Google’s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So my question is why was the article written? If it were to highlight the use of contract employees vs FTEs, why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries? Why throw out the case of the harassed employee but leave the information that Google fired the harasser when a complaint was filed until much further in the article when many readers will have stopped reading? This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.
Companies which never had that kind of image don’t get dispelling stories.
The second part is the painful irony of his positioning himself as a Man of Science Protecting The Enlightment Against Dogma!!! but what he wrote was a poorly-edited (and don't forget, what finally leaked was presumably better after the several rounds of editing prior to it being published) rehash of traditional reactionary arguments for biological determinism with only a few references to peer-reviewed literature, with little discussion or signs of familiarity with their fields, and instead relying mostly on links to broad Wikipedia pages and conservative blogs. Note how much work it was simply to summarize his claims clearly enough to evaluate them in https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... — that's the most point-by-point examination I've seen and it's considerably longer than the original.
On its own failing to perform at the level of a good student essay would be embarrassing but given the topic and how quick he was to cast this as political oppression while taking as little responsibility as possible for his own actions, I think it warrants the use of “tantrum”.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/federal-labor-bo...
Every company uses agencies for all sorts of things: recruiting, marketing etc..
But when you bring people in house, if they're working 'in' your company ... then almost universally they are 'employees'.
These are not 'security guards' or 'cleaners' who exist almost outside the scope of the work, they're very much within it.
If you're in HR at a bank on Wall Street, doing 'recruiting' - odds are you work for the company, not a contractor.
It's very rare to see a large tech firm contract directly with an individual employee, and it would be incredibly rare to see it happen with a lower paid position. I've never seen it personally.
Quite a few of the people I've interacted with were contractors. You can sometimes tell from their email signature even if the email address is @bank.com.
The NYT article is talking about 121000 contractors.
Either Google has 121000 white-collar contractors, or the article also talks about blue-collar jobs.
These articles always get it wrong by completely failing to distinguish who exactly the TVCs are. They'll interview a less common white collar contractor but then use numbers for total contractors. A decisive majority of the actual white collar workers are FTEs.
The only contractors I work with, and not too closely at that, are the tier one support people for our product in the Philippines. And then there's some web developers, designers, and project managers who work for a web design firm, but their job seems pretty cushy so I wouldn't include them in this conversation.
There is already a general discussion around employees vs. contractors in the American economy. Showing a large, profitable technology company doing the same bolsters the case that this is a systemic problem.
Also, the article mentions that “high-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks.“
This forced firms to then hire third party vendors who in turn 1099ed the "workers" to work at company X, including google.
Should we force every company to be vertically integrated and directly employ everyone who works at one of their facilities? It's just a ridiculous complaint.
Now, if they took the entire recruiting work for that team and gave it to the outsourcing agency who did the job from their Florida office, it wouldn't be a problem. They could also do what Apple does and host all the contractors in a separate building with no contact with Apple employees https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/apple-bla... but the optics of that isn't great either.
By having large numbers of contractors, Google could have their egalitarian, idyllic workplace, but have a non-egalitarian 2 tier system, with distinctly 2nd class workers.
The reality is that people don't operate in a purely communal/egalitarian fashion. Nor are people purely hierarchical. There is always some degree of hierarchy, and some degree of communal existence. The larger the group, the more hierarchy is necessary. However, even in the sort of magical feeling hippie-dippy gathering of artists, there are still community leaders. There is still some kind of functioning hierarchy, or things just don't get done. (I have some personal experience in this area.)
I think the problems in such systems come about when people are in denial about their hierarchy, their meritocracy, and the consequences of not fitting in. If people have to pretend their hierarchy doesn't exist, and everything's just running on love and understanding, then people who violate the rules and norms still need to be punished. Often the hierarchy remains disguised by characterizing violators as fundamentally bad or selfish people. By abandoning consciousness of one's rules and hierarchy, one risks nonsensical, outsized, or downright unjust consequences being meted out by the group. Basically, it's a recipe for groupthink to take over and the abandonment of principles.
You just described a systemic issue with SV companies replacing FTE with contractors, then ask why someone would write an article about that?
How many companies should the article have included to not be considered a "hit piece"? Or do you just consider any article about one company a "hit piece"?
Because this article is about Google. Why doesn't every book or article cover every subject, all the time?
