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Comment by 1ris | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.)

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.

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