Google rescinds offers to thousands of contract workers | Hacker News Reader

Google rescinds offers to thousands of contract workers

nytimes.com

142 pointsericzawo137 comments

As much as it sucks for the 2000 people who won't have their offers honored and especially who many have left other roles for the chance to work at Google, this is the devil's bargin of contract work. You are there specifically so the company can adjust labor resources in real time and with minimal consequences or press. If you don't want to be treated as extra-disposable and second class then don't take contacts, because they are higher risk than FTE.

Of course you will also be cutting yourself off from opportunities to quickly gain new experiences, and contracts can frequently lead to FTE offers if your agency structures their contract in your favor.

Every company is doing this. Protect the full time employees first. Consulting and contingency companies do very well in good times but struggle in downtimes.

In certain areas contractors earn good money, at times more then FTE. Like $300+ an hour and much higher.

With that pay comes the risk of a less strong connection to the company. Which is expected and wanted by many contractors.

Of course, this is for everyone, and not everyone does it voluntary - not getting a gig during the current situation can suck badly.

Legacy finance tech - investment banks, hedge funds, etc.

Contractors arguably make more than FTEs. If your spouse is a FTE somewhere that gives health insurance, then it can be even more lucrative.

Some of my coworkers in London have told me it can be considered stupid (from a monetary perspective) not to be a contractor in the UK if you're working as a SWE at a bank/hedgefund. However from what I understand, tax laws have changed recently and this is no longer the case.

Contractors at Google and other tech companies are apparently treated as second class citizenry, but my observation at finance companies is that this is usually not the case.

London contract market is an outlier even with UK, which is pretty much an outlier even across EU. With some careful planning, it was possible to exploit the situation to ridiculous degree, by avoiding UK taxes altogether and keeping ones tax residency somewhere else. UK contractor might pay as high as 45% tax, there are countries in EU that would let you pay 5%

and contracts can frequently lead to FTE offers if your agency structures their contract in your favor.

Maybe Google is different (I doubt it) but in most cases it is harder to become a direct employee from a temp position. Obviously the staffing agency wants to go on being paid it’s fee, it doesn’t want you cutting out the middleman.

One of my buddies was hired by Accenture out of college as a contracted consultant. He was overworked with daily 10-hour work days. And they basically strung him along for 2 years with promise of full time conversion until he got fed up and left. Contracting in software has its pros but unpaid holiday, or awful benefits package just doesn’t seem worth it to me. Probably better if you run your own one-man consulting shop that accepts different contracts at high rates, than being a 40-hr/wk contingent worker and do the same work as a full time employee with none of the benefits like 401k match, pto, or health coverage. Long term I’d love to run my own software consulting shop and charge these large Fortune 500s out the ass, but until then I’ll keep chugging along as a full time employee, while staying well clear of contract work.

Being a contractor there's a certain amount of freedom that you get from a contract. You don't have to play the idiotic performance eval games, eg.

I was a contractor in a company that laid off 10% of the workforce, and strangely remained on contract. I talked with my manager about why, and it turned out that a layoff was an excuse to fire FTEs without going through the firing process.

I could be wrong but:

Wouldn't "contractor at Google" still look great on a resume? Obviously not as great as having been a FTE, but I'd think it would still be a positive differentiator.

And as you said, there is the possibility of being flipped to FTE. Does this apply to SWEs too, and if so, is that a way to circumvent the dreaded and notorious leetcode style "Google Interview"? If so, combined with the first point above, seems like it would be worth playing the odds, considering going in the front door via the usual FTE SWE interview process is a huge gamble anyways.

Absolutely! Contracts have many benefits to both parties, but stability is not one of them. A contract at Google sounds like resume gold to me. Many people commonly list the company they contracted for and leave off the agency and maybe say "Google May-Sept (contract)". I don't know Google's hiring practices but I do know that at many companies, going contract-to-hire let's you skip the full interview process. I have seen it personally many times from working in the industry. Contractors are usually hired after a single short interview.

Experience as a contractor (strictly, employee of a contracted agency) at a big tech company is fine, not that exciting but positive. It would probably push my estimate of a candidate slightly above the middle of the distribution, away from either the good or bad extreme; but it's a lot less important than what you did.

And yes, software developers do go from contract to FTE. The interview process may become somewhat pro forma in that case, since the options are to hire as FTE, fire as everything, or get somewhat awkward. So probably sometimes that lets candidates who couldn't have passed normal interviews slip through. In a certain sense, that's fine, since you've had much more time to assess your contractor, and probably already made a better determination than even the best 1-2 day interview process could. That does feel unfair, though; and since your contractor knows the group's work well and interview questions usually (should, at least) relate to that work, they should be coming in to your usual process with a strong advantage.