Google is a major, global brand, widely-recognized as one of the "best places to work". Seems like a good focus of investigation to me.
>This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.
You can't talk about anything anymore without it being a "hit piece", or "fake news", or an "attack", or "astroturfing", or written by "paid shills". I guess people are more comfortable when they can simply dismiss any topic they disagree with.
Because almost any other entity could claim it's economic pressure and financial reality.
Google is sitting on Fort Knox, they're one of the most cash flush companies in thew world ... and they can't be bothered to actually hire people.
At the last G event, Sundar brought out this hyperbolic weeping montage about how their AI helps poor people in India 'read' the cooking directions on food labels, even when they are illiterate (i.e. AI text to voice).
It was gushy and pulled hard on heartstrings.
Well then why can't they just hire people and treat them as human equals?
It's beyond hypocritical.
With a little bit of cynicism, it's understandable from a business perspective - hey, it's money.
But what irks me is the elements of 'social justice' coming out of these entities while they're blind to the very social ills that they are driving.
People wonder why we have inequality, or 'housing affordability' etc. - well - this is it.
Folks in the Valley seems to be stoked to solve big problems and work on 'AI' - while kind of ignorant to the fact there are trailer parks all over the Valley. Which is mind blowing.
What you're saying is, essentially, if a company is making a lot of money, then they should give that money to their employees. But the purpose of a company isn't to hire or pay people, it's to generate a return for your investors.
The problems come about when the dispersal of wealth and power are faked. (No real power is dispersed.)
It's a big economic disadvantage. Your property depreciates rapidly. Meanwhile, you're still paying rent, and it's easier to get evicted.
What do you propose to replace them with?
How about communities of low cost housing, which allow for lower income people to build equity and which are somehow distinct enough to preclude co-option by well heeled tech employees? Maybe some kind of intentional community with such goals built into its charter?
Homes.
Its troubling to see this immediate rush to claim persecution and victimhood by those who have power.
Try and imagine having the ability to be concerned with the plight of disposable labor in the modern economy and yet still (gasp) capable of noticing and commenting on other facets of the situation, like how the press chooses to frame their coverage: that's what's happening here.
Those who are actually concerned with the plight of disposable labour will have little issue with the press having the same concerns.
I'm sure it is. Good thing nobody here is claiming that (I'm certainly not).
My comment was about the fact that your upthread comment is a complaint about someone discussing any other facet of the issue than focusing on the power dynamic between the employer and the employed. Not everyone is afflicted with this obsession to the point that they're unable to see anything in the world but through this single lens.
Just because it's common doesn't mean it's okay.
So instead of the average Google compensation being $144,652 (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3304439/man-or-myth-the-3-...), it could be 30-50% lower if you account for contractors.
But an average Google compensation of $80,000 (for example) wouldn't be a good recruiting tool.
Then I got a new manager, new policies were enacted, they canned my project, and they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.
Anyway, Google had good reason to use contractors. Their hiring standards and policies makes it extremely difficult and costly to hire people, and many jobs there typically only have a retention rate of about 9-12 months, or just isn't "involved" enough to demand a FTE position, or needs to be scaled up more quickly than they can hire for. It just isn't worth it to go through the full Google process for jobs like that.
Also they took Memegen away from me. WTF.
EDIT: I'm probably forfeiting my referral bonuses by handing out that information. Better to contact me: g@yabasic.net
2. I worked almost 2 years at Google, you're damn right I do. I still work for (edit) at a different assignment to pump up my SRE experience though, so I don't know what the effect will be on future prospects. I imagine having Google, even as a contractor, looks good on a resume. In either case, the experience was invaluable.
3. This gig MADE my career. Again, I was homeless, jobless, no real experience of any worth, and now I'm making 6 figures in San Francisco with extensive knowledge of cloud computing, application design and architecture, SRE principles, etc. We'll see where it goes from here, but honestly I prefer the coding side of things, so I'll have to put in more work to learn to pass coding interviews if I want to get away from SRE/Ops work. That's something you can't learn on the job, which is really the only way I tend to learn things.
Like many things about the way Google was run, I really didn't appreciate Memegen enough until I left.
I think (happy to be convinced otherwise) it is ok for a company to have more temps than employees or vice versa. What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?
Note: I wrote this as a general trend, which does not mean this applies to Google specifically.
If I went as a contactor in the UK id expect 2x to 3x when compared to a FTE at a similar grade.
