Not implying at all that tech companies are deliberately abusing their contractors. My point was that because Microsoft did do so back in the 80's (and got slam

Not implying at all that tech companies are deliberately abusing their contractors. My point was that because Microsoft did do so back in the 80's (and got slammed by the courts for it), now everybody is scared to even appear to treat contractors the same as FTEs. I don't know all the ins and outs of FTE vs contractor vs vendor (I'm a geek, not an HR person), but presumably there are business reasons for choosing one over the other. "One's cheaper" is an obvious one, but there are probably others (taxes? liability? who knows. me write code). There are definitely cases where job functions at major tech companies have been converted from vendor/contractor to FTE (Google physical security officers is one I personally know of. Presumably there are others).