So I personally try very hard not to start interviews for a quasi-internal candidate unless I'm confident they'll pass the usual process, and encourage interviewers to evaluate with their usual rigor. I've seen managers deliberately bring in interviewers outside the group too, both to improve objectivity and (hopefully) to make an introduction that the candidate will find valuable in their new FTE job.

Is your last bit fair though?

I mean, if a contractor has already proven he/she does the real, actual, job well, and gets along with the team well, is it fair to make their future career depend on whether or not they can, say, convert a linked list to a balanced binary tree on the spot on a whiteboard? (arbitrary problem for sake of illustration).

As opposed to taking on a fresh FTE who, as you put, only had 1-2 days of interviews to determine any sort of fit - technical or cultural.

If the contractor does the job well but can't pass the usual interview, then either the contractor got unlucky or the interview process is broken. If the interview process is broken, then I should fix it for everyone, not make a one-time exception (e.g., realize that my front-end developer doesn't actually need to know how to balance binary trees on the whiteboard or whatever).

That leaves the possibility that the contractor was unlucky, since even the best interview process will generate some false rejects. I believe the extra familiarity that a quasi-internal candidate has with the group's work (and thus the kind of stuff we're likely to ask) should more than offset that, though.

Makes sense, fair enough!

> And yes, software developers do go from contract to FTE. The interview process may become somewhat pro forma in that case,

This whole paragraph sounds very weird to me. It runs completely opposite to my experience.

I have never worked at a place which made contractors go through technical interviews. That sounds like a huge waste of time when you already know how they perform. Interviewing is costly.

In the field I used to work for, hiring contractors was seen as a major pain because you had to be careful about not spoiling your relationship with their current company and contracts tend to have clauses about "poaching". It was never done unless you really wanted the guy.

Where are you? I believe my experience is typical of large tech companies in California, which was the question asked. I'd be shocked if a former contractor got hired without at least a half-baked pretense of an interview, if only for legal reasons--to treat contractors differently from other non-employees risks creating a presumption that they're not non-employees, which HR built this whole elaborate mechanism to fight.

And the agencies are absolutely fine with it. Sometimes there's a buyout fee, but not a big deal. The agencies are pretty interchangeable anyways, so they can't be too picky.

No, it looks like a contract gig. There's a big difference between the contractors hired at Google vs FTE.

The comparison isn't one between Google FTE and Google contractor. Obviously Google FTE is the superior job.

It's between Google contractor and working (fulltime or otherwise) at a "lesser" company.

Is there a significant difference between terminating a full time, "at will" employee and a contractor? Other than a few weeks of severance I can't think of any.

Legality aside, culturally Google has a reputation of never having laid off employees. Even when a team gets shuttered the engineers are given months to find a new role on another team.

That kind of positive reputation makes recruiting easier.

They may not have publicly announced layoffs, but I know several who, let's say, overstayed their welcome. They were given months, but no other position appeared. The company was still hiring like crazy, but somehow an internal candidate wasn't acceptable. Go figure.

It's a company like any other and now they're acting more like the herd.

Then that's just a PIP in disguise.

The candidate could very well have been a false positive on the initial hire in the first place. And candidate simply got lucky into that team

I know an extremely high performing engineer that was on a successful but completed project (not at Google). His whole team was given a few months to find a new position. Multiple managers tried to get them on their teams, but the transfers all were blocked at a higher level.

Eventually, he asked for and got severance pay. Shortly after, during the earnings call, the leadership told the investors they were reducing engineering spend by cutting hiring and consolidating programs, but that all redundant engineers were encouraged to seek another position in the company.

Of course, they neglected to mention that such positions didn’t really exist.

It was clearly a layoff, except they strung the laid off employees along for a few months. That way, they didn’t have to damage morale or customer/investor confidence by admitting it was a layoff.

I’m sure people further removed from the situation would assume it was a PIP, which hurts the engineers’ careers.

This is interesting.

Then That’s clearly just lay-off.

Layoffs (especially of 2k people) are interpreted as the company being in trouble. Letting contractors go is interpreted as business as usual.

Defaults matter. FTEs are default live; they stay unless laid off or fired. Contractors are default dead; they're gone unless the contract is renewed. In this case they've rescinded offers that were made, which makes it unusual and newsworthy.

You can’t sue for discrimination or wrongful termination.

You are not protected by the WARN act.

There are more but that’s just off the top of my head.

If there wasn’t a difference, companies wouldn’t do it.

Remember, they have to pay these people more money than they would for a direct hire because the staffing agency takes a cut of their weekly pay.

Contractors for Google are still employees working for a contracting company. They could sue if they were discriminated against for membership in a protected class.

Usually this is not true: they are not employees at all, contracting company also hires them as subcontractors, each of them running their own sole propertiorship (at least that's how it works in my country).

But even if they were employees, they are not really getting fired from the contracting company - it can still try and find them another gig, for a different client. So you can say they are not getting fired at all, just suddenly have no work to do (but still have a valid employment contract).