I'd personally even take it one step further: those who are payed the least need benefits the most. By relegating this work to temporary workers you're doing exactly the opposite: cutting away the privileges that the full-time employees have. Not to just one employee, but anyone who's ever going to fill out that position.
A trip to the doctor would not make a dent in a senior engineer's pocket (regardless of the insurance), but a janitor could not afford a trip to the doctor in the first place. This could work in a country with good social programs to fall back on, but it has catastrophic consequences in the US.
It's unreasonable to expect one company to make big strides in this area when all it does it put them at a competitive disadvantage to their peers. Google is already mandating a $15/hour minimum wage on all contracted-out workers, plus some minimums for sick days, which is much better than most other companies (which tend not to have requirements on contracted out employees in their contracts with staffing firms at all).
> What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?
I'm not familiar enough with Google's specific practices to reach a conclusion about that.
It's one thing to outsource security, another to outsource people who work as part of the organization: admins, executive assistants, developers, recruiters etc..
At least in the US that’s often not how it works. The agency takes a big cut and the contractor probably makes less than an FTE. In my company must contractors are super eager to go full time given the opportunity.
As such, there's almost always an intermediate taking a cut of the actual rate, even if you're a contractor to the staffing agency.
Then you've got agency relationships, like where I work at now. I'm a salaried, full time employee for the agency I work for and I make about the regional median for my role. But I'm contracted out to clients (including Google) and bill hourly. Depending on the client and the specific roles I'm billing as for a given project, an hour of my time gets billed out anywhere from 2x - 6x what my fully loaded hourly cost is to my employer (salary + benefits + payroll taxes). So the cost to the client is certainly in line with your expectations, but it doesn't come back to me.
[1] You don't see this as frequently at the SME end of the market for many reasons, not least of which is the deliberate inefficiency and increased costs of such a structure.
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Though that link is just showing how incompetent MS Hr was - when it happened I recall having a good laugh with some Colleagues who work in HR/IR
In my case, the equivalent job at Google definitely carried more responsibilities, and they were paid more. However, I believe Google paid my consulting company more than the FTE salary for each of us, with my company taking their cut off the top (at least, that's what I heard).
In short, it's complicated
There's an incredible amount of conflation here between individuals that are directly contracted to companies (what most of these comments seem to be talking about) and then what actually happens at large corporations (staffing firms that contract out their own employees).
- project leaders pressuring contractors to work longer hours than stated in their contracts without reporting overtime (on the vague possibility of a full-time role).
- the contractor recruiter who was sexually harassed by a FTE manager and may have been fired due to her rejection of him
I would suspect that part of the reason for such a "program" is to save on wages, which would be much higher for locally-hired staff. Her field is admin/marketing. Should be easy enough to find local talent for that. At a higher price.
I'm sure there are upsides to this exchange program, but having no real choice (except quitting) and working at a lower salary don't leave the best impression.
Google wants their 401(k) to be as efficient and useful as possible for their employees, which tend toward being highly-paid engineers and other professionals. ERISA has some fairness provisions, which means that all employees must be subject to the same plan rules, and the plan must pass certain tests of "highly-compensated" employee participation limits compared to non-highly-compensated ones.
So if you have a bunch of engineers and some janitors, and you offer a large 401(k) match that engineers use and value and janitors don't, you wind up having to unwind some of the engineer contribution and matching in order to keep things "fair".
But, crucially, ERISA doesn't have say anything about who has to be an "employee" versus hired on as a contractor. So all the janitors and cafeteria workers become contractors, and now your 401(k) plan counts junior developers as the "non highly-compensated" comparison class, and your 401(k) plan passes muster again.
This affects Google a lot because their retirement plan is highly optimized for allowing highly-paid employees to save a ton of money in a tax efficient manner. It'd be difficult to craft a better plan, and from what I've heard they've even automated using a niche tax loophole as well ("mega-backdoor Roth" - after-tax 401(k) contribution followed by immediate Roth conversion, basically allows an extra $20k/yr or so in Roth contribution room).
Of course the companies that pay more attention to data do this more extensively and aggressively, why wouldn't they?
The army of temp workers/janitors/contractors/uber drivers convene and sleep in the same parking lots at night. It's a whole community of a semi-permanent underclass drifting around, saving the spreadsheets a few points here and there.
