I guess it would depend quite heavily on location - particularly re. tax and employment regulation. For example, in London, a lot of the good people historically went the contracting route due to much higher rates and lower taxes. Big banks were (and are) staffed with a lot of contractors who were very happy not to be on payroll.
I was working as an intern in a team developing a tool for the traders, there was two FTE, the boss and one senior dev; the rest (5 devs) were all consultants, all independents
Depends on project work vs. ops. Big institutions will hire an army of contractors to complete the task.
In one case I was in, the project had about 350 people, probably 75% contractor. At the midpoint of the project (year 2/5) they started attrition of contractors, and landed at around 100 people (10-15% contractor) at the end.
Why? It’s hard to hire at the levels you need and then get rid of them in a big company.
It may vary by team, but I've never seen a contracted out SWE, SRE, or any other highly technical position -- unless you want to count the web developer employees of design agencies who are contracted to make one-off marketing websites (i.e. not core products), but their jobs seem pretty cushy. They don't even come onsite anyway.
Interns usually work for small periods of time between school cycles. They get interesting projects, because internships are effectively a recruiting tool for new grads.
With the amount of prep work and oversight/mentorship that goes into an internship, it's not obvious that they benefit the company outside of recruiting.
If the argument is "TVCs tolerate more because they fear retribution/loss of access to a full-time role," that might happen for interns too. (I haven't studied either group, so I'm not qualified to say.) If the argument is that "TVCs are being exploited to minimize the number of full-time roles," that definitely doesn't apply to interns.
Is it possible for a temporary employee to be promoted to full time status, or is that impossible? What is the average length of employment for a temporary employee vs that of a full timer? Just asking.
Sure, why wouldn't it be? Part time is not a status, it's just a different contract.
Maybe you're confusing temps with employees though; in that case, it is possible but the temp agency will demand a fee. It works the same with consultants, for who the fee will be much higher (think 2-3x their annual wage).
I was a contract worker for a similar scale web company and I was offered a full time role after 12 months of working there. I declined it because the day rate that I was on was more than the full time salary. The perks (stock, parental leave and other benefits) were significant but I didn't want them as they didn't apply to me. I preferred to keep my own autonomy and didn't think the future was going to work out well for the team I was in. The team had constant squabbles and moral was low. If you're willing to accept risk like that you can make good money as a senior contracting engineer. Full timers heads exploded when I declined the offer but I hated the self created heirarchy that the contractor/FTE relationship posed. It seemed like there were two set of rules, one for ftes and one for contractors. I think it's a really toxic way to run your company.
From what I've been told, you cannot treat contractors/temps the same way that you treat your employees, otherwise they can claim that they were in fact employees the whole time (which usually comes with an expensive lawsuit and a visit from the IRS). In order to ensure that contractors/temps can't claim to be employees, it's not enough to not offer benefits. You have to effectively create a two tier system with FTEs at the top and contractors/temps at the bottom.
Not arguing whether it's good/bad, but it comes with the territory in the current landscape. You gain in flexibility/autonomy but loose in benefits/treatment.
I’ve definitely seen the tiered system you’re describing. For example, contractors aren’t given the same training or professional development opportunities as FTEs. But do you know if there are actually legal reasons for this, or is it just pragmatic to give fewer opportunities or privileges to employees you know won’t be around long?
Interesting, thanks for the reference. In the Microsoft case it looks like the decision hinged on the definition of a common law employee. Wikipedia notes that benefits eligibility can be formally defined. Employers don’t have to treat their contractors badly just to imply a tiered system, in other words, as the parent comment suggests.
That nuance is too often lost in the temp/vendor/contractor (TVC) conversation.
There are a whole lot of different situations that get swept under the TVC umbrella:
- Qualified to work at a firm in their core competency, but bureaucracy makes hiring you hard (e.g. hiring freezes, long interview periods, etc.) You can often make more than an FTE in this position.
- Trying to get your foot-in-the-door and taking any job you can get, regardless of pay. This is the situation you hear about in articles like this one. The pay's probably not great, and you spend all your time working harder than anyone else there to become a "real boy" (FTE).
- Jobs that the company won't admit are valuable, but needs anyway (like testers). You get yo-yoed (in for 2 years; out for 6 months) because the company won't offer these roles to full-time employees, and doesn't want you retroactively deemed one.
- Food/security/massage staff - people who work on-site, but not in a core competency. These jobs are often blue-collar in the outside world, so access to perks like free food and regular clientele who you can form personal relationships with (e.g. other staff) might make these jobs nicer than alternatives serving the public. At the same time, many of these jobs used to be full-time. Moving non-sales, non-product jobs to vendors feels like a regression in treating people like humans, and a thinly-veiled exploitation of a loophole in employment policy.
- Totally external vendors - people like financial auditing, network operations, etc. They have access to internal systems, but operate in clearly defined roles-of-responsibility offsite. I presume the granularity for these roles is whole agencies, rather than individual workers. They fall under the TVC umbrella, but workers have a more clear working relationship with the agency than the other scenarios.
Yes it's possible and a lot of teams try to convert their temps into full-time employees.
A conversion requires interviews (2-3). Candidates usually get statements of support from their team colleagues, which has quite an impact during the hiring committee discussion.
E.g. I'd reckon it's easier passing via the tvc->fte route.
I'm not in the US, but working for an American company, I started as a contractor from a big firm 2 years ago, I'm starting next week as a FTE (with a 20% salary increase). During that time, two other contractors were hired and the rest (a dozen out of the 60 people in our office) had their contract not renewed as some project were moved to other offices/finished.
Here, there was no difference on how FTEs and contractors were treated (including company outings, which was very nice) with team composed of both FTEs and contractors. This situation is close to illegal here (I think) as contractor are supposed to be brought only for a specific job that can't be done by a FTE; but since it worked for everyone, no-one is complaining.
I have known plenty of white collar contractors be converted to full-time. Note that this isn't a promotion technically, but rather, a change of employer. They're going from being employed by a staffing firm to being employed directly by Google. Also note that a lot of the white collar contractors are only 'temporary' at Google itself; they are full-time employees of their staffing firm, and if their gig is up at Google then they'll go on to the next client. They do tend to get benefits like health insurance and retirement accounts, albeit not as good as the ones offered directly by Google.
Also note that this path is only available for white collar workers. There aren't any full-time positions available for janitors, cafe workers, security guards, etc., as big companies tend not to employ those positions directly as it's outside their wheelhouse.
Another anecdote: Local friend works for Google in Asia. She is basically forced to relocate to SF for 1-3 years and work at a rather low salary (for SF standards) there on something unrelated to her current job.
I would suspect that part of the reason for such a "program" is to save on wages, which would be much higher for locally-hired staff. Her field is admin/marketing. Should be easy enough to find local talent for that. At a higher price.
