AFAICT, there's two kinds of contractors. The first kind are experts that companies don't have enough ultraspecialized knowledge work to keep on a salaried basi

AFAICT, there's two kinds of contractors. The first kind are experts that companies don't have enough ultraspecialized knowledge work to keep on a salaried basis. These people are like the Wolf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU), brought in for problems nobody on staff was able to solve and charge accordingly. All the contractors of this type I know are self-represented, no middlemen. 3x is a norm, but often much higher due to their niche experience. The other kind of contractor is ordered from an agency. The agency might charge a shit ton, but the IC sees a fraction of that. These agencies only profit from the markup, so they position themselves accordingly; they find as much cheap labor as they can. If you look at the top H1-B sponsors, it's typically dominated by these places. Nominally places like Infosys file Labor Condition Assessments at 10x the rate of Google, but in a sense most big tech firms are outsourcing the H1-B process to the body shops. As you can imagine, this puts downward pressure on contractor wages.