Of course if contracting agency can't find them another position in reasonably short time they will fire them as well, but that's not on Google anymore, so Google can't be sued for that.

I’ve worked as a contractor. Was definitely an employee of the contractor company.

Contractors can sue for discrimination in some states.

Well if you have accepted a contract offer isn't google in breach of contract?

Self employed contractors seem to get a really bad deal in the USA. If I had agreed a contract in the UK for x months work id expect the employer to honour it and also be paid 2 to 3 times the FTE rate .

This article is using “contractor” to mean whatever they want it to mean. They’re not talking about highly paid independent software developers working on contract. They’re talking about at-will employees of a third party that Google contracted with to fill low-skill positions.

That's not "whatever they want it to mean". That's industry standard terminology. And it's not all low-skill positions. A friend of mine is a PhD optics researcher and he was a Google contractor (the employee of a third party kind) for a few years before moving on to an FTE position elsewhere.

The difference is that contractors can be removed from the company without any action on part of the employeer. If an employer wants to remove contractors one option they have is to do nothing and let the contracts expire. They cannot do that to an employee. They must explicitly tell the employee that their employment is being terminated.

Even for higher skilled "contract positions" you don't seem to command a premium in the USA.

The positions in question here are basically lower-tier quasi-employees, who are contracted through an employment agency because Google doesn't want the liability of employing them directly. That liability is both legal and reputational, the latter because cutting contractors lets Google cut costs without worrying their FTEs. These contractors work full time for a single client (Google). They expect/hope to do so indefinitely, at least for a year or so, and in normal times they do.

I believe that UK-style contractors are closer to what I'd probably call a "consultant", specialists who get a much higher hourly rate than an FTE would but aren't sad or surprised when a contract ends. Those do exist in the USA, but that's quite different from the "contractors" here.

I have seen people getting paid a lot on contracts. But of course it depends who considered them high skilled - Company contracting them or contractor themselves.

Got to keep this discussion in context. Google has no need of hotshot contract programmers. That company already has 50000+ crackerjack programmers and they decline to hire 99% of the candidates who want to join them. In the context of this article, the contractors are people who would not be qualified for full-time engineering jobs at that company. They are performing peripheral business functions or grinding on manual tasks like content moderation.

I think contracts come with clauses that enable either party to give notice and terminate the contract. As to whether or not you get 2 or 3 times the FTE that is highly variable. You wouldn't necessarily know what the FTE rate is. Typically you would see an advert with a specified rate, be recommended or brought in by someone already there. Either you would be made an offer. If you like it you go for it.

FTE for the industry is fairly easy to get and contract agencies will know what the rate is.

I know what the day rate for my skills are £700-800 for central London - though that doesn't factor the commute so probably ought to be a bit more.

I don't think "at will" employees are even guaranteed severance pay every where.

True, this is just an expected curtesy, just like the 2 week notice an employee is supposed to give when leaving.

I always thought this was an odd formality due to the asymmetry; if an employer is terminating you, they generally won't give you a 2 week notice, at least in the USA.

But they are supposed to give you 2 weeks of pay. I prefer to get the cash and have 2 weeks, at home, starting the full time search for a new job. Instead of having to show up for 2 weeks while knowing that I will be gone in a few days :)

There's no such law in any US State that I'm aware of that requires a company provide you severance pay upon termination. Such severance is a courtesy at best. When the circumstances are contentious, it is frequently provided in exchange for an agreement that the terminated employee not sue the company for unlawful termination, discrimination, etc. and not defame the company in any way.

In CA and many other states have an implied contract exception to at-will employment. If two weeks notice is in the written employee handbook, or they have a history or doing providing it they do need to give two weeks notice or pay in lieu even if you don't agree to any other agreements

Yes, just like the 2 week notice from the employee. I feel like we've gone full circle twice now.

I've always given 2 weeks notice, never been offered severance pay, but on the other hand never been marched out immediately like some people. In one instance, I gave my resignation and then they said shortly afterwards how about we make it a week from now instead of the full two weeks (or something like that). They paid me according to how long I worked and no more.

There are also no laws that an at-will employee must give two weeks notice- it is a courtesy at best.

In most jurisdictions the only thing a company in the US is legally required to do is pay you for the days you've worked in the pay period you are terminated. If they let you go, they are also usually required to give you your final paycheck at termination time. Mandatory severance is not part of the law.

Tell that to all of my former employers...

A lot of contractors are incorporated, so the contract is not between google and the contractor, but between google and the contractor's corp (sometimes another agency in between google and corp). So the contractor is not an employee of google and employment laws do not apply. Termination rules (typically a few weeks notice) are defined in the contract.

There's a legal difference at these volumes. The WARN Act applies here and states may have their own laws that also apply.

Contracts are for a specific time period, 12 months for example. FTE has no expiration date.