I'm sure there are upsides to this exchange program, but having no real choice (except quitting) and working at a lower salary don't leave the best impression.
As the OP wrote, this is only for 1-3 years, not a job offer.
What usually happens in such big companies is that you might have to work in another country for the same company of a couple of years. Big but is that you go there as an employee of the source country taking with you the respective salary and not that of the destination country. They usually pay for the fixed expenses, eg. accommodation and even might have an allowance for the daily expenses but depends on the company and still it might not be enough to make it with your salary.
Also you don't really have an option to decline, you are up next then for dismiss and in many countries it is not that easy to find a similar job etc. etc.
This is not how it works at any of the majors. Your salary is indexed to the local cost of living, not your country of origin, otherwise nobody from (say) India would ever be able to move and neither would they qualify for US work visas.
I work for a multinational company of 400k+ employees. For the "normal" people this is how it works, for upper management of course it is different.
Also from friends working for other such companies I have the same input.
Please note that here we are talking about temporary move (a few years) and then you have to go back to your originating country. Furthermore in order to compensate for the increased costs as I mentioned they usually pay some of the fixed costs like accommodation BUT your salary remains the same. Back in the old days (eg. 10-15years ago) they could even pay extra money on top of your salary.
Also keep in mind that the world is not just the US or India, there are many big companies outside of the US and one last point, this works very well the other ways around. People from a country with higher salary to go work for a few years on a country with lower salary so they make money + get extra promotion points for having worked outside of their main country
She was already there and changed to Google a few years ago. She has a boyfriend and apartment in this certain city. Now, if she wants to stay with Google, she needs to move to SF for 1-3 years and live in a shared apartment because the salary is so low. It's not ideal to say the least.
There's usually a fairly long list of things you can't legitimately ask an employee to do on pain of being fired. Like go on a date with you. Or move to another continent for a year or more.
Beyond the obvious question of whether a suitable position is open, consider that refusing a chance take an offer might lead to retribution rather than a favorable offer.
Greetings metallic shill. If you want to blend in, you should select a username that doesn't look like a randomly generated ID. Humans rarely come up with them and it's a dead giveaway.
Why is this newsworthy? Genuine question. The article (I did read it!) doesn't seem to articulate why exactly this is a problem.
I think (happy to be convinced otherwise) it is ok for a company to have more temps than employees or vice versa. What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?
There was a significant lawsuit in the 90s that Microsoft lost over hiring permatemps, temps who did the same work as employees, weren't really temporary, weren't going to be hired, and weren't receiving benefits like stock options or health insurance.
Lower paychecks (75-80% of hourly rate of full-time workers), little to no benefits (like healthcare coverage), harder to keep track of for taxation purposes, harder to object to inhumane conditions like exploitative working hours or sexual harassment (since you're seen as a "guest" instead of an employee, complaining to the HR will usually result in you simply being discarded and replaced by someone else who won't complain) etc.
Note: I wrote this as a general trend, which does not mean this applies to Google specifically.
When I was contracting, I was making significantly more than my usual salaried rate. Using contractors doesn’t mean you must be exploiting them somehow.
You have to remember that we’re a couple decades into reclassifying jobs with less negotiating power as contractors and healthcare costs growing astronomically (not unrelated). The people who are still doing traditional contracting - short-term experts, independent businesses which can negotiate – are going to have a very different experience than the people who were never respected.
Just because we're in a position to say no doesn't mean that we shouldn't feel compassion for the others that are not in an opportunity to do so. A tech office without a janitor will be dysfunctional, same as the one without a senior engineer. But unlike a senior engineering position, a janitor will not be a full-time position.
I'd personally even take it one step further: those who are payed the least need benefits the most. By relegating this work to temporary workers you're doing exactly the opposite: cutting away the privileges that the full-time employees have. Not to just one employee, but anyone who's ever going to fill out that position.
A trip to the doctor would not make a dent in a senior engineer's pocket (regardless of the insurance), but a janitor could not afford a trip to the doctor in the first place. This could work in a country with good social programs to fall back on, but it has catastrophic consequences in the US.
I agree in general terms, but the solution would be to pass stricter laws requiring more benefits to full-time workers. These contractors are full-time workers, they're just full-time workers of staffing firms that contract with Google and that themselves don't have benefits that are nearly as good. So either require them to offer better benefits, or preferably, decouple benefits from employment entirely. Everyone should get healthcare, retirement accounts, etc.; it shouldn't be tied to your employer.
It's unreasonable to expect one company to make big strides in this area when all it does it put them at a competitive disadvantage to their peers. Google is already mandating a $15/hour minimum wage on all contracted-out workers, plus some minimums for sick days, which is much better than most other companies (which tend not to have requirements on contracted out employees in their contracts with staffing firms at all).
Staffers have undeniably more leverage that contractors. So yes, on an 'all things equal' basis, this will come out oddly.
It's one thing to outsource security, another to outsource people who work as part of the organization: admins, executive assistants, developers, recruiters etc..
“If I went as a contactor in the UK id expect 2x to 3x when compared to a FTE at a similar grade.”
At least in the US that’s often not how it works. The agency takes a big cut and the contractor probably makes less than an FTE. In my company must contractors are super eager to go full time given the opportunity.
Contractors for large companies[1] in the US almost always goes through staffing firms - direct contracts with independent contractors are comparatively rare. And even when you do want to bring on an independent contractor, you usually still have to route them through some designated third party staffing firm so that the contractual relationship is IC <-> Staffing Firm <-> Client. This is all due to fact that there are huge liability[2] concerns related to classifying someone as an IC but treating them as an employee.
As such, there's almost always an intermediate taking a cut of the actual rate, even if you're a contractor to the staffing agency.
Then you've got agency relationships, like where I work at now. I'm a salaried, full time employee for the agency I work for and I make about the regional median for my role. But I'm contracted out to clients (including Google) and bill hourly. Depending on the client and the specific roles I'm billing as for a given project, an hour of my time gets billed out anywhere from 2x - 6x what my fully loaded hourly cost is to my employer (salary + benefits + payroll taxes). So the cost to the client is certainly in line with your expectations, but it doesn't come back to me.
[1] You don't see this as frequently at the SME end of the market for many reasons, not least of which is the deliberate inefficiency and increased costs of such a structure.
Perhaps, until a shooter shows up at the youtube office and starts firing and then kills herself in front of you. That did happen and can happen at any firm, tech or otherwise.
It depends. For some contractor jobs, they need high level engineers short term and don't want to deal with the normal Google hiring process, which is expensive, difficult, and time consuming for many current employees (most technical interviews at Google are carried out by a random assortment of other engineers). In those cases, they can and will often pay equal or higher salaries to the contractor.
