>> Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember

>Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of

This is like the one scenario where being a contractor is better than being salaried. Asking for more hours and getting paid for them is absolutely not being “taken advantage of”.

Your comment REALLY resonates with me. When I was fresh out of school, I joined an enterprise software team as a junior engineer. The team was mostly FTEs, but there were 2 or 3 contractors as well - one of whom was extremely talented. It was the talented one that everybody ganged up on. He was ridiculed (it was supposed to be in good fun but I think it went too far), and he was abused and given all the hard problems to solve. Here's the thing - this guy made up for all the rest of those shitty FTEs. He fixed all their problems, he did all the real work, developed the best features, and fixed all the hard bugs. The lead engineer was an absolute joke (I once caught him making changes to a live production database). The roles were all reversed.

Well, it didn't sit well with me then, and I became friends with that guy and the other contractors. We're still friends to this day. I'd say he got the last laugh because he started his own company and is doing well. But I promised myself that I would never treat any contractor like that ever. I'm a Director now, with a team of my own. Similarly, it has a few contractors, and every single one of those guys is treated like an FTE, with regular 1x1s, objectives, and personal development. As a leader, I invest the time in them like they're my own, because they are people too - regardless of the SSO number or the ".consultant" in their email address.

This reads like a LinkedIn parable. I hope you're also providing them with avenues to become full-time contributors if they want to, and ensuring they're fairly compensated and have access to the resources as discussed in this thread.

Well, I’m not a preacher, and LinkedIn is brutal. Regarding providing the avenues to full time, that’s sort of the plan. I hope to convert them - if they want to. Some people enjoy being contractors I’ve found, others are just there looking for the next full time gig.

> Similarly, it has a few contractors, and every single one of those guys is treated like an FTE, with regular 1x1s, objectives, and personal development.

If you work in a large company, HR is going to have a shit fit when they find out. And if you don't, why not just hire them full time?

I would rather have a team of all-FTEs than a mix. But the company wants more contractors because when cost-pressures arise, they can dump them without any thought. In fact this happened during COVID, hundreds of contractors at my firm were let go in one fell-swoop. Some FTEs were also cut, but it was like a 4-1 margin of contractors to FTEs, maybe more.

This is probably an unpopular opinion but as a contractor, I’m not expecting to be fully integrated into a company, nor lauded for my efforts. As a contractor, I understand that I am plugging a gap at short notice, on a temporary basis. I anticipate coming in, being useful and getting paid well to do so. I then expect to leave and find something else. The flexibility, autonomy and well-remunerated nature of contracting is what appeals to me - integrating with co-workers and compliments on my work are a distant second.

As an aside, if you are being compensated less than permanent employees as a contractor, then your rate is not high enough. The ‘fully loaded’ cost of a permanent employee is higher than their stated salary, due to tax, insurance, pension contributions etc - all of these need to be deducted from the contractor’s billable rate to provide an accurate comparison between the two.

It was the same in the last two (American) companies I was working for. In both companies, my team and I have done some majestic work. Still, at the end when C-level people and managers were giving aknowledgements and thanks, my team was either not mentioned at all, or we've received some vague aknowledgements for our work...

We still got paid handsomely, but It sucks to be left out from the end credits.

That's awful.

I was a contractor myself, and I still work with contractors every day. I wasn't treated as badly as that, but I was not too happy with how I was treated either. I and my team lead try to go out of our ways to acknowledge and include all workers, without regard to their actual employers, in all the team's meetings and interactions, and acknowledging their contributions.

It's still not enough. Just last week, I found out that a team member is now considering to leave, and one of their reasons is being treated as "less worthy" by the higher-ups in my company. There was some internal confusion where they forgot to assign them an office, and since they're a contractor, HR ended up putting them in a somewhat remote office, away from the team, completely ignoring our protests.

The thing is, we (my team lead and I) don't know what to tell them, how can we convince them to stay after this. We're at a loss.

Tell them to leave and be happy for them. You cannot fix a broken organization.

I was a contractor in corporate America for a while and experienced the same thing. The way it was explained to me was that you cannot give contractors the same "benefits" is a regular employee. If you do, then you have to treat them as employees, which means you have to offer the same healthcare, PTO structure, etc.

I don't think the rules around the "benefits" were especially clear from a legal standpoint. Therefor the company would always err on the side of caution. If some auditor somewhere could perceive an action or event as employee specific and a contractor took part then the company could be penalized for it. In my case, it was pretty standard things like in-office birthday parties and monthly staff meetings.

It's not right, but I can understand why it happens. The legal team in a big corporation is extremely risk averse.

This seems inconsistent with what little I know of employment law, or at least the spirit of the law. The difference between an employee and a contractor is mostly about the degree of control the employer exerts. Employees are more heavily controlled and therefore get more protections and benefits.

