Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee

I think the key is that as an employee, you are expected to act in the interest of the company in ways that are different from what you are expected to do as a contractor.

My perception and experience is that as a contractor, I'm supposed to do what you tell me to do. If you tell me to do something stupid, I'm supposed to tell you it's stupid, and to explain why, but if you say do it anyhow, well, that's my job. It has more to do with task-based work.

My perception is that as an employee you are expected more to act in the best interest of the company.

I personally have a hard time seeing the difference between the two, because I'm not omniscient, I am sometimes wrong, and if the boss has heard my arguments for why the way they asked me to do a thing is stupid and still wants me to do it that way, well, maybe the boss knows something I don't know, right? The company, by making them the boss, has said that the company thinks the boss knows more than I do, so maybe the right thing to do is to go along with it?

(I'm mostly talking of "the right way to do it" in the sense of "the most efficient or correct way to do it" - I think of ethical dilemmas in a different sort of way.)

It makes it more clicky.

If a bunch of your engineers (or whatever) went to Stanford, they people they trust are also much more likely to be from Stanford, because those are the people that they know. The same holds for any university.

Then as time goes by the organisation becomes increasingly dominated by Stanford(or whichever) because the follow on hires also recommend people that they know — eg Stanford and the likes.

Now you have ensured that if someone cannot - for any reason - get into one of the feeder supplies, typically because going to those colleges requires a huge amount of money, or they’re super prestigious (the fancy UCs say) which have strong correlation to wealth (if you’re poor you can’t support the costs involved in getting a successful application).

So now you end up where large groups of people, for reasons outside of their control, and irrespective of talent, cannot get a job at your company.

At no point does anyone say “I don’t trust X”, it is simply the requirement that you have to /know/ someone to get a job there. Even if people are not trying to be assholes it is required nepotism. Even if you’re trying not to be biased, your hiring pool has already shrunk to match the backgrounds of your existing engineers.

If you want you could probably make a dumbass simulation of this, and I suspect if you start with X colours it will devolve to a small number fairly quickly.

This is in contrast to employment consultants getting fees in intervals over a period of a person's time with an employer, usually done for executive positions. So I'd say optimise your agreements with contracting firms for quality rather than quantity by paying them bonuses in intervals, with a low initial payment for the finding the candidate.

1. You can get a functioning team much more quickly.

2. It's a lot easier for someone unfamiliar with the field in question to evaluate the quality of a consulting company than to evaluate a prospective hire.

3. It's a lot easier to get rid of them once you don't need them anymore.

A few basic reasons:

* You can't do it in-house as well as a contractor who specializes in this field, or as well as this particular contractor. Very broadly speaking, the best people in field X want to work for themselves, do things their way, and keep the revenue from their work. They don't want to be several layers deep in management at your company, to have f-ng morons (i.e., anyone else) telling them how to do their job, and to be paid a salary for the breathtaking, save-the-day miracles they routinely output.

* It's not worth the investment: You would have to find and hire talent, ramp up, provide resources to them (equipment, training, etc.), be able to manage the talent in a field that isn't your expertise, and keep them busy and interested. Maybe you don't have enough scale in the things they do to support quality resources; maybe you just don't have enough work or enough interesting work for them.

* Every additional employee or capability is a distraction for the organization, including management. Keep focused on the things you do best and that are strategically important; you don't even have time for that. If you're small restaurant chain, IT isn't strategically important - it just has to be reliable and good enough. Outsource it and focus on world-beating food, service, and marketing.

* You don't want to pay benefits, taxes, or have the other responsibilities of being an employer. See: Uber.

* Sometimes it's just politics: I once worked in an outsourced capacity for a company where the IT manager simply didn't want to invest in a technology that would threaten their fiefdom, so somebody brought in a contractor. It was not a fun place to be.

"Engineer at Tesla" beats "engineer at IBM" but probably is socially inferior to "radiation oncologist".

Obviously status is to some extent subjective and culturally/individually determined, but there's broad agreement that certain jobs are higher status than others by various groups of people.