labor in politics and law and there has been a very long campaing now to basically make hiring contractors extremely unattractive.

So now you hire an engineering consultant, train him/her for a few months on the job and are forced by law to let that person go after 18 months to repeat the cycle.

In Poland social insurance is lower as a contractor. Also taxes for someone with high income (linear scale).

In Finland this is the only way to get anybody even slightly competent to get something done.

A startup I once worked at a decade ago decided to hire a sales executive in the UK. They initially hired him as a contractor and only made him a full-time employee a few months later because in the UK you can easily fire a contractor but not an employee, and they really wanted to make sure the guy they hired was the right person for the job.

(To answer the inevitable "was he the right person?": Yes, he was. EMEA was continually our best-performing sales region the whole time I worked there, and he built our EMEA sales infrastructure from the ground up. Some years later, after the company exited, most of the senior people regrouped at another startup. He was in charge of EMEA for a few years, and then he was promoted to CEO.)

You can actually fire without cause in the UK within the first 2 years of employment. Until that period elapses they have no recourse unless they can show discrimination on a protected ground (e.g race, pregnancy).

However, most UK employers would use a probation period or initial fixed term contract (true employee with a fixed end date), rather than a non employee contractor.

It is unlikely your company hired the guy as a contractor because the set up for becoming a self employed contractor (your bank will hate you, an umbrella company takes 10% of your income, you have to register as self employed abd fill out extra tax forms for ever), would probably kill a hire, if you weren't hiring an existing contractor, who wouldn't hang around to perm.

Eh, I don't know the exact details. I just remember what my boss's boss told my department at a staff meeting one day.

Maybe it was an initial fixed-term contract.

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