At will employment can be terminated at any time. Contracts can also be terminated whenever the company decides, as per the present example. Not sure what that has to do with my question.

Sure that's true in theory. In practice contractors are let go at the end of their contract unless there's a renewal and often due to co-employment risk they can only be renewed for a certain length of time before they must either be hired or let go. It's also seen as no big deal to end a contract early. You are there fully at the convenience of the company. Often there's no need to go through HR, they just make a phone call to your agency for you not to come in the next day. That's much different than most companies treat their FTEs, even though in the USA employees have almost no protection in most states anyway.

Just because something is legally similar does not mean it's used the same in practice. This is very true of contracts.

Fun fact: Montana is the only state that bans this.

It is a little more nuanced than that. Many states have laws that say PTO is earned, it needs to be paid out 100% of the time, some say it depends on the written company policy, other say it never needs to be paid out. And similarly, Montana requires good cause to fire employees(except if they are new employees or meet a number of other exceptions), a number of states have exceptions to at-will that require employers to follow their own policies(and many large companies require two weeks notice, and good cause for firing) and a number have few to no exceptions to at-will.

Yes there is. In CA and many other states the at-will employment doctrine has an implied contract exception. That means employers need a good faith business reason, or good cause to fire employees, but not contractors in this context.

It's also the case that some companies will hire MORE contractors at this point because they are more easily disposable than employees

More likely they will hire more contractors in the fast ramp-up after things start rolling again (quicker to onboard a contractor).

Contractors are the first to get filled and first to let go.

I disagree. A benefit of having a contract worker is that they don't show up as a recurring cost. I used to work at Morgan Stanley (Ruth Porat's previous CFO gig before Google) and around the time I left, the tech organization was roughly 70% contract workers. This was well after the crisis, and the company was laying off full time employees in at least one wave each year, while the ranks of contractors began to swell.

My breaking point there was actually that despite having a fairly senior title, I was being called in to do tons of mundane work on the weekend (checkouts after network/firewll changes) because they would have to pay contractors to do it on the weekend, and that was not allowed.

I definitely felt toward the end that you had considerably more job security as a contractor than an FTE. So much so in fact, that after being fed up with weekend and late night work, I probed to see if I could go the contractor route. Then I found out that they got paid by the "day" and not even the hour, and the rates they were paying were finely tuned to make them more or less break even in terms of FTE pay when considering benefits and such.

Your solution is "if you can't get a good job, just get a better job?" And you think no one's thought of that already?

Nope, not what I was saying at all. I was making a statement about personal risk tolerance. A contract is more risky than FTE because your risk of the company being done with you before you are done with the company is higher. If you are unemployed and need to get back to work then you'd usually take what you can get. If you are choosing between opportunities or leaving a FTE job then be aware of the risk, even if the company is Google.

Reminding people that took a paying job out of a need to get paid that they should expect to be treated as less human than full-time employees assumes that they are somehow unaware of this. Every contractor I've worked with in the past 5 years clearly understood the fragility of their situation, while the employees working with them often did not.

> treated as less human

Keep it civil? Nobody said anything about "less human". That's a vile straw man.

"extra-disposable and second class"

It's not a straw man. It's in there in the original comment.

Second class employee does not, in any way, imply less than human. If there are FTE and Contractors, and you have to lay people off, the Contractors come first. The commitments you've made to each are different. That doesn't mean they are less human, or that you don't feel bad that you need to let them go. But sometimes, you have to let people go, and you have to choose which people.

I've worked on contract before. Just shake my hand and tell me you don't need more right now. Don't feel bad, you've been paying me to offer that option without drama. You won't scale up enough if you're afraid to scale back down.

Your comment that I was replying to did not say "less than human." You said "less human."

Being treated as "extra disposable and second class" is being treated as less human than a FTE. It's up in the air whether that also means they were being treated as "less than human."

You seem to explicitly ignore the “extra-disposable” modifier used with “second-class”. Curious.

No seriously you're not treated with dignity which is less than any human deserves

I just don't understand this argument. As a contractor, you are hired with the understanding that, if someone needs to be let go, it is you before the FTEs. In general, you're paid more as contractor than as an FTE, and that's one of the reasons.

There is nothing about that that implies you're not treated with dignity.

Yes it's not intrinsic to the relationship per se but in the implementation.

Contractors are treated with less dignity than they deserve on a number of fronts

As a contractor and even as an employee I've been treated with less dignity than I deserve especially when being let go on a moment's notice and treated like a plague carrier the minute I'm terminated

> treated as extra-disposable and second class

I suppose it depends on the eye of the beholder. Humans aren't disposable.

The position is disposable, not the person.

I was let go with no notice and not even a bag to take my shit home while the asshat recruiting manager who hired me and got a promotion

For such statements we must observe the speech which is uttered forth from the motion of hands and not the motion of lips.

