Every company hires contractors for different services. The company that cleans your offices at night is almost certainly a contractor, for example. If your office needs to be repainted, your company doesn’t hire a painter full-time and manage them directly. They enter into a contract with a painting company. If they need to expand their building, they contract with a construction company to do the work and the construction company hires people to do the construction work. Nobody would mistake the construction workers for employees of your company because the construction contracting model is commonly understood, unlike the data center model.

Working on a company’s contracted projects doesn’t make someone an employee of that company. It seems well-understood in common situations like cleaning or construction but people seem to struggle to understand how it works when it comes to unfamiliar topics like data centers.

The situation in this article is no different. The company they’re complaining about isn’t actually Google, despite how much the article tries to be about big tech:

> But the company that recruited McNally was not Google; it was Modis Engineering,