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Comment by JSavageOne | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this even legally flies. Seems like the legal equivalent of creating a shell company.

It is a shell company, except that it is not Google (or its equivalent) who is creating it. It is the Infosys and Cognizants (or other bodyshopping firms) of the world who create this structure to satisfy the demand created by the Googles.

The US loves its purely procedural legal distinctions. Shell companies are often not only legal but encouraged.

I mean classic example are contracting out food service in the corporate cafeteria. You contract the work to some random other company who hire people to do food service or do you want Google or whoever to start hiring cooks themselves? Janitorial staff is also a classic role for this style of employment.

That's quite different - Google contracts for a service to be provided and takes no interest in managing janitors and cooks individually. The red badgers sound like they're being given individual instructions but denied employee protection.

Two different kind of outsourcing contracts. And red badgers, unless they are freelancers, have employee protection. Just not from Google, or any other company using subcontracting agencies for that matter.

but looking at it from a top down perspective, it does seem like google treats these contractors no better than the janitors and cooks. So i dont think you can say it's different merely because the nature of the work is not the same.

Google doesn't treat janitors any way. They treat the building services company. They do treat the contract programmers a certain way.

The difference between a legitimate third party service and these ought-to-be-illegal body shop arrangements is whether Google is paying for a specific service—e.g. clean offices—or people that they boss around.

> or do you want Google or whoever to start hiring cooks themselves?

Yes? Whats wrong with hiring a cook if you need to cook?

Because Google has no idea how to manage or hire cooks?

Google's first chef Charlie Ayers was hired way back in 1999

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers

And notorious as a bad example in the business world of how to hire cooks? They changed shortly afterwards.

They pretty much were giving away the farm, and if they kept that up they’d be bankrupt - not an incredibly valuable company.

Google managed to hire their first chef in 1999 and manage them directly, I'm sure they can manage a global team of cooks better than anyone else if they wanted to, because of their specific needs and so many global offices to spread the gains through. It's all just a decision they took.

What they did with Ayer’s was so clearly unsustainable (and disproportionate) it’s a classic story in the business world of giving away the farm.

Anyone doing that at scale is going bankrupt quickly. Which is the point.

Google has infinite money and doesn't have to care about things like that. They can waste money on food just like they waste it hiring 10000 engineers who don't do any work.

Bwahaha. Good luck with that.

> no idea how to manage or hire cooks?

Ah yess, cooking food is like deepwater welding, and an average adult has no idea how to manage the risks involved.

Seriously, how can an adult write something like this?

Have you ever managed a commercial kitchen? Or hired and supervised cooks?

I know people who have, and it is far from an easy or straightforward thing. If you want to stay solvent and out of jail anyway.

Most restaurants go bankrupt within a few years.

I have worked in a ghost kitchen, its not rocket science.

We discussing a canteen for employees, not a commercial restaurant. You don't need marketing, you don't need to turn a profit.

It's just as easy to hire a chef as it is to hire a catering service.

What surprises me the most is how a corporation like Google is incapable of meeting temporary staffing needs internally, by shifting people already on their payroll around projects. It's as if they are just admitting that they are shit at managing projects and workloads and scoping work to the point that they need external help to plug these gaping holes in their load management.

How many people do they need to pay to manage this contractor circus? How much effort do they waste sourcing contractors, tracking work assigned to them, treat contractors differently even interns of security processes, and dealing with higher attrition levels? So much waste.

Many countries make legal distinctions between direct employees and contractors.

Those kinds of regulations are a prime driver for this kind of contracting.

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