This is a web forum that uses characters submitted in a form textarea to communicate. Whether those comments are posted by hand or by assistive technologies such as text-to-speech or mouth control is not relevant.

I used to be a contract worker in tech. If you'd like to learn more about why I feel that way, and why those feelings come up for me when reading the comment I replied to, then I would normally encourage asking. You chose the "this is conversational warfare" approach instead, so there isn't anything I can usefully say about that topic in reply.

Sure! I know most people who have been through the experience of being a contractor are well-aware, but not everyone has had that experience and not everyone one of the 2000 unfortunate people will have clearly understood the risks before accepting the offer. Some may have even expected to be eventually hired due to unscrupulous recruiters. The tech recruiting industry is rife with shysters.

You seem like you may have been burned in the past and I think setting clear expectations up front can help. We used to tell our contracting candidates "The full-time staff will judge you differently than they judge one of their own so be prepared to dress better, work harder and be recognized for it less." But lots of people already understood that and there were plenty that really preferred the flexibility and variety of contracts and felt bored and trapped as FTE. People can have different life priorities than we do.

I think my agency was one of the good ones, but it was still rare that I was offering someone a clear career boost instead of a placeholder or a way to pay the bills. But bills need paying too. We used to be explicit about that and tell our contractors to keep looking for full-time work and treat the contract as a gap-fill and that we would cheer them on and gladly serve as a reference if they found better work. Our idea was that contractors who find dream jobs turn into eventual hiring managers who remember that we were honest.

And I see a vibrant discussion of language and rhetorics below:) I do want to clarify that I meant the position is disposable and that you are a second class citizen in the context of the first class FTEs. If anything in this situation feels dehumanizing it's due to the modern corporate philosophy of labor as resource. I'm out of recruiting now and my mental health and perception of self-worth are much improved for the change.

Doesn't make them any less human to point out they took a known risk.

At least in my part of the country, Contract workers are paid a premium over FTEs because of that risk. Broadly speaking the more 'secure' the contract job (i.e. years vs months) the less this differential in pay is, but I know plenty of people who specifically do contract work knowing that risk but finding the payoff worth it.

The entitlement is real and I don't even understand how full time employees can get so comfortable when they're just as precariously positioned in many cases

But they certainly don't go out of their way to help contractors or each other unless it's to complain about the company at least that is all I've ever witnessed

Wrong wrong wrong!

Companies ~20 years ago use to hire a CW (Contract worker, Contingent worker) then see if they would fit and then eventually hire them as FTE.

Now, they hire contract workers as they are in a different tax bracked and companies do get tax breaks. Thus the company will pay the CW the lowest possible wage, while giving them NONE of the company perks with a contract that starts at 6 months/1-year and is ALWAYS extended for longer term, or the contract starts out as never ending. For example job's that should be FTE, are contracted to CW's. I.E system admin, validation etc.. Companies contact recruiters to find CW's, vs Companies hiring people directly as FTE instead of being forced to use a recruiter. I.E My job, I dont have an end date contract... its indefinite, yet my duties are exactly if not very simular to FTE's. How is that even fair?

Companies like Google, MS, Intel, HP etc etc have excessive contact worker workforce for the main purpose of making more money. Pay CW's less, they make more $$.. CW's do not get the same FTE resources like stock, access to perks on-site as FTE's, more so treated as 2nd class people.

There is a clear abuse in the industry, but none want to take it on imho. I've got stories and actual experience for daaays! I'd actually like to talk to a lawyer as I think its a complete abuse of the CW system that these big companies are getting away with. </rant>

They don't treat them as equal because of the legal system. I believe in the eyes of the law, if you treat a non-FTE as a FTE then they are essentially as FTE. That means companies have to treat CWs this way as a means to protect themselves against litigation. It's a little more complicated then just "the purpose of making money"

Microsoft got in trouble for this in the 90s for treating permatemps too similarly to FTEs. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...

The case you're talking about is Vizcaino v. Microsoft

https://corporate.findlaw.com/human-resources/vizcaino-v-mic...

They don't treat them as equal because of the legal system. So then why dont they hire CW's as FTE's after 1 year? Why do they abuse the term CW, and keep using CW's for longer than 1 year when the job does not change?

Why do these large companies have a majority of their workforce as CW's vs FTE? Costs.. FTE's are higher costs, so they shift the savings to a CW workforce that is basically a FTE, but lower costs in all aspects where then all liability is shifted to the recruiter.

CW's are a lower cost workforce for companies that need specific skills. The job is suppose to be by legal standards and IRS "a short period of time that should not extend 1 year...." yet it does. Companies continued use of a CW in a FTE capacity is a complete abuse of the CW system imho.