In my case, the equivalent job at Google definitely carried more responsibilities, and they were paid more. However, I believe Google paid my consulting company more than the FTE salary for each of us, with my company taking their cut off the top (at least, that's what I heard).
It provides a specific example of the power imbalance between Googlers and non-Googlers. It provides some facts on how temps make less money, have different benefits and receive no paid vacation in the US. Probably far-fetched, but it may be hoping to convince some people to engage with their elected representatives on stricter laws for companies who employ a lot of contractors. Why is this not newsworthy?
Companies shouldn't be providing benefits anyway. It's a terrible model. Much better for the government to be providing healthcare for all than to have it unnecessarily tied up with employment. The United States is unusual in this regard because of a historical quirk of tax evasion.
It's been in the news so much that I think they assumed you would not that contractors don't get benefits, like health insurance. Lack of benefits are the reason they are contactors. Period.
Negative, the contractors being discussed in the linked article are actually full time employees of staffing firms. They aren't employed by Google, they're employed by the likes of Adecco. Their healthcare isn't as good as what Google itself offers, granted, but they do have some benefits.
There's an incredible amount of conflation here between individuals that are directly contracted to companies (what most of these comments seem to be talking about) and then what actually happens at large corporations (staffing firms that contract out their own employees).
The article brought up a few points that should encourage broader discussion, around the general idea that contractors don't have the same agency as FTEs, which in the case of Google, has reportedly led to:
- project leaders pressuring contractors to work longer hours than stated in their contracts without reporting overtime (on the vague possibility of a full-time role).
- the contractor recruiter who was sexually harassed by a FTE manager and may have been fired due to her rejection of him
The issue with that at the time was that Microsoft was using temps to avoid paying payroll taxes. Ironically the IRS wised up to this tactic because of just how good Microsoft was treating their temps, i.e. the same as regular employees.
Now the issue is a company is using temps to hold down the market rate for salary. Less about tax avoidance, and more about wage suppression. Of course it’s also a valid argument to say the Supreme Court decision at the time made it more likely for companies to choose this route.
Also true that the two-tier system existed in one of the big tech giants and with it many of the same symptoms. It is interesting to see it again with Google, although I wonder if Amazon/Netflix/Amazon have a similar situation.
Most large tech companies- think FB, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco are similar. Amazon surprisingly has a low ratio of contractors (they say under 10%)- probably because their fulltime benefits are so cheap it doesn't make a difference or maybe they don't count warehouse workers in that ratio.
The article itself acknowledges that the ratio of contractors to employees at Google isn't out of the ordinary for SV companies and my personal experience is that it isn't unusual for large companies outside of SV. Even in the unfortunate case sited in the article of the contract employee that was sexually harassed once a complaint was filed Google fired the FTE responsible for the harassment and negotiated a settlement with the contract employee.
So my question is why was the article written? If it were to highlight the use of contract employees vs FTEs, why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries? Why throw out the case of the harassed employee but leave the information that Google fired the harasser when a complaint was filed until much further in the article when many readers will have stopped reading? This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.
It started many years before Damore’s tantrum. I think it mostly goes back to the image Google enjoyed for years as this amazing place with crazy benefits, and then reality caught up that it’s a big company and will do things like most other big companies such as aggressively cost-optimizing its workforce or canceling beloved products (Reader was very popular with journalists).
Companies which never had that kind of image don’t get dispelling stories.
Yeesh, I know it's popular to dump on the fact that their recruiting process (perhaps unduly) is tilted towards CS grads, but this is the first time I've seen someone go full conspiracy theory and assume it's part of some nefarious tendency to treat employees poorly in general.
This is getting off-topic but it's basically two parts: the first being the he attended an optional “Diversity and Inclusion Summit” and had a strong emotional reaction, which he made an effort to circulate around the company for several months. It's loaded with emotional language (“an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed”) and claims of authoritarian oppression. That inflammatory rhetoric is what cost him his job because it clearly wasn't just a scientific discussion and left quite plausible grounds for anyone working with (or especially, had he been successful in making it into a leadership role, supervised by) to claim a hostile working environment — which is why he dropped the NLRB claim after it was looking like it'd be unfavorable[1]. Even if you think they're wrong, publicly putting your management in a position like that is unlikely to end favorably.
The second part is the painful irony of his positioning himself as a Man of Science Protecting The Enlightment Against Dogma!!! but what he wrote was a poorly-edited (and don't forget, what finally leaked was presumably better after the several rounds of editing prior to it being published) rehash of traditional reactionary arguments for biological determinism with only a few references to peer-reviewed literature, with little discussion or signs of familiarity with their fields, and instead relying mostly on links to broad Wikipedia pages and conservative blogs. Note how much work it was simply to summarize his claims clearly enough to evaluate them in https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... — that's the most point-by-point examination I've seen and it's considerably longer than the original.
On its own failing to perform at the level of a good student essay would be embarrassing but given the topic and how quick he was to cast this as political oppression while taking as little responsibility as possible for his own actions, I think it warrants the use of “tantrum”.
This may not be totally relevant but it's always bothered me that he lied about being a chess Fide Master (FM) and then doubled down on his lie in a reddit ama
I don't think this has anything to do with Damore. I think people are frustrated with the way technology has infiltrated their lives, and how they have no control over it. Many people want tighter regulation of the tech companies + the view of technology workers as the new yuppies makes tech an easy target.
It started when they stopped following "Don't Be Evil" motto. If they want to be evil, then people might portray them in negative ways. Usually based on their own behavior.
These contracted employees are working for other companies, not directly for Google. Their employer is Adecco or some other staffing firm (which I guess would vary by office).
It's very rare to see a large tech firm contract directly with an individual employee, and it would be incredibly rare to see it happen with a lower paid position. I've never seen it personally.
> If you're in HR at a bank on Wall Street, doing 'recruiting' - odds are you work for the company, not a contractor.
Quite a few of the people I've interacted with were contractors. You can sometimes tell from their email signature even if the email address is @bank.com.
It most definitely does include all blue collar jobs that are contracted out, including janitors, receptionists, cafe staff, security guards, movers, and more.
They aren't. The majority of TVCs at Google are call center workers, cafe staff, janitors, security guards, receptionists, etc. They work for companies like Adecco, Restaurant Associates, and various other staffing firms.
These articles always get it wrong by completely failing to distinguish who exactly the TVCs are. They'll interview a less common white collar contractor but then use numbers for total contractors. A decisive majority of the actual white collar workers are FTEs.
Heh. While I was at Google I was surprised to gradually realized how many the technical teams we worked with were actually non-employee contractor teams. It might vary by division.