In a sane world, common practices like forbidding a "contractor" from working with any other company would be more legally risky than letting a contractor participate in an in-office party.

I was a long term, full time contractor from about 2015 until 2019. It worked out better for me since I was working as a nomad abroad. Around 2019, my client wanted me on as an employee. I never found out the precise motivations, but I suspect it had to do with the contractor laws getting tightened down for rideshare drivers. I suspect that I could have remained a contractor by the letter of the law, but that still might have skirted into territory the legal team was not comfortable with. This seems like the most reasonable read of the situation to me, but it’s still only my speculation.

For all we know, some attorney general was ginning up to collectively punish businesses that use contractors because recent press had made such businesses politically attractive targets. And your client was just trying to stay out of the crosshairs.

You can be compliant with the spirit of the law and still be targeted by some ideologue using the law as a cudgel.

Yes that’s exactly the way I’d characterize the public sentiment towards “businesses with many contractors” at that time.

To be honest I don’t think it is the cost of benefits but the ability to fire people quickly without having to find other work that is appealing to companies. If some big grand idea flops and it’s 200 contractors, just don’t renew the contract. If it’s a lot of employees you have to move them around or something. Also, often contractor money is a different pile of money than regular hires/payroll. So people looking to empire build can do it more easily with contractors. Companies looking for lower costs will hire lower on the skill ladder or choose different cheaper locales, or drive off with more experience and higher salaries.

The argument is that it's a legal risk. Look up the Microsoft co-employment lawsuit for the kinds of things they're scared of. As parent accurately describes, the contractors are doing the same kinds of work as full time folks... So to avoid the appearance of them being the same (and possibly suing for benefits), basically they get treated as second class citizens.

I know of companies where referring to vendors by name is frowned upon.

That’s dumb. I work with contractors who I consider not only my team mates (we work on the same shit) but also my friends. We play games together after work sometimes and chat once in a while on zoom.

They give demos, leadership gives them kudos, and they feel part of the team.

Contractors are team mates with a different employment structure but if we’re in the trenches together that distinction gets thrown out.

This happens at my BigCo job too. We literally are not allowed to give any official recognition of the incredibly hard work and immense talent of our contractors. "Contractors" - the human beings we work with day in and out, that build amazing products, that we joke with, share holiday photos with, wish well when they're sick, urge to take a break every once in a while, who seem to work well into what should be their kids' dinner time or bedtime. But because they get paid differently, they're treated like surfs. They always are forgotten in company e-mails, they always have a harder time accessing services, since they don't get a company laptop they're left to go through some RDP interface to use a machine on our network, they don't get the same vacation days we do. I really hate how they're treated.

And let me guess, when it comes to the types of work assigned to them they are not treated like the types of completely fungible hourly workers that you would expect from the type of treatment you describe?

MBA way of doing business.

On a sidr note: at least they were paid for overtime.

As an hourly employee they legally have to be. If the company doesn't, they're in for a world of hurt if the employee decides to contact a lawyer. That assumes a level of privilege (knowing your rights, having enough money to pay for a lawyer's initial time, etc), but that level of privilege is common in software, so much so that no company with a legal department is going to let it fly to try and treat an hourly employee like a salaried one; there's just too much risk.

Why do companies choose contractors over FTE? Sometimes it’s just because it’s temporarily addition to the work force. If they are vetted and trained like FTE, great. Sometimes the difference is just how you get paid and it doesn’t matter

Sometimes though companies can’t hire FTE so they bring in a of contractors (or outsource), vet and manage them poorly, or give them controversial projects and then they have to lean on the FTE. Also they are often not on call.

Why is a contractor asking for more hours an example of them being taken advantage of?

Some people can make it work, but imo it's an orange flag for a path to burn-out, especially if it's an excessive number of hours and not a standard 9-5 (with all the rest of their clients put together). A lot of times contractors work for multiple clients at one time, so it's easy to forget "your hours" are not their only ones.

But it was not the company asking for more hours from the contractor, but the other way round. If they need to work more because they need the money, maybe it would be better to let them?

From the text I would assume Pete was working full time for this company. This is also not unusual for my company.

In Germany there are laws against this type of 'contracting' as you seem/are fully depending on one client.

This German law sucks, Germany simply doesn't like independent people. It is also not "contracting", but contracting.

Ultimately, once again, the government is telling me how I have to work or run my business. I didn't ask them to do that, and I don't want them to do that.

In some time the future generations will come to consider this contractor/employee dichotomy with the same disgust we have for child labor. Same with surrogacy and many other things.

Funny you say that, the entire reason I even opened my mouth was because I used to be on those contractor teams early in my career. Experienced it first hand. It sucked. I knew how much it sucked. I promised to be a better leader than the ones I had and saw.

It's a glaringly obvious caste system. I hardly see the difference between being punished for praising a contractor and being shunned for associating with an "untouchable".