Most people dont know, but companies have at least 2 type of CW contracts. Because of the Vizcaino v. Microsoft case CW's were forced to take a "break" for legal reasons. So a CW would have a contract that would start at 6 months, then get extended to 12 months, and then within the last few years got companies could extend to a max of 18 months before a CW was forced to take a 6 month break. When 6 months came back around the CW could have their very job back, or go elsewhere in the company.

The other type of contract is a never ending. You're a CW that is hired thru a tech recruiter and you settle on wage and that is what you get until you leave. Perks are null in most cases. The wage can be higher, but companies set limits on the job so the CW get never get anymore as that is the rate set for the job.

My experience is quite different. I enjoy contract work. And it is quite rare that I am treated very different than an FTE. While I don't get the same benefits, I am paid more, in fact I have a prepared statement for when FTE's ask how much I am making to avoid the awkward conversation after. I pay for my own HC and Roth and still make more than FTE's doing similar work as me at the same company. I control my WFH schedule, vacation, sick, etc. I also enjoy working at different places so I may be working at a financial company for six months, about half way through that I will start looking for a new gig (if I don't have one already) and that new gig might turn out to be a utility company. They often ask me back for projects as well. So it's nice to see old friends again. I obviously don't work on the help desk or racking servers but in tough times I wouldn't turn down datacenter work. Most of the gig's I work at approach me about coming on full time but at most I might extended my contract a few months. Most of my work I find on my own but I also work as a sub-contractor for a few places I like if they need help and our schedules align.

I'm trying to get started in this world! Mind if I ask a few questions?

- When you were getting started, how did you find your contracts? Did you use an agency or recruiters, or make connections on your own?

- How do you negotiate the length of a contract? From what I've seen, most employers are looking for 6 months to a year, while most freelancers are looking for 2 to 4 months.

- How long did it take to start charging premium rates?

Obviously it's a tough market right now but I'm trying to figure out how to turn some small contracts into a sustainable lifestyle and would love to learn from your experience.

Delighted to help.

- When you were getting started, how did you find your contracts? Did you use an agency or recruiters, or make connections on your own?

My network. I had worked in technical sales for several years and had built up a decent size network and a great reputation. I did approach one local smaller agency where I knew they specialized in an area of consulting and I was in the same realm but they didn't have anyone who did the type of work I specialize(d) in so I offered to accompany them on calls/meetings to expand the sale and they took a portion of the revenue. I did the same with another firm that was small and I knew the owner. I haven't used agents or recruiters, I guess I haven't needed to but if they add value I wouldn't have a problem using them to get land gigs. It's always about the work, I don't chase the money, and I find that the works (usually) turns out to be great and the money is too.

- How do you negotiate the length of a contract? From what I've seen, most employers are looking for 6 months to a year, while most freelancers are looking for 2 to 4 months.

I don't do staff augmentation work if I can avoid it. Then it is all project based work, so a few months, typically. Although I had a gig last almost a year last year. I scope out the work and send them a SOW, we can negotiate rates but I always bid high. If I was just starting out and building a reputation I would bid lower, and tell them that I was purposely bidding low and ask them for a letter of reference and/or take reference calls from other customers.

- How long did it take to start charging premium rates?

Not long but I had a head start because of my reputation and blog. The market dictates the rate quite a bit, and I changed my specialty so I went through a period of about six months where I was transitioning and charged lower rates to get gig to build my reputation back up and get the experience.

Obviously it's a tough market right now but I'm trying to figure out how to turn some small contracts into a sustainable lifestyle and would love to learn from your experience.

This is the best thing you can do. I have found if you treat customers like family, they will fall in love with you and want you on all their projects. I get birthday and Christmas cards (yes they still exist) from customers. I get asked advice on other projects that have nothing to do with my specialty because they trust my opinion. I get asked to bid on work even if its remotely related to what I do. I had the worlds largest financial company (you can guess who it is) wait four months for me to be available for work, essentially holding up their entire project for me. I regularly get asked by the largest airline in the US if I know anyone that specializes in 'blah' because we have built a level of trust over the last six years, and I pass that work on to my network.

I feel like if I treat everyone with respect and kindness it is returned back to me 10x. For example, if a dir at said airline calls me at 2am, I pick up the phone and do anything I can to help, at no cost, and then call him about a week later to see if things are working and almost every time I get work from it.

If you can build and maintain those relationships you will have more work than you can handle.

Thanks for the response, very helpful!

I've done my best to build relationships over my 8 years in the software development industry, but I don't have much work to show for it after querying my network. All of my work to date has been from external sources.

I also make a point to over-deliver, both in availability and deliverables, and to ask for referrals.

I wonder if the types of interpersonal connections in tech sales are more valuable for finding work than those in software development - I'm certain I could tap my network for a job offer easily, but contract work has been a tougher sell.

It's still early days though, we'll see how things look 6 months down the line after I have a couple more contracts under my belt.

What is your prepared statement regarding pay?