The only contractors I work with, and not too closely at that, are the tier one support people for our product in the Philippines. And then there's some web developers, designers, and project managers who work for a web design firm, but their job seems pretty cushy so I wouldn't include them in this conversation.
> why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries?
There is already a general discussion around employees vs. contractors in the American economy. Showing a large, profitable technology company doing the same bolsters the case that this is a systemic problem.
Also, the article mentions that “high-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks.“
The vast majority of those contractors aren't independent contractors but rather employees of some other vendor. It seems odd to complain about contacting out some work to vendors.
This is old capitalist trick comrade: company hires other company, easy firings, fewer benefits, no danger of being accused of pretend-contracting like Uber.
Actually no, this changed as a result of a lawsuit at MicroSoft where contractors were hired directly as contractors with no firewall firm. They worked at MS for decades with zero benefits and then sued to get them.
This forced firms to then hire third party vendors who in turn 1099ed the "workers" to work at company X, including google.
I don't know why you're bringing up the Microsoft case. That was about independent contractors. The subjects of this article are mostly regular W-2 employees. They just happen to be employees of a different company.
Should we force every company to be vertically integrated and directly employ everyone who works at one of their facilities? It's just a ridiculous complaint.
I agree it would be silly to expect companies to do everything themselves, but the example was of contractors (recruiter in this case) doing similar work to and under the direction and control of a full-time employee, at the Google facility, for a long time (1 year). This is where labor laws come into play and why companies restrict temps from working long term. Just putting a contractor on a 3rd party's W2 doesn't mean you're free to do as you wish.
Now, if they took the entire recruiting work for that team and gave it to the outsourcing agency who did the job from their Florida office, it wouldn't be a problem. They could also do what Apple does and host all the contractors in a separate building with no contact with Apple employees https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/apple-bla... but the optics of that isn't great either.
Also, the article mentions that "high-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks."
By having large numbers of contractors, Google could have their egalitarian, idyllic workplace, but have a non-egalitarian 2 tier system, with distinctly 2nd class workers.
The reality is that people don't operate in a purely communal/egalitarian fashion. Nor are people purely hierarchical. There is always some degree of hierarchy, and some degree of communal existence. The larger the group, the more hierarchy is necessary. However, even in the sort of magical feeling hippie-dippy gathering of artists, there are still community leaders. There is still some kind of functioning hierarchy, or things just don't get done. (I have some personal experience in this area.)
I think the problems in such systems come about when people are in denial about their hierarchy, their meritocracy, and the consequences of not fitting in. If people have to pretend their hierarchy doesn't exist, and everything's just running on love and understanding, then people who violate the rules and norms still need to be punished. Often the hierarchy remains disguised by characterizing violators as fundamentally bad or selfish people. By abandoning consciousness of one's rules and hierarchy, one risks nonsensical, outsized, or downright unjust consequences being meted out by the group. Basically, it's a recipe for groupthink to take over and the abandonment of principles.
It’s because there are some employees in the company agitating about it. As other commenters have noted, articles about Google get a lot of play from the public. Disgruntled insiders seem to have a strong conduit to the media and this is the latest controversy de jour that these activists have groused about. The reporters happily lap it up, and another knock at Google makes it to the front page of this site.
You just described a systemic issue with SV companies replacing FTE with contractors, then ask why someone would write an article about that?
How many companies should the article have included to not be considered a "hit piece"? Or do you just consider any article about one company a "hit piece"?
Seriously. As an avid NYtimes loyalist, I'd prefer they exhaustively enumerate through EVERY company where contractors outnumber FTEs. And then I want an equal amount of coverage distributed over all companies.
The tech industry is wildly profitable, though, and Google the most profitable among the industry. I don't really think it's a hit piece to single out one of the most successful companies in the world and ask why they don't do more.
>If it were to highlight the use of contract employees vs FTEs, why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries?
Because this article is about Google. Why doesn't every book or article cover every subject, all the time?
Google is a major, global brand, widely-recognized as one of the "best places to work". Seems like a good focus of investigation to me.
>This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.
You can't talk about anything anymore without it being a "hit piece", or "fake news", or an "attack", or "astroturfing", or written by "paid shills". I guess people are more comfortable when they can simply dismiss any topic they disagree with.
Because almost any other entity could claim it's economic pressure and financial reality.
Google is sitting on Fort Knox, they're one of the most cash flush companies in thew world ... and they can't be bothered to actually hire people.
At the last G event, Sundar brought out this hyperbolic weeping montage about how their AI helps poor people in India 'read' the cooking directions on food labels, even when they are illiterate (i.e. AI text to voice).
It was gushy and pulled hard on heartstrings.
Well then why can't they just hire people and treat them as human equals?
It's beyond hypocritical.
With a little bit of cynicism, it's understandable from a business perspective - hey, it's money.
But what irks me is the elements of 'social justice' coming out of these entities while they're blind to the very social ills that they are driving.
People wonder why we have inequality, or 'housing affordability' etc. - well - this is it.
Folks in the Valley seems to be stoked to solve big problems and work on 'AI' - while kind of ignorant to the fact there are trailer parks all over the Valley. Which is mind blowing.
I mean, why should they? Clearly Google thinks how they do things is in the best interest of their shareholders. Maybe you could argue that contractors are detracting from shareholder value because their interests aren't aligned, but that's not the argument you're making.
What you're saying is, essentially, if a company is making a lot of money, then they should give that money to their employees. But the purpose of a company isn't to hire or pay people, it's to generate a return for your investors.
If you take a longer view, then here's how justice gets served and the welfare of more and more people is increased over all of history: Power gets dispersed. Wealth and power goes from elite nobles to the merchant class, then there arises a middle class.
The problems come about when the dispersal of wealth and power are faked. (No real power is dispersed.)
I suspect you should view Andrew Yang's interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. There is a job apocalypse coming and millions of people will be thrown out of work by tech firms relentless pursuit of machine learning and automation via robotics.
It's a big economic disadvantage. Your property depreciates rapidly. Meanwhile, you're still paying rent, and it's easier to get evicted.
What do you propose to replace them with?
How about communities of low cost housing, which allow for lower income people to build equity and which are somehow distinct enough to preclude co-option by well heeled tech employees? Maybe some kind of intentional community with such goals built into its charter?
I think you may be misunderstanding what a trailer park is in this context. Most homes in most trailer parks aren't RVs or anything; they're reasonably normal houses built in the most cost-effective way, which happens to be building them in a factory and then shipping them to the final location on a trailer.
This is a bit curious. The large number of contractors can be seen as the victims here. They don't have power or privilege as other employees and yet those who see nothing wrong with it are not arguing their point but claiming persecution and victimhood on Google's behalf.
Its troubling to see this immediate rush to claim persecution and victimhood by those who have power.
