Comment by throw3823423 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw3823423 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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?

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