I have a range I stay in. I have a SOW that I just use a template, pull things out, put things in, depending on the scoping call/requirements. I don't do MSA's.

Contract-to-hire still exists, but you should talk to the recruiter to try to gauge the possibility of that up-front if it's important to you. An honest recruiter will give you a sense. And yes, there are plenty of companies that abuse the contract worker system as pseudo-permanent employees with less benefits, pay and leverage. But that is actually illegal and there have been a number of successful co-employment lawsuits. Many companies have policies that contracts can never be extended more than 1 or 2 years in order to mitigate this risk.

I think there’s also the issue of H1B/Visa contract workers getting abused by the companies they were contracted out to and losing half their pay to the staffing agency they work for.

What you are saying is completely spot-on. Large companies especially microsoft, intel and now google use the (permanent)contract worker in a majority of roles now. It seems especially predominant in IT helpdesk, and datacenter technician work. It is really bad as these jobs are usually a stepping stone for people to get their foot in the door and learn and grow to more senior positions in the company. For my company IT helpdesk used to be staffed by FTE's who got stock and benefits, now it is 100% contract workers with no chance for moving to FTE at all, very sad. In addition folks that are in these roles alot of times come from low income backgrounds so it seems an effective way to keeping them from moving ahead. Lets hope laws are introduced to stop this horrible practice as it really is eating this country alive.

"Some of the would-be contractors left stable, full-time jobs once they received an employment offer at Google and are now searching for work in a difficult labor market."

This is a good example of why it's a good idea for agencies and independents to write penalty clauses into contracts, so that if the hiring company rescinds the agreement, they must compensate the contractor for lost opportunity costs.

(On a side note, "employment offer at Google" is a bit misleading; the employer is typically an agency, not Google.)

Correct. Many of these people will not qualify for unemployment benefits because they willfully quit their other job and because of the US system are at serious risk of destitution and homelessness unless they have friends or family that will support them during this time.

Are they true independent contractors or are they working under contracting companies that handle the payroll for Google? I don't know the proper term for these companies.

They're typically known as agencies.

Quitting to start a new job does not prevent you from receiving unemployment. There is no blanket prohibition on receiving unemployment if you quit. You qualify for unemployment if you lost your job through no fault of your own, or you quit for good cause

I don't know what jurisdiction you are specifically discussing, but in California you cannot collect unemployment if you simply left your job. You must show "good cause" for leaving, where "good cause" includes things like violence and physical danger, but not "I thought I could get paid more across town".

In CA specifically if you accept a better job and quit, then later this other job never materializes that is good cause and you would qualify for unemployment.

Per https://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/Voluntary_Quit_VQ_5.htm on whether a voluntary quit qualifies for unemployment

>[T]he quitting must be for such a cause as would reasonably motivate in a similar situation the average able-bodied and qualified worker to give up his or her employment with its certain wage rewards in order to enter the ranks of the . . . unemployed.

This is wildly false. “quit for a good cause” means things like they changed your hours to ones you cannot work or something where you job changed in a way in which you were not capable of performing your job duties. Or things like you were a victim of discrimination or harassment. Leaving for another job is definitely not one of them. This was specifically about the US. Where you possibly referring to a different country?

Good cause is not limited to those reasons. Leaving for another job is good cause in CA, NY, MA and many other states depending on the specifics.

Per https://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/Voluntary_Quit_VQ_5.htm on whether a voluntary quit qualifies for unemployment

As a practical matter, this means that the employer made working there so harsh and intolerable for the employee that any reasonable person in a similar situation would have quit, too. This is known in the law as "constructive discharge," and if you can make your case to EDD (in California) that you were constructively discharged then you can qualify for unemployment benefits.

But if you simply quit your job because you got a better offer, that's a different story, and EDD will likely reject your subsequent application for unemployment benefits.

Different states have differing rules but most states in a non-pandemic time would not authorized Unemployment if a person left one job for another, and that other job offer was rescinded, you would not be qualified to get unemployment in that situation

That said, while under this current state of emergency many rules have the changed, extended, and lowered

Sure that's a good idea if the other party will agree to it. It's not industry standard so you may have trouble negotiating that in.

I am honestly amazed that people do not seem to realize that all the "tech" companies that are advertising vendors are in deep trouble right now.

The numbers are not good and some seriously hard decisions are going to be coming up.

Do you have some sources/data to reference? I have read articles discussing this superficially, e.g. companies reducing ad and marketing expenditure, therefore affecting ad serving platforms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/technology/coronavirus-go...

An NYT article about it.

Although I am not sure I agree with the deep trouble assessment. At least for the first quarter, the analysts were too fearful.

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/04/29/alphabet-posts-sudde...

There is a counter argument that online ads is the way to drive traffic to online stores that are currently replacing brick and mortar outlets during quarantine.