Presumably it's because some people aren't simple-minded enough that they need to desperately cram every possible statement about any topic into the same tired framework of victims and oppressors.
Try and imagine having the ability to be concerned with the plight of disposable labor in the modern economy and yet still (gasp) capable of noticing and commenting on other facets of the situation, like how the press chooses to frame their coverage: that's what's happening here.
> It's simple minded to think there are not victims and oppressors in the real world.
I'm sure it is. Good thing nobody here is claiming that (I'm certainly not).
My comment was about the fact that your upthread comment is a complaint about someone discussing any other facet of the issue than focusing on the power dynamic between the employer and the employed. Not everyone is afflicted with this obsession to the point that they're unable to see anything in the world but through this single lens.
> The article itself acknowledges that the ratio of contractors to employees at Google isn't out of the ordinary for SV companies and my personal experience is that it isn't unusual for large companies outside of SV.
I think its trying to point out that companies are increasingly relying on non-FTE positions. Why they are doing it is obviously about benefits. I don't work for Google but I do work for a massive international company and on my team there are three FTE positions and over twenty contractors. For daily work there is no difference. However as an FTE I get the usual benefits along with a pretty nice training budget for personal development, very generous PTO and extra time off. Most of the contractors will have their contracts renewed until they move on somewhere else or an FTE position opens and they get that. So essentially companies are using temp and contract resources to avoid the cost of having what they need as FTE positions.
The most interesting part of all of this, is that when SV companies soft-brag about their high average salaries, they leave out all the contractors contributing significant work.
But if you're relying on the name to lead potential employees to contract because it's contact with Google, then the pay scale is misleading. Contracting for Google is a lot like being a Serf for Techdom.
A total average compensation across all contractors and employees of $80k seems pretty far fetched. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split between contracts and temp workers, if the employee compensation average was $145,000 then contractors would have to make an average of $15,000 in order for the combined average to be $80,000.
What's the induction process like for a temp at Google? I'm curious as I've heard stories of temps becoming subject matter experts on teams and carrying projects across the line. If said individuals couldn't get into Google as a full-time employee what would that then say about the way Google interviews?
They interview the temps the same way they interview a FTE but if the project has no open req they pay a temp agency to actually employ the person.
Temps are technically not permitted to supervise actual FTEs but in practice some do so.
Temps don’t make as much as FTEs. So there’s an incentive to do this and also to terminate the contract (legal reasons) rather than hire them, which means the institutional knowledge goes elsewhere.
I worked as a contractor on a Google backed company on the Google campus. My interview consisted of a short meeting at the gentleman who ran the agency's house. I found the opportunity through an online consulting marketplace. I then and showed up to the Google site the next week and began working. I also applied directly, but have never heard back from them. My most striking memory was the complete lack of connection to the outdoors. Every single window and skylight was covered with light blocking coverings, you never knew if it was night, day, sunny or stormy outside. Other than that it was fascinating work with great people.
What does Google-backed company mean? Is that a bet (under Alphabet)? Something outside that even?
Did you contract directly with the company or were you working for the agency, who contracted you out?
I was a contractor for four years as my first job and I was a full-time employee of that contracting firm for the entire time. They paid a decent salary, gave me healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, etc. It was actually my best offer compared to some other SWE positions. Some company like Google could have been one of my clients at some point (and indeed was at my next job), but instead it was mostly banks and insurance companies.
To be fair to Google every company in every industry is doing this more and more. It's one of the first things that happens when a merger or private equity takeover happens- aggressively purge full time and move to temp workers for all non-core services to save some money.
Of course the companies that pay more attention to data do this more extensively and aggressively, why wouldn't they?
The army of temp workers/janitors/contractors/uber drivers convene and sleep in the same parking lots at night. It's a whole community of a semi-permanent underclass drifting around, saving the spreadsheets a few points here and there.
In related news, I'm not sure I want to be an American anymore. This is not the country I grew up in.
The big company I work for isn't doing what you said. They acquired a big company last year. They also have multiple business units which are being merged. Still not aggressively changing full time employees, nor changing roles into temp ones. They have recently starting to insource some of the IT again (less IBM).
Google doesn't do this either. As discussed elsewhere in the thread, most of the vendors at Google are in nontech roles like food service, security, and maintenance/facilities.
Given the whole problem with platform economies (e.g. Uber drivers), perhaps it's better if the distinction between contractor and employee becomes smaller. E.g. healthcare benefits, separate them from the employer and make them the same for everybody.
I was a contractor at Google and I thought they treated me VERY well, with most of the perks that come with the office (food, activities, music room, gym, etc). They even let me work on a 20% project during office hours.
Then I got a new manager, new policies were enacted, they canned my project, and they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.
Anyway, Google had good reason to use contractors. Their hiring standards and policies makes it extremely difficult and costly to hire people, and many jobs there typically only have a retention rate of about 9-12 months, or just isn't "involved" enough to demand a FTE position, or needs to be scaled up more quickly than they can hire for. It just isn't worth it to go through the full Google process for jobs like that.
I worked as developer support for Google cloud (for Platinum/gold customers). I worked alongside their FTE support staff (called TSEs) and the SWEs and SREs on many GCP projects like App Engine and Spanner. I loved it, learned a lot, met a lot of great people, etc. But customer support burns you out after a while, and I figured I learned enough for a proper engineering job elsewhere, so that's what I did.
What they don't tell you is that it's basically the nerve center of Google's internal culture. If you ever want to find out what the latest news is, get a pulse on the current mood of googlers, or even to see if there's an outage somewhere, the quickest way was to check Memegen.
1. I didn't arrange it, it basically landed in my lap. I was near homeless, and I was lucky that my firm found me on some job board. I think the main qualifier they wanted was somebody knew some amount of Linux and programming, who could learn anything quickly, and didn't come with too much baggage/experience of how "things should be". If you want to apply, look up (edit).
EDIT: I'm probably forfeiting my referral bonuses by handing out that information. Better to contact me: g@yabasic.net
2. I worked almost 2 years at Google, you're damn right I do. I still work for (edit) at a different assignment to pump up my SRE experience though, so I don't know what the effect will be on future prospects. I imagine having Google, even as a contractor, looks good on a resume. In either case, the experience was invaluable.
3. This gig MADE my career. Again, I was homeless, jobless, no real experience of any worth, and now I'm making 6 figures in San Francisco with extensive knowledge of cloud computing, application design and architecture, SRE principles, etc. We'll see where it goes from here, but honestly I prefer the coding side of things, so I'll have to put in more work to learn to pass coding interviews if I want to get away from SRE/Ops work. That's something you can't learn on the job, which is really the only way I tend to learn things.
Tell me about it. I can see now the rest of my career is going to be "how, in any way, can I make this place just one tiny step closer to what I experienced at Google?"
