Hacker News Reader

Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

It don't want to sound insensitive, but same employer or not, being a contractor is different. For starters, your career is less subject to office politics. Or you feel far less pressure to take work home. Don't like to gig, look for something. You're hired to do a job. Do it. No more. No less. There is for some, comfort in that.

The one surprise from the article is that the gross pay is the same. Typically, contractor is more but you lose benefits like paid days off so it's a wash. But same? Maybe that's because supply is up and demand down?

View on HN

Contractors are well paid (per day) when they are in a "short term consulting role" for a company that doesn't need a permanent position.

When the role is "a body for the shop when the workload is high enough", the contractor is the least valued class in the team, paid less with less benefits, and first to cut when load or funding drops.

It all depends on skills. I've never been a contractor and paid less.

The part about first-to-cut is true though. Because it's the easiest for the employer.

Sadly, I've been seeing the opposite. My large company keeps hiring groups of contractors out of India. They are low-quality and low-paid and are there for minor feature conversions. However, we see the company keeping them over strong employees every round of layoffs. The levels of technical debt someone will have to deal with in the future is absurd.

> They are low-quality and

I think I know them, they are /producing/ low-quality /results/, but I woulnd't go THAT far.

It's like low-quality products from China. The Chinese companies are more than capable of producing high-quality products, but you get what you pay for. If you negotiate them down to the lowest price possible you get the lowest quality product possible that still meets your basic requirement.

It's more complicated than that. Many companies that aren't mainly in tech end up having strange ideas of what competitive pay is for FTEs, thanks to HR, but managers can spend capital project money with far fewer limitations. This leads to places where the contractors are very well paid, but there's no way to convert them to FTEs, just because the offers are never high enough. Add to that the fact that raises in those places are rarely competitive with the market, and you can see crazy situations where a contractor is doing so much better than an FTE that has been in the company for 5 years.

I've also seen layoffs where only full time employees get hit, while the contractors, just don't get hit. Just this month, I've just seen a 20% cut in FTEs , followed by the remaining employees having to spend a lot of time interviewing contractors to replace them. And the contractors are not going to be on-call, so support rotations shrink.

So yes, there are places where the long term contractor is the least desirable position available, but it's really hard to generalize.

That‘s definitely not the case for most of Europe, where it‘s much more difficult to cut FTE‘s due to law compared to contractors. Can you give an example where something like that is happening?

This is the norm from my perspective over the last 25 years.

I was a contractor once and while I sat at a tiny desk in a hallway and wasn’t invited to the ice cream parties I know I was paid better than all the FTE as they tried recruiting me but their offers were far less that my hourly rate.

There are also many variations on the contractor relationship that are important. Some contractors are hired through staff augmentation companies while others work through their own company.

Working through your own company is a much better arrangement, but harder to get setup. You'll have more control over rates and have the opportunity to get more work.

This all depends on having a relationship with someone with some kind of budgetary control and relationship with procurement. If procurement can get a better deal working directly with your company then it's normally possible to work something out. This is a good reason to build relationships with the "highly political" people that technical-types normally eschew.

There's a bunch of differentiation here that really needs different names for the roles. Personally and in observation I've seen it lead to way too much confusion and arguing at cross-purposes.

We've got people who own, or are, established independent businesses whose customers are other businesses. In white collar work these roles are generally called "consultants". In blue collar work they are often "contractors" or "sub-contractors".

We've got temp agencies who provide temporary or permatemp employees to other companies, where the temporary employee may or may not have any guarantee of long-term employment by the temp agency, but are almost guaranteed to have stretches of time in which they aren't compensated, even if they do. These roles are "temps" or "permatemps", but often get called "contractors", though the real "contractor" is the temp agency. The jobs described in the article fall in this bin.

We've got people who directly fill roles for spec pay. I guess these days these roles are called "gig work".

I think the word "contractor" should be reserved for talking about non-employee labor, or business-to-business labor, in general. Even then there are edge cases (like catering) that I'm not sure belong here, or belong in the non-contract business-to-customer category. The more specific terms should be used for the particular type of job (Consultant/Sub-contractor, temp/permatemp, gig worker).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com