"Temps, vendors and contractors are an important part of our extended workforce, but they are employed by other companies, not Google."
This is completely incorrect in every way except legally. Google employs them, and pretends that they don't by inserting another company in between.
When you find yourself doing something simple in a complicated way because the law gives you additional advantages, that's a great sign that the law is bad.
Temp agencies are a pretty nontrivial force in the employment world. If you work at a temp agency, they pay you regardless of whether you're bringing money, they do technical training and career advancement work, all the while you're "on deck" not actually being useful. Then a company like Google or Boeing or Joe's Game Studio comes along and says "we need 3 highly skilled C++ programmers in two weeks, for 6 months", and the temp agency sends you off to work there. You relocate, you work on some internal project for 6 months, and then you're back "on deck" at the temp agency, and then off to somewhere else. The company does not have the option to hire you permanently unless the temp agency put that into the agreement (probably for a price), the agency charged something like 2x or even 3x your salary to the company while you were working there, but your wage and benefits stay the same throughout, working or not.
So, who's your real employer?
Looking at this from an armchair, it's easy to miss that there's more going on than just, "Tim is on the team for the next few months." Whether or not you like the fact that this kind of agency exists and this kind of work is possible is another question.
They're not "3 highly skilled C++ programmers", they're usually slotted into some kind of not as appreciated but still required role, like QA or data entry, and they're not "in two weeks, for 6 months", they're basically at a single host company for the entire time, but they renew the contract in 6 month increments until such time when the host company decides it doesn't need them anymore. Which is basically a form of downsizing.
They aren't some form of highly skilled consultants that drop to aid a project in a pinch. Usually they're basically indistinguishable from FTEs.
When I was a contractor in New Zealand, I had an external office, my contract allowed me to subcontract, I used my own equipment and I didn't go to the parties.
When they wanted to send me overseas? We negotiated a new contract which included paying me hourly rates for the flight hours.
Unmentioned in the Canadian and New Zealand documents, they also typically consider length of service as a hint. If the contractor is with a single company for more than 2 years, that's a hint that they're not really a contractor.
USA [3]:
1 Behavioral Control (instructions, when, rules, evaluation)
2 Financial Control (equipment, expenses, profit)
3 Relationship (contracts, benefits, permanency)
1 Control
2 Tools and Equipment
3 Ability to subcontract
4 Financial Risk
5 Outside office and/or staff
6 Able to increase profit
1 Intention test (what both parties intend?)
2 Control vs independence test (who sets the rules?)
3 Integration test (are they part of the team? uniforms/parties)
4 Fundamental/economic reality test (who pays what?)
[2]: https://www.employment.govt.nz/starting-employment/who-is-an...
[3]: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...
That's never been a thing I've seen. Cite?
"they do technical training and career advancement work"
I've only seen that in the sense of "we'll test your MS Office proficiency and offer you generic resume tips"
The temp agency model exists solely to enable large corporations to avoid having layoffs and reorgs: firing 49% of Google's staff would have a terrible effect on the stock price, and telling the temp agencies that they won't have contracts next quarter boosts the bottom line, instead.
You have your technical consulting firm and general IT contractors that sell services to companies whose main competence is not software developers. Then you have contractors go on-site, develop some software, and go back once the project is over.
But those aren't red badges in the sense we're talking about. We're talking about a company whose core competence is software development taking on contractors as members in existing software dev teams. The companies employing these contractors tend to be more like shell companies then technical consulting firms, and most of the training given to the contractor is the same as that given to FTEs, by the host company, since they have to work on the same code base and contractors and FTEs need to be in lock-step.
I'm responding to the claim above, about "that never being a thing they've seen", which seems silly to me because it's the basic way every staff-aug firm works.
Its all hourly paid work with the contracting firm only acting as a legal shield for the hiring company to be able to add/remove what are effectively their employees, without being beholden to the political or legal ramifications of layoffs
Regardless: I was responding to a point upthread about the supposed rarity of these arrangements. I'm less interested in litigating other things.
The question from the top of the thread is whether staff-aug firm employees get paid even when Google doesn't need them. And the answer to that question, in general, is yes: they're W2 employees, not 1099s.
I'm sure Matasano did a number of things better than a large body shop firm. But paying for bench time is a norm, not an exception.
>But paying for bench time is a norm, not an exception
Having worked at a temp firm for a low skilled job, call center and data entry, you don't get paid for downtime. They have you on an agreement where you get paid hourly and just aren't scheduled. Or they let you go and call you back if there's more work later. The negotiating power isn't there for employees to have the companies shoulder that risk
Also, since I know who you are, did your firm supply highly specialized engineers in fields such as security or cryptography? Or were you involved in general software development?
I negotiated my pay directly with the company. They basically told me "we can only hire TVCs now, and the vetting process for new vendors is exhausting. If you want to start right away, join this agency." The client was the agency's primary (or maybe only) customer. I was paid an hourly rate and expected to fill out a timesheet. If I wasn't working (e.g. if I was at the end of the client's max 1 year TVC policy), I wouldn't be paid. The agency took some commission on top of my hourly rate, but I never knew what it was.
The whole thing was a very thin veil to dissuade TVCs from going for back benefits like the famous Microsoft case. Both companies were upfront about that.
Not really. It's usually a sign that you're trying to evade the plain meaning of the law with technicalities.
And I don't think it's nearly as murky as some folks want it to look. Let's be real: more often than not, when somebody's doing something dirty, they know it's dirty.
Google hires people full time as employees and the laws for them require some things. Google also hires companies to provide services on a contract basis and the laws for them require others.
Is your contention that Google shouldn't subcontract labor for anything because Google is somehow different than every other company?
Or does IBM sell development services to the customer, hire the workforce, turn over day-to-day management to the customer and fire the engineers when the setup job is done? That looks like the customer hired IBM as a cut-out.
I’d agree that the rest of it is a good test, but I think it’s also a test the vast majority of Google contractors would pass. Temp agencies don’t typically fire people at the end of every project, and certainly the janitorial services don’t.
So hard to imagine that a codebase needs janitors too?