I can trace a lot of the mistakes I've made (and continue to make) in my career to the fact that I started at Google, setting my baseline assumption of organizational competence and personal intelligence way, way, way too high.
"(Insert any big corporation here)'s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees"
With few exceptions, you'll do the same job as a FTE but for 40% to 60% less salary, garbage benefits and zero job security. Most "staffing" companies are little more than parasites.
This is a natural and expected consequence of tax law - specifically provisions in ERISA, which sets out the rules for 401(k) plans.
Google wants their 401(k) to be as efficient and useful as possible for their employees, which tend toward being highly-paid engineers and other professionals. ERISA has some fairness provisions, which means that all employees must be subject to the same plan rules, and the plan must pass certain tests of "highly-compensated" employee participation limits compared to non-highly-compensated ones.
So if you have a bunch of engineers and some janitors, and you offer a large 401(k) match that engineers use and value and janitors don't, you wind up having to unwind some of the engineer contribution and matching in order to keep things "fair".
But, crucially, ERISA doesn't have say anything about who has to be an "employee" versus hired on as a contractor. So all the janitors and cafeteria workers become contractors, and now your 401(k) plan counts junior developers as the "non highly-compensated" comparison class, and your 401(k) plan passes muster again.
This affects Google a lot because their retirement plan is highly optimized for allowing highly-paid employees to save a ton of money in a tax efficient manner. It'd be difficult to craft a better plan, and from what I've heard they've even automated using a niche tax loophole as well ("mega-backdoor Roth" - after-tax 401(k) contribution followed by immediate Roth conversion, basically allows an extra $20k/yr or so in Roth contribution room).
I'm going through this process right now, I have a contract for a SWE role at Google through a contracting company. Interestingly enough I was offered no benefits.
175 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadIn one case I was in, the project had about 350 people, probably 75% contractor. At the midpoint of the project (year 2/5) they started attrition of contractors, and landed at around 100 people (10-15% contractor) at the end.
Why? It’s hard to hire at the levels you need and then get rid of them in a big company.
Interns usually work for small periods of time between school cycles. They get interesting projects, because internships are effectively a recruiting tool for new grads.
With the amount of prep work and oversight/mentorship that goes into an internship, it's not obvious that they benefit the company outside of recruiting.
If the argument is "TVCs tolerate more because they fear retribution/loss of access to a full-time role," that might happen for interns too. (I haven't studied either group, so I'm not qualified to say.) If the argument is that "TVCs are being exploited to minimize the number of full-time roles," that definitely doesn't apply to interns.
Maybe you're confusing temps with employees though; in that case, it is possible but the temp agency will demand a fee. It works the same with consultants, for who the fee will be much higher (think 2-3x their annual wage).
Not arguing whether it's good/bad, but it comes with the territory in the current landscape. You gain in flexibility/autonomy but loose in benefits/treatment.
That set the framework for all contracting that has followed since.
There are a whole lot of different situations that get swept under the TVC umbrella:
- Qualified to work at a firm in their core competency, but bureaucracy makes hiring you hard (e.g. hiring freezes, long interview periods, etc.) You can often make more than an FTE in this position.
- Trying to get your foot-in-the-door and taking any job you can get, regardless of pay. This is the situation you hear about in articles like this one. The pay's probably not great, and you spend all your time working harder than anyone else there to become a "real boy" (FTE).
- Jobs that the company won't admit are valuable, but needs anyway (like testers). You get yo-yoed (in for 2 years; out for 6 months) because the company won't offer these roles to full-time employees, and doesn't want you retroactively deemed one.
- Food/security/massage staff - people who work on-site, but not in a core competency. These jobs are often blue-collar in the outside world, so access to perks like free food and regular clientele who you can form personal relationships with (e.g. other staff) might make these jobs nicer than alternatives serving the public. At the same time, many of these jobs used to be full-time. Moving non-sales, non-product jobs to vendors feels like a regression in treating people like humans, and a thinly-veiled exploitation of a loophole in employment policy.
- Totally external vendors - people like financial auditing, network operations, etc. They have access to internal systems, but operate in clearly defined roles-of-responsibility offsite. I presume the granularity for these roles is whole agencies, rather than individual workers. They fall under the TVC umbrella, but workers have a more clear working relationship with the agency than the other scenarios.
A conversion requires interviews (2-3). Candidates usually get statements of support from their team colleagues, which has quite an impact during the hiring committee discussion.
E.g. I'd reckon it's easier passing via the tvc->fte route.
Here, there was no difference on how FTEs and contractors were treated (including company outings, which was very nice) with team composed of both FTEs and contractors. This situation is close to illegal here (I think) as contractor are supposed to be brought only for a specific job that can't be done by a FTE; but since it worked for everyone, no-one is complaining.
Also note that this path is only available for white collar workers. There aren't any full-time positions available for janitors, cafe workers, security guards, etc., as big companies tend not to employ those positions directly as it's outside their wheelhouse.
Sure it happens, but it's mostly to string along suckers.
I would suspect that part of the reason for such a "program" is to save on wages, which would be much higher for locally-hired staff. Her field is admin/marketing. Should be easy enough to find local talent for that. At a higher price.
I'm sure there are upsides to this exchange program, but having no real choice (except quitting) and working at a lower salary don't leave the best impression.
What usually happens in such big companies is that you might have to work in another country for the same company of a couple of years. Big but is that you go there as an employee of the source country taking with you the respective salary and not that of the destination country. They usually pay for the fixed expenses, eg. accommodation and even might have an allowance for the daily expenses but depends on the company and still it might not be enough to make it with your salary.
Also you don't really have an option to decline, you are up next then for dismiss and in many countries it is not that easy to find a similar job etc. etc.
Also from friends working for other such companies I have the same input.
Please note that here we are talking about temporary move (a few years) and then you have to go back to your originating country. Furthermore in order to compensate for the increased costs as I mentioned they usually pay some of the fixed costs like accommodation BUT your salary remains the same. Back in the old days (eg. 10-15years ago) they could even pay extra money on top of your salary.
Also keep in mind that the world is not just the US or India, there are many big companies outside of the US and one last point, this works very well the other ways around. People from a country with higher salary to go work for a few years on a country with lower salary so they make money + get extra promotion points for having worked outside of their main country
The key point here is it being her choice to stay. The reason a company can "get away" with doing this is that people are willing to do it.
I think (happy to be convinced otherwise) it is ok for a company to have more temps than employees or vice versa. What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1297250.html
Note: I wrote this as a general trend, which does not mean this applies to Google specifically.
If I went as a contactor in the UK id expect 2x to 3x when compared to a FTE at a similar grade.
