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Comment by cgore | Hacker News Reader

This is rather strange if it is accurate. Everywhere I've worked where they hired contractors as developers, the company always preferred contract-to-hire, assuming the person worked out well. I've had two jobs that way, 6-12 month contract to full-time regular employee. The only time people didn't transition to full-time is if they sucked, basically a 6-month interview. And sometimes they would go full-time even if they did suck.

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In one organization where I was a manager, our HR policies limited the contractors we hired to 'two terms,' 36 months. If I wanted to keep that person on staff, I would have to wait 12 months before I could bring them back. The result: The really good people I WANTED on my staff could not keep any longer than three years.

Did the HR people ever provide any rationale for this? I mean, I know that hiring people full-time creates a bunch of additional costs and liabilities. But did they ever quantify what those costs would be, so that you could weigh them against the projected benefit of a hire, not to mention the opportunity cost of cutting someone loose and hiring a new person, with the resultant drop in productivity?

I mean, it's not going to get better until HR people and CFOs are called on the carpet for poor decision-making in a situation like that.

Microsoft got sued in the 90's for not extending retirement plans to its temps. Since then the two track system developed.

This isn't unique to the tech sector, there were companies operating this sort of policy before MS. I'm not asking why, I'm asking whether it is actually economically efficient or whether people just take HR's say-so that it is.

It's kind of the same way in the military, at least for officers.

Once an officer gets around 18 years of active-duty time the law requires that they be permitted to serve 20 years if they wish (to qualify for retirement).

So one of the things the Navy looks at when deciding whether to mobilize an Reserve officer is whether they would possibly hit that 18-year point "by accident" as then they'd have to keep them on the active-duty list for even longer than they thought.

HR pointed the finger at Procurement for signing a contract with the staffing provider that included those terms. Noone could really justify why that clause existed, and likely to still be the case.

From the story, the author doesn't sound like a developer.

Agree

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