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The article itself acknowledges that the ratio of contractors to employees at Google isn't out of the ordinary for SV companies and my personal experience is that it isn't unusual for large companies outside of SV. Even in the unfortunate case sited in the article of the contract employee that was sexually harassed once a complaint was filed Google fired the FTE responsible for the harassment and negotiated a settlement with the contract employee.

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.

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> why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries?

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.“

The vast majority of those contractors aren't independent contractors but rather employees of some other vendor. It seems odd to complain about contacting out some work to vendors.

This is old capitalist trick comrade: company hires other company, easy firings, fewer benefits, no danger of being accused of pretend-contracting like Uber.

There's no "trick" about it. That's literally the way business has always worked since the first private companies were established.

Actually no, this changed as a result of a lawsuit at MicroSoft where contractors were hired directly as contractors with no firewall firm. They worked at MS for decades with zero benefits and then sued to get them.

This forced firms to then hire third party vendors who in turn 1099ed the "workers" to work at company X, including google.

I don't know why you're bringing up the Microsoft case. That was about independent contractors. The subjects of this article are mostly regular W-2 employees. They just happen to be employees of a different company.

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.

I agree it would be silly to expect companies to do everything themselves, but the example was of contractors (recruiter in this case) doing similar work to and under the direction and control of a full-time employee, at the Google facility, for a long time (1 year). This is where labor laws come into play and why companies restrict temps from working long term. Just putting a contractor on a 3rd party's W2 doesn't mean you're free to do as you wish.

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.

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."

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.

The most interesting part of all of this, is that when SV companies soft-brag about their high average salaries, they leave out all the contractors contributing significant work.

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.

That's irrelevant if you're recruiting employees.

But if you're relying on the name to lead potential employees to contract because it's contact with Google, then the pay scale is misleading. Contracting for Google is a lot like being a Serf for Techdom.

A total average compensation across all contractors and employees of $80k seems pretty far fetched. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split between contracts and temp workers, if the employee compensation average was $145,000 then contractors would have to make an average of $15,000 in order for the combined average to be $80,000.

So my question is why was the article written?

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"?

OP is saying it’s a systemic issue spanning multiple industries, hence the article focusing on Google alone does somewhat feel like a hit piece.

How dare they use a compelling example to demonstrate a problem.

Seriously. As an avid NYtimes loyalist, I'd prefer they exhaustively enumerate through EVERY company where contractors outnumber FTEs. And then I want an equal amount of coverage distributed over all companies.

They covered Apple last year https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...?

The tech industry is wildly profitable, though, and Google the most profitable among the industry. I don't really think it's a hit piece to single out one of the most successful companies in the world and ask why they don't do more.

I would bet the NYT outsources cleaners, janitors and security guards as well.

They are talking about technical people, not blue collar jobs.

The example was an entry level recruiter no offence but HR is not exactly technical.

Are you familiar with "white collar" vs "blue collar"? Recruiting and HR are most definitely the former.

No All White collar jobs are "technical" and when I worked at British Telecom entry level HR jobs where Hourly paid CWU grades.

I dunno the head of HR at my old company used to work as a cashier at Urban Outfitters...

Entry level recruiters would be staff at most companies.

In my experience, many fintech/Wall Street firms outsource their recruitment efforts to "head hunting" firms.

This is something different.

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.

These contracted employees are working for other companies, not directly for Google. Their employer is Adecco or some other staffing firm (which I guess would vary by office).

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.

> If you're in HR at a bank on Wall Street, doing 'recruiting' - odds are you work for the company, not a contractor.

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.

They talk about one example from 121000 contractors - are you sure they don't include blue collar jobs?

My GF was one of those contractors. PhD. Also they discussed Ph.D linguists in the article.

The argument was that the NYT article is not talking about blue-collar jobs.

The NYT article is talking about 121000 contractors.

Either Google has 121000 white-collar contractors, or the article also talks about blue-collar jobs.

It most definitely does include all blue collar jobs that are contracted out, including janitors, receptionists, cafe staff, security guards, movers, and more.

They aren't. The majority of TVCs at Google are call center workers, cafe staff, janitors, security guards, receptionists, etc. They work for companies like Adecco, Restaurant Associates, and various other staffing firms.

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.

Heh. While I was at Google I was surprised to gradually realized how many the technical teams we worked with were actually non-employee contractor teams. It might vary by division.

Can you give more information, if you can?

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.

A lot of journalists are freelance- is the NYT an exception to this trend?

but but Journalists are special :-)

Journalists too.

I would bet those services are included in the lease agreement provided by the property management company they pay their rent to.

NYT owns their building.

"So my question is why was the article written? "

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.

I mean, why should they? Clearly Google thinks how they do things is in the best interest of their shareholders. Maybe you could argue that contractors are detracting from shareholder value because their interests aren't aligned, but that's not the argument you're making.