I'd personally even take it one step further: those who are payed the least need benefits the most. By relegating this work to temporary workers you're doing exactly the opposite: cutting away the privileges that the full-time employees have. Not to just one employee, but anyone who's ever going to fill out that position.
A trip to the doctor would not make a dent in a senior engineer's pocket (regardless of the insurance), but a janitor could not afford a trip to the doctor in the first place. This could work in a country with good social programs to fall back on, but it has catastrophic consequences in the US.
It's unreasonable to expect one company to make big strides in this area when all it does it put them at a competitive disadvantage to their peers. Google is already mandating a $15/hour minimum wage on all contracted-out workers, plus some minimums for sick days, which is much better than most other companies (which tend not to have requirements on contracted out employees in their contracts with staffing firms at all).
> What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?
I'm not familiar enough with Google's specific practices to reach a conclusion about that.
It's one thing to outsource security, another to outsource people who work as part of the organization: admins, executive assistants, developers, recruiters etc..
At least in the US that’s often not how it works. The agency takes a big cut and the contractor probably makes less than an FTE. In my company must contractors are super eager to go full time given the opportunity.
As such, there's almost always an intermediate taking a cut of the actual rate, even if you're a contractor to the staffing agency.
Then you've got agency relationships, like where I work at now. I'm a salaried, full time employee for the agency I work for and I make about the regional median for my role. But I'm contracted out to clients (including Google) and bill hourly. Depending on the client and the specific roles I'm billing as for a given project, an hour of my time gets billed out anywhere from 2x - 6x what my fully loaded hourly cost is to my employer (salary + benefits + payroll taxes). So the cost to the client is certainly in line with your expectations, but it doesn't come back to me.
[1] You don't see this as frequently at the SME end of the market for many reasons, not least of which is the deliberate inefficiency and increased costs of such a structure.
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Though that link is just showing how incompetent MS Hr was - when it happened I recall having a good laugh with some Colleagues who work in HR/IR
In my case, the equivalent job at Google definitely carried more responsibilities, and they were paid more. However, I believe Google paid my consulting company more than the FTE salary for each of us, with my company taking their cut off the top (at least, that's what I heard).
In short, it's complicated
There's an incredible amount of conflation here between individuals that are directly contracted to companies (what most of these comments seem to be talking about) and then what actually happens at large corporations (staffing firms that contract out their own employees).
- project leaders pressuring contractors to work longer hours than stated in their contracts without reporting overtime (on the vague possibility of a full-time role).
- the contractor recruiter who was sexually harassed by a FTE manager and may have been fired due to her rejection of him
Now the issue is a company is using temps to hold down the market rate for salary. Less about tax avoidance, and more about wage suppression. Of course it’s also a valid argument to say the Supreme Court decision at the time made it more likely for companies to choose this route.
Also true that the two-tier system existed in one of the big tech giants and with it many of the same symptoms. It is interesting to see it again with Google, although I wonder if Amazon/Netflix/Amazon have a similar situation.
So my question is why was the article written? If it were to highlight the use of contract employees vs FTEs, why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries? Why throw out the case of the harassed employee but leave the information that Google fired the harasser when a complaint was filed until much further in the article when many readers will have stopped reading? This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.
Companies which never had that kind of image don’t get dispelling stories.
The second part is the painful irony of his positioning himself as a Man of Science Protecting The Enlightment Against Dogma!!! but what he wrote was a poorly-edited (and don't forget, what finally leaked was presumably better after the several rounds of editing prior to it being published) rehash of traditional reactionary arguments for biological determinism with only a few references to peer-reviewed literature, with little discussion or signs of familiarity with their fields, and instead relying mostly on links to broad Wikipedia pages and conservative blogs. Note how much work it was simply to summarize his claims clearly enough to evaluate them in https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... — that's the most point-by-point examination I've seen and it's considerably longer than the original.
On its own failing to perform at the level of a good student essay would be embarrassing but given the topic and how quick he was to cast this as political oppression while taking as little responsibility as possible for his own actions, I think it warrants the use of “tantrum”.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/federal-labor-bo...
Every company uses agencies for all sorts of things: recruiting, marketing etc..
But when you bring people in house, if they're working 'in' your company ... then almost universally they are 'employees'.
These are not 'security guards' or 'cleaners' who exist almost outside the scope of the work, they're very much within it.
If you're in HR at a bank on Wall Street, doing 'recruiting' - odds are you work for the company, not a contractor.
It's very rare to see a large tech firm contract directly with an individual employee, and it would be incredibly rare to see it happen with a lower paid position. I've never seen it personally.
Quite a few of the people I've interacted with were contractors. You can sometimes tell from their email signature even if the email address is @bank.com.
The NYT article is talking about 121000 contractors.
Either Google has 121000 white-collar contractors, or the article also talks about blue-collar jobs.
These articles always get it wrong by completely failing to distinguish who exactly the TVCs are. They'll interview a less common white collar contractor but then use numbers for total contractors. A decisive majority of the actual white collar workers are FTEs.
The only contractors I work with, and not too closely at that, are the tier one support people for our product in the Philippines. And then there's some web developers, designers, and project managers who work for a web design firm, but their job seems pretty cushy so I wouldn't include them in this conversation.
There is already a general discussion around employees vs. contractors in the American economy. Showing a large, profitable technology company doing the same bolsters the case that this is a systemic problem.
Also, the article mentions that “high-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks.“
This forced firms to then hire third party vendors who in turn 1099ed the "workers" to work at company X, including google.
Should we force every company to be vertically integrated and directly employ everyone who works at one of their facilities? It's just a ridiculous complaint.
Now, if they took the entire recruiting work for that team and gave it to the outsourcing agency who did the job from their Florida office, it wouldn't be a problem. They could also do what Apple does and host all the contractors in a separate building with no contact with Apple employees https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/apple-bla... but the optics of that isn't great either.
By having large numbers of contractors, Google could have their egalitarian, idyllic workplace, but have a non-egalitarian 2 tier system, with distinctly 2nd class workers.
The reality is that people don't operate in a purely communal/egalitarian fashion. Nor are people purely hierarchical. There is always some degree of hierarchy, and some degree of communal existence. The larger the group, the more hierarchy is necessary. However, even in the sort of magical feeling hippie-dippy gathering of artists, there are still community leaders. There is still some kind of functioning hierarchy, or things just don't get done. (I have some personal experience in this area.)
I think the problems in such systems come about when people are in denial about their hierarchy, their meritocracy, and the consequences of not fitting in. If people have to pretend their hierarchy doesn't exist, and everything's just running on love and understanding, then people who violate the rules and norms still need to be punished. Often the hierarchy remains disguised by characterizing violators as fundamentally bad or selfish people. By abandoning consciousness of one's rules and hierarchy, one risks nonsensical, outsized, or downright unjust consequences being meted out by the group. Basically, it's a recipe for groupthink to take over and the abandonment of principles.