In related news, I'm not sure I want to be an American anymore. This is not the country I grew up in.
Temps are technically not permitted to supervise actual FTEs but in practice some do so.
Temps don’t make as much as FTEs. So there’s an incentive to do this and also to terminate the contract (legal reasons) rather than hire them, which means the institutional knowledge goes elsewhere.
Did you contract directly with the company or were you working for the agency, who contracted you out?
I was a contractor for four years as my first job and I was a full-time employee of that contracting firm for the entire time. They paid a decent salary, gave me healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, etc. It was actually my best offer compared to some other SWE positions. Some company like Google could have been one of my clients at some point (and indeed was at my next job), but instead it was mostly banks and insurance companies.
Now the issue is a company is using temps to hold down the market rate for salary. Less about tax avoidance, and more about wage suppression. Of course it’s also a valid argument to say the Supreme Court decision at the time made it more likely for companies to choose this route.
Also true that the two-tier system existed in one of the big tech giants and with it many of the same symptoms. It is interesting to see it again with Google, although I wonder if Amazon/Netflix/Amazon have a similar situation.
Maybe you're confusing temps with employees though; in that case, it is possible but the temp agency will demand a fee. It works the same with consultants, for who the fee will be much higher (think 2-3x their annual wage).
Not arguing whether it's good/bad, but it comes with the territory in the current landscape. You gain in flexibility/autonomy but loose in benefits/treatment.
That set the framework for all contracting that has followed since.
There are a whole lot of different situations that get swept under the TVC umbrella:
- Qualified to work at a firm in their core competency, but bureaucracy makes hiring you hard (e.g. hiring freezes, long interview periods, etc.) You can often make more than an FTE in this position.
- Trying to get your foot-in-the-door and taking any job you can get, regardless of pay. This is the situation you hear about in articles like this one. The pay's probably not great, and you spend all your time working harder than anyone else there to become a "real boy" (FTE).
- Jobs that the company won't admit are valuable, but needs anyway (like testers). You get yo-yoed (in for 2 years; out for 6 months) because the company won't offer these roles to full-time employees, and doesn't want you retroactively deemed one.
- Food/security/massage staff - people who work on-site, but not in a core competency. These jobs are often blue-collar in the outside world, so access to perks like free food and regular clientele who you can form personal relationships with (e.g. other staff) might make these jobs nicer than alternatives serving the public. At the same time, many of these jobs used to be full-time. Moving non-sales, non-product jobs to vendors feels like a regression in treating people like humans, and a thinly-veiled exploitation of a loophole in employment policy.
- Totally external vendors - people like financial auditing, network operations, etc. They have access to internal systems, but operate in clearly defined roles-of-responsibility offsite. I presume the granularity for these roles is whole agencies, rather than individual workers. They fall under the TVC umbrella, but workers have a more clear working relationship with the agency than the other scenarios.
A conversion requires interviews (2-3). Candidates usually get statements of support from their team colleagues, which has quite an impact during the hiring committee discussion.
E.g. I'd reckon it's easier passing via the tvc->fte route.
Here, there was no difference on how FTEs and contractors were treated (including company outings, which was very nice) with team composed of both FTEs and contractors. This situation is close to illegal here (I think) as contractor are supposed to be brought only for a specific job that can't be done by a FTE; but since it worked for everyone, no-one is complaining.
Also note that this path is only available for white collar workers. There aren't any full-time positions available for janitors, cafe workers, security guards, etc., as big companies tend not to employ those positions directly as it's outside their wheelhouse.
Sure it happens, but it's mostly to string along suckers.
In one case I was in, the project had about 350 people, probably 75% contractor. At the midpoint of the project (year 2/5) they started attrition of contractors, and landed at around 100 people (10-15% contractor) at the end.
Why? It’s hard to hire at the levels you need and then get rid of them in a big company.
Interns usually work for small periods of time between school cycles. They get interesting projects, because internships are effectively a recruiting tool for new grads.
With the amount of prep work and oversight/mentorship that goes into an internship, it's not obvious that they benefit the company outside of recruiting.
If the argument is "TVCs tolerate more because they fear retribution/loss of access to a full-time role," that might happen for interns too. (I haven't studied either group, so I'm not qualified to say.) If the argument is that "TVCs are being exploited to minimize the number of full-time roles," that definitely doesn't apply to interns.