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Comment by wycy | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. If you go to work every day at Google, you work at Google. It is unfortunate that laws don't reflect that, but of course if they did, companies would find loopholes. If working every day at Google were legally defined such that you work for Google, perhaps contractors would simply be forced to rotate between workplaces weekly to skirt these definitions.

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I don't think that would make sense as a hard-line rule though. If IBM sells a new mainframe system, and sends a squad of engineers to help set it up for a few months, surely we shouldn't force those engineers to become employees of the customer.

Easy test: does IBM have a staff of mainframe site install engineers, who don't take direction from IBM's customer but rather from IBM's management, and can reasonably be expected to work on more than one site install during the length of their employment at IBM? That looks like an IBM employee to me.

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.

Install engineers often do end up taking direction from customers, the same way as management consultants and such do.

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.

This is a blanket generalization and easily doesn't apply to housekeeping staff or any other number of support roles outside of engineering efforts.

So hard to imagine that a codebase needs janitors too?

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