You just described a systemic issue with SV companies replacing FTE with contractors, then ask why someone would write an article about that?
How many companies should the article have included to not be considered a "hit piece"? Or do you just consider any article about one company a "hit piece"?
Because this article is about Google. Why doesn't every book or article cover every subject, all the time?
Google is a major, global brand, widely-recognized as one of the "best places to work". Seems like a good focus of investigation to me.
>This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.
You can't talk about anything anymore without it being a "hit piece", or "fake news", or an "attack", or "astroturfing", or written by "paid shills". I guess people are more comfortable when they can simply dismiss any topic they disagree with.
Because almost any other entity could claim it's economic pressure and financial reality.
Google is sitting on Fort Knox, they're one of the most cash flush companies in thew world ... and they can't be bothered to actually hire people.
At the last G event, Sundar brought out this hyperbolic weeping montage about how their AI helps poor people in India 'read' the cooking directions on food labels, even when they are illiterate (i.e. AI text to voice).
It was gushy and pulled hard on heartstrings.
Well then why can't they just hire people and treat them as human equals?
It's beyond hypocritical.
With a little bit of cynicism, it's understandable from a business perspective - hey, it's money.
But what irks me is the elements of 'social justice' coming out of these entities while they're blind to the very social ills that they are driving.
People wonder why we have inequality, or 'housing affordability' etc. - well - this is it.
Folks in the Valley seems to be stoked to solve big problems and work on 'AI' - while kind of ignorant to the fact there are trailer parks all over the Valley. Which is mind blowing.
What you're saying is, essentially, if a company is making a lot of money, then they should give that money to their employees. But the purpose of a company isn't to hire or pay people, it's to generate a return for your investors.
The problems come about when the dispersal of wealth and power are faked. (No real power is dispersed.)
It's a big economic disadvantage. Your property depreciates rapidly. Meanwhile, you're still paying rent, and it's easier to get evicted.
What do you propose to replace them with?
How about communities of low cost housing, which allow for lower income people to build equity and which are somehow distinct enough to preclude co-option by well heeled tech employees? Maybe some kind of intentional community with such goals built into its charter?
Homes.
Its troubling to see this immediate rush to claim persecution and victimhood by those who have power.
Try and imagine having the ability to be concerned with the plight of disposable labor in the modern economy and yet still (gasp) capable of noticing and commenting on other facets of the situation, like how the press chooses to frame their coverage: that's what's happening here.
Those who are actually concerned with the plight of disposable labour will have little issue with the press having the same concerns.
I'm sure it is. Good thing nobody here is claiming that (I'm certainly not).
My comment was about the fact that your upthread comment is a complaint about someone discussing any other facet of the issue than focusing on the power dynamic between the employer and the employed. Not everyone is afflicted with this obsession to the point that they're unable to see anything in the world but through this single lens.
Just because it's common doesn't mean it's okay.
So instead of the average Google compensation being $144,652 (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3304439/man-or-myth-the-3-...), it could be 30-50% lower if you account for contractors.
But an average Google compensation of $80,000 (for example) wouldn't be a good recruiting tool.
Temps are technically not permitted to supervise actual FTEs but in practice some do so.
Temps don’t make as much as FTEs. So there’s an incentive to do this and also to terminate the contract (legal reasons) rather than hire them, which means the institutional knowledge goes elsewhere.
Did you contract directly with the company or were you working for the agency, who contracted you out?
I was a contractor for four years as my first job and I was a full-time employee of that contracting firm for the entire time. They paid a decent salary, gave me healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, etc. It was actually my best offer compared to some other SWE positions. Some company like Google could have been one of my clients at some point (and indeed was at my next job), but instead it was mostly banks and insurance companies.
Of course the companies that pay more attention to data do this more extensively and aggressively, why wouldn't they?
The army of temp workers/janitors/contractors/uber drivers convene and sleep in the same parking lots at night. It's a whole community of a semi-permanent underclass drifting around, saving the spreadsheets a few points here and there.
In related news, I'm not sure I want to be an American anymore. This is not the country I grew up in.
Then I got a new manager, new policies were enacted, they canned my project, and they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.
Anyway, Google had good reason to use contractors. Their hiring standards and policies makes it extremely difficult and costly to hire people, and many jobs there typically only have a retention rate of about 9-12 months, or just isn't "involved" enough to demand a FTE position, or needs to be scaled up more quickly than they can hire for. It just isn't worth it to go through the full Google process for jobs like that.
Also they took Memegen away from me. WTF.
EDIT: I'm probably forfeiting my referral bonuses by handing out that information. Better to contact me: g@yabasic.net
2. I worked almost 2 years at Google, you're damn right I do. I still work for (edit) at a different assignment to pump up my SRE experience though, so I don't know what the effect will be on future prospects. I imagine having Google, even as a contractor, looks good on a resume. In either case, the experience was invaluable.
3. This gig MADE my career. Again, I was homeless, jobless, no real experience of any worth, and now I'm making 6 figures in San Francisco with extensive knowledge of cloud computing, application design and architecture, SRE principles, etc. We'll see where it goes from here, but honestly I prefer the coding side of things, so I'll have to put in more work to learn to pass coding interviews if I want to get away from SRE/Ops work. That's something you can't learn on the job, which is really the only way I tend to learn things.
Like many things about the way Google was run, I really didn't appreciate Memegen enough until I left.
With few exceptions, you'll do the same job as a FTE but for 40% to 60% less salary, garbage benefits and zero job security. Most "staffing" companies are little more than parasites.
Google wants their 401(k) to be as efficient and useful as possible for their employees, which tend toward being highly-paid engineers and other professionals. ERISA has some fairness provisions, which means that all employees must be subject to the same plan rules, and the plan must pass certain tests of "highly-compensated" employee participation limits compared to non-highly-compensated ones.
So if you have a bunch of engineers and some janitors, and you offer a large 401(k) match that engineers use and value and janitors don't, you wind up having to unwind some of the engineer contribution and matching in order to keep things "fair".
But, crucially, ERISA doesn't have say anything about who has to be an "employee" versus hired on as a contractor. So all the janitors and cafeteria workers become contractors, and now your 401(k) plan counts junior developers as the "non highly-compensated" comparison class, and your 401(k) plan passes muster again.
This affects Google a lot because their retirement plan is highly optimized for allowing highly-paid employees to save a ton of money in a tax efficient manner. It'd be difficult to craft a better plan, and from what I've heard they've even automated using a niche tax loophole as well ("mega-backdoor Roth" - after-tax 401(k) contribution followed by immediate Roth conversion, basically allows an extra $20k/yr or so in Roth contribution room).