Ads on youtube seem to have recently gotten much more annoying, to the extent that the last few times I've tried to watch a 20-30 minute video I get sick of it inside of 5 minutes and quit.

That would be my intuition too. And I don't really have any source to back it up, but to me ads and marketing firms are gonna be hit hard indirectly.

My company is directly impacted by all the shutdowns because we sell things, in stores, to people. So yeah, times are tough. But ads and marketing budget is the first thing that got slashed, and I imagine that it happens everywhere.

A buddy of mine works at a marketing company. He kept telling me that they were fine, people staying home didn't affect their business, etc etc. But a week ago he told me that now they were feeling the ripple effect very hard.

Thank god they all have massive amounts of cash to eat through before they have to lay off workers.

And then 130,000 contractors to eat through before getting to the 100,000 employees.

uber has a lot of cash and yet still laid off.

i think it’s in the shareholders interest to lay-off instead of eating into cash reserves

Of course. You hired those employees presumably in the interest of shareholders, not as a humanitarian deed.

What do the shareholders do?

Sorry, I thought my sarcasm was clear.

Are you implying that Google is a "tech" company that is actually an advertising vendor? I understand where they derive most of their revenue from but given their contributions to everything from the linux kernel, to networking, containers, etc. I think it's a little unfair to put quotes around "tech" in their case.

In the sense of where does the money come from, google is absolutely an advertising company.

You can be an advertising company and also make some contributions to tech at the same time

Sure, if a "tech company" can only make money by selling in-house developed technology, and not by packaging in-house developed technology into other products, then I concede the point. There are fairly few "tech companies" by that definition.

I still think your rephrasing of the characterization is somewhat unfair to Google. They created their main business by developing the technology to enable it, and they have gone way beyond "some contributions" to software and systems technology in support of it.

The person quoted in the article was hired as a recruiter. Last time there was a recession, Google axed all its recruiters. If they are unloading their recruiter organization, that says a lot about their full-time hiring rate right now.

Sundar himself has commented on this publicly.

"We believe now is the time to significantly slow down the pace of hiring, while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas where users and businesses rely on Google for ongoing support, and where our growth is critical to their success."

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/15/21222942/google-slowing-d...

Isn’t Google one of the last companies to let its contractors go at this point?

Anecdotally I know of only one company that did not let them go at the start of this crisis to preserve cash.

It’s really a shame that with a company of this size and importance we don’t enjoy a newsletter like “Shannon Knows DEC”. I’d love to get an inside perspective about current events at google from someone with deep contacts and a real understanding of the business.

i can tell you from experience it’s often misrepresented as well. the leadership will say something in an internal announcement and when it gets leaked it’s like a game of telephone. where the news is slightly different than what was actually said

It sucks for them. But we’re in a slump to sag the least. It’d be nice for them to take on those workers as obligation but obviously they’re not obliged to do that, so they’re not because once the economy comes back people will go back to them due to cachet .

>But we're in a slump to say the least.

I don't know what this "we" is to which you refer, as Google's Q1 2020 revenue outpaced Wall Street estimates by 3-4%, and shares have increased 6% since their last earnings call, outperforming the S&P 500.

I agree with your point that Google, nor any company, is obliged to take on workers if that's their business decision, but let's not pretend that Google is getting hit _that_ hard by the recession.

Q1 only covers through the end of March which would have only seen a few weeks of social distancing in some regions. Budgets take time to slash, and ripples take time to spread. The lean times could last for years and the common advice for surviving recessions is to cut as deeply and quickly as you can to preserve cash. That's why many companies are doing layoffs before they actually see a quarterly revenue performance hit. Organizations take time to move so decision makers need to lead the target.

> let's not pretend that Google is getting hit _that_ hard by the recession.

yet... Google's primary source of revenue is advertising (84% in 2019).

Marketing and advertising are the first things that companies cut.

non-paywall link: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/18758

Do Google contractors make more than Google employees? If yes, the premium is the priced-in risk. I sincerely don't know, but US government contractors make more than the GSA schedule counterpart.

We're misusing the term contractor in this thread. There are about 130,000 TVCs at Google (Temps, Vendors, and Contractors) according to the article.

The overwhelming majority of those are vendors, who provide security, staff cafeterias, call centers, etc. A few thousand are temps, who do the same work as an FTE but on a fixed-term basis with a cap at 2 years. Temps are employees of a staffing agency like Adecco which rents them out to Google for a rate about 2-3x the hourly pay of the temp.

The number of actual contractors, who are self-employed and have contracts directly with Google, is just a few hundred. They likely do make more than many FTEs, at least lower-level ones.

Don't think so. It depends on the type of contractor. If you're independent, you might (although you don't get stock and stock is a sizable portion of an FTEs total comp) but if you're actually working for Accenture/Wipro/Infosys/etc.. and they send you to Google on a contract, most definitely not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com