Re:Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
by garply on Sunday June 07, 2009 @01:18PM
(#646080)
That consulting is pro-cyclical surprises me - I always figured that large corporations had some people who weren't terribly efficient and that in a downturn they would be cut and their workloads would be outsourced to a 3rd party, whom the employer wouldn't need to offer perks and raises and who would have to pay full FICA him/herself.
Re:Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
by nostrademons on Sunday June 07, 2009 @01:26PM
(#646090)
It's a huge pain to fire an employee - there're dozens of potential "wrongful termination" lawsuit hitches, and if you run into any of them, you've just cost the company more in legal bills than you'll ever save in that employee's salary. For that reason, companies usually will keep full-timers even if they aren't quite as efficient as consultants or new hires, because the costs of getting it wrong and inviting a lawsuit don't outweigh the marginal benefits. Unless the employee is grossly incompetent, in which case you both save more in lost productivity, and there's a lower chance of a successful lawsuit...
Playing devil's advocate here (your suggestion is exactly what I'd do, and it's worked fairly well for me), but...
One reason they don't may be that it's almost never rational to start a new project over sending out a resume. The resume offers the possibility of immediate monetary payoff for relatively little work, and while the chances are low (particularly in this economy), they're certainly higher than the chances that your new project will succeed. The latter has no immediate monetary payoff, requires lots of work, and has risks that are so varied that you don't even have a framework for evaluating them.
It's only when you put a lot of these risks together in sort of a "career portfolio" that it makes sense to take them. Any individual project will probably fail, but together they give you the skills and experience that will a.) get you hired and b.) let you succeed more often with these independent projects.
Alas, in my experience most people don't take such a long-term view of their careers...