This is obviously a generalization and of course this may well work great for some companies, including yours.
I actually find that quite offensive. Myself and the other contractors I know are professionals, winning work through reputation and delivering results. That's why we get paid well.
We require less management and always try to deliver above expectations. We have a professional, business to business relationship with our clients, where many employees seem to consider their employer almost a surrogate parent.
Employees have no more skin in the game, in fact I'd say less - if I don't deliver I get no more work.
What skin in the game does an FTE have? Aside from maintaining benefits, which personally I think is preposterous to tie to full-time employment anyway. What else is there? Stock? Contractors are eligible for stock.
Even so, I don't need anyone to do anything beyond what they've been hired to do. Why would I need someone to go above and beyond? I just need smart, competent workers.
Either way, I am trying to take home a certain amount of money, sure. And make enough to cover my insurance needs, yes.
And as a contractor, I was always sensitive to those clients who wanted to make sure I never billed more than 40 hours a week, regardless of how many hours of work I actually did.
Maybe that’s not how contractors are supposed to do things, but that’s a core part of my personality, and not something I can change — or would want to.
Of course, I’ve never been an Amazon warehouse worker, or a driver for Uber or Lyft, so for them I might act differently. But as an IT consultant many times over the past 30+ years, this has been the way I have worked.
The better I do, the more money I can make.
I look forward to not having to inspire or align people and just tell people "this is what I want".
Their skin in the game is their reputation for repeat work.
What I like about contractors is that good ones will give you suggestions and recommendations for improvement, but they won't make it their life's eternal mission to throw your entire project off track by campaigning for their solution.
What do you believe employees are in it for?
I don't think that's totally true, it certainly wasn't in my case. I started contracting because I had had enough of the corporate grind. Quite a lot of my peers seemed to have the same attitude.
"Personal Business Commitments" "Performance Reviews" "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" "Be sure to share stuff about X new project on your social media!" "Submit your vacation request"
Yes, this. All of this.
I will deliver you technical solutions to the best of my ability, and I will do it as well as I can, making sure things are documented, complete and easy to understand for longer term maintainers, using common tech stacks where possible.
I will not corporate pole-climb or waste my life on company admin, nor pretend I believe in your mission.
Played the game to put myself in position to do this, but absolutely weary of it.
My incentive is to make my client happy so they may hire me again, to get a successful project on my resume, and to be able to point future clients to this client if they want to know what I can do for them.
The only real downside is finding clients to agree to that limit, but so far it hasn't been too much of a problem.
Why? Lowers weekly management / feedback / “business decisions” needed to enable your work.
Working, part time, with a remote team and seem to have 3 hours of meetings. How do you do it?
Beyond that, we communicate mostly on GitHub issues, Slack (for realtime issues, goofing off, etc), and P2 for designing things that need more threading/nuance.
We're so distributed (literally around the world) that our one hour meeting is guaranteed to inconvenience someone. When it's my turn, our meeting is at 11pm local time. I usually join with a beer. This meeting is usually a retrospective and just going through what issues we're planning to prioritize for the next few weeks.
We're a very technical team, so we don't have any business specialists on the teams.
This is precisely why when I started my company I committed to only hiring contract devs for 10-20 hours per week. No meetings. No bullshit. I pay you a high hourly wage, you do as much (often more) work than if you were a salaried 40 hour FTE, and you likely make more money in the process.
The model of work and the 40 hour work week is so fundamentally broken I feel like I'm in a perpetual twilight zone state when I talk to people. They think it's normal and okay to have 3+ hours of meetings per day and barely get any work done. I will never understand it.
My first 7 years of work life outside of college consisted of THOUSANDS of pointless meetings and months of pretending to be busy. I've promised myself I will never do that shit again, and I will not let my business succumb to that style of work.