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.

If you take a longer view, then here's how justice gets served and the welfare of more and more people is increased over all of history: Power gets dispersed. Wealth and power goes from elite nobles to the merchant class, then there arises a middle class.

The problems come about when the dispersal of wealth and power are faked. (No real power is dispersed.)

I suspect you should view Andrew Yang's interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. There is a job apocalypse coming and millions of people will be thrown out of work by tech firms relentless pursuit of machine learning and automation via robotics.

What’s wrong with trailer parks? What do you propose to replace them with?

What’s wrong with trailer parks?

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?

"What do you propose to replace them with?"

Homes.

I think you may be misunderstanding what a trailer park is in this context. Most homes in most trailer parks aren't RVs or anything; they're reasonably normal houses built in the most cost-effective way, which happens to be building them in a factory and then shipping them to the final location on a trailer.

They are homes.

It’s because there are some employees in the company agitating about it. As other commenters have noted, articles about Google get a lot of play from the public. Disgruntled insiders seem to have a strong conduit to the media and this is the latest controversy de jour that these activists have groused about. The reporters happily lap it up, and another knock at Google makes it to the front page of this site.

>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?

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.

I think its trying to point out that companies are increasingly relying on non-FTE positions. Why they are doing it is obviously about benefits. I don't work for Google but I do work for a massive international company and on my team there are three FTE positions and over twenty contractors. For daily work there is no difference. However as an FTE I get the usual benefits along with a pretty nice training budget for personal development, very generous PTO and extra time off. Most of the contractors will have their contracts renewed until they move on somewhere else or an FTE position opens and they get that. So essentially companies are using temp and contract resources to avoid the cost of having what they need as FTE positions.

Ever since the Damore thing blew up, any article that portrays google in a negative light gets a lot of play..

It started many years before Damore’s tantrum. I think it mostly goes back to the image Google enjoyed for years as this amazing place with crazy benefits, and then reality caught up that it’s a big company and will do things like most other big companies such as aggressively cost-optimizing its workforce or canceling beloved products (Reader was very popular with journalists).

Companies which never had that kind of image don’t get dispelling stories.

Google's notorious whiteboard hazing gives off a toxic smell. I'm sure it only gets stronger once you're in.

Yeesh, I know it's popular to dump on the fact that their recruiting process (perhaps unduly) is tilted towards CS grads, but this is the first time I've seen someone go full conspiracy theory and assume it's part of some nefarious tendency to treat employees poorly in general.

Can you tell me how Damore’s memo was a tantrum, and quote passages that reflect your opinion?

This is getting off-topic but it's basically two parts: the first being the he attended an optional “Diversity and Inclusion Summit” and had a strong emotional reaction, which he made an effort to circulate around the company for several months. It's loaded with emotional language (“an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed”) and claims of authoritarian oppression. That inflammatory rhetoric is what cost him his job because it clearly wasn't just a scientific discussion and left quite plausible grounds for anyone working with (or especially, had he been successful in making it into a leadership role, supervised by) to claim a hostile working environment — which is why he dropped the NLRB claim after it was looking like it'd be unfavorable[1]. Even if you think they're wrong, publicly putting your management in a position like that is unlikely to end favorably.

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...

This may not be totally relevant but it's always bothered me that he lied about being a chess Fide Master (FM) and then doubled down on his lie in a reddit ama

Anyone who writes a ten page essentialist rant about how women are inherently bad at tech is throwing a tantrum.

Can you give me a quote supporting his point that women are inherently bad at tech?

I don't think this has anything to do with Damore. I think people are frustrated with the way technology has infiltrated their lives, and how they have no control over it. Many people want tighter regulation of the tech companies + the view of technology workers as the new yuppies makes tech an easy target.

Every Google product launch gets a free marketing boost on all tech blogs. Maybe these negative articles balance it out..

It started when they stopped following "Don't Be Evil" motto. If they want to be evil, then people might portray them in negative ways. Usually based on their own behavior.

This is a bit curious. The large number of contractors can be seen as the victims here. They don't have power or privilege as other employees and yet those who see nothing wrong with it are not arguing their point but claiming persecution and victimhood on Google's behalf.

Its troubling to see this immediate rush to claim persecution and victimhood by those who have power.

Presumably it's because some people aren't simple-minded enough that they need to desperately cram every possible statement about any topic into the same tired framework of victims and oppressors.

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.

It's simple minded to think there are not victims and oppressors in the real world.

Those who are actually concerned with the plight of disposable labour will have little issue with the press having the same concerns.

> It's simple minded to think there are not victims and oppressors in the real world.

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.

> The article itself acknowledges that the ratio of contractors to employees at Google isn't out of the ordinary for SV companies and my personal experience is that it isn't unusual for large companies outside of SV.

Just because it's common doesn't mean it's okay.

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