5 ms·

Discussing Uber and Lyft is boring because the companies are so reviled, but this bill is much bigger than Uber and Lyft. It seems the ABC contracting test is

by zaroth 7y ago

Discussing Uber and Lyft is boring because the companies are so reviled, but this bill is much bigger than Uber and Lyft. It seems the ABC contracting test is pretty detrimental to any kind of contract hiring that is done in an area which is closely related to a company’s core business. Software development contracting in particular seems like it would be particularly problematic under this test. I contract out work all the time which I closely manage many aspects of how the work is done, and for work which is core to my business operations, and within my core competency. Mostly this is to be able to quickly scale up development capacity during a project where there are isolated pieces that can be worked on concurrently. It’s often work that I could do, but for scheduling purposes, would rather hire out. I’ve also done “micro-contracting” where I break out specific problems which I could eventually figure out a solution but it’s easier to find an expert who can spend 5 hours on it while I keep moving on other pieces of the puzzle. What I’m doing seems like it’s exceptionally common, and because of how ABC test is a logical AND I’m not seeing the “escape hatch” where it wouldn’t be basically preventing software contracting work for software companies.

xemdetia 7y ago
I see your logical out being close to (IANAL): 1. with a contractor you are creating a contract around the deliverables and the time frame for those deliverables. You do not have the ability to reach into the contractor and have any say in how the work gets done (e.g. can Bob work on this task Tuesday instead of Thursday even though it's not related to interfacing with me). To me this satisfies the "person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work" part. 2. "the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business" is the tricky one, but I think it more has to do of what you explain your business to be. If you are running a SaaS platform and enter into a contract with someone who provides software development expertise the relationship between your business and the contractor is different. In the cleaner case in one of the other trajectories there is a difference between someone providing supplemental cleaning services for existing cleaning businesses and someone who provides cleaning services. The relation is probably distinct enough to be interpreted this way, as someone pursuing to sell their capacity to someone else is different than a business acquiring a contractor to deliver the goals of their business. In the Uber case a driver who works for Uber to deliver their core business is different than a company formed to provide taxi service capacity to other companies who are running a taxi service. 3. Then the last clause "the person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business" I think for software development this is easy to say when someone is trying to demonstrate themselves as a contractor vs. someone who is 'hired' as a contractor. I think if you are worried about really the first case that is just something that should enter your contract language as a deliverable of the other entity. The relation between you and the entity you are contracting is different than discussions with the downstream contractors. Since the smaller contractors inevitably have this end up being the same person this could be confusing. Based on the writing of this rule I feel like you would be able to ask the entity for updates, information related to the deliverables, schedule meetings, and so on. You may be able to ask for accurate accounting for hours worked but you can't have any say when those hours were because the entity would be billing you the number of hours. For the second case I think you would be fine if you were soliciting someone to contract some hours to work for you because the other person would be representing themselves as a consultant who has hours to sell. You would be buying hours of work in expertise X which is different than your goal of selling Y. If the relationships were built this way then I think this satisfies the third clause as well as because then this contractor would be in an independent business who could satisfy the terms of a contract between entities. I feel like as long as you treat the other party as a business and not a person, and the other party understands this you are able to operate normally. You may have to emphasize this nature more to be compliant with this rule and focus on milestones and deliverables and contractual obligations (it is still fair to say to enter a contract that says it has to be delivered by 2pm Friday), but you have to keep your hands off defining hours to be available/hours on call/punch in and punch out times, etc. I would stick with buying and selling hours of work for some contractual outcome.
- nickodell 7y ago
  >"the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business" is the tricky one, but I think it more has to do of what you explain your business to be. If you are running a SaaS platform and enter into a contract with someone who provides software development expertise the relationship between your business and the contractor is different. This argument seems too general. One way of looking at Uber is that it's a taxi service. Therefore, Uber and an Uber drivers are engaged in the same line of business. Another way of looking at Uber is that it's a platform to connect drivers and passengers. Therefore, Uber and Uber drivers are engaged in different kinds of business. If you need to explain what your business is in a particular way, then you're on thin ice.
sfifs 7y ago
In general you'll very likely have to let go of the "closely control" piece to be able to contract the kind of work you refer to out safely. Contracting to experts would probably be pretty safe. Note that nothing will happen unless someone complains but it's a business risk you're taking. The reason for these types of regulations is basically that society benefits from people having secure jobs and benefits and the security translates into higher investment back into economy (ie people save, buy houses etc) I'd suggest to consult a lawyer.
- dangxiaopin 7y ago
  Contractors send 1099 they receive from a company to FTB. They don't need to complain. This means that a bootstrapped start-up cannot temporarily hire a graphics designer or a coder in California anymore, without the budget to make him an employee. But non-VC entrepreneurship has been hardly possible here for other reasons: building and rent control regulations driving the housing and office space costs. Since the 2006's "web2.0", progressive California regulators are at it for real, pitching entrepreneurship as an enemy of labor: it's no longer a place for small business and non-VC startups. Those have been fleeing.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    This means that a bootstrapped start-up cannot temporarily hire a graphics designer or a coder in California anymore, without the budget to make him an employee. This is so completely wrong. You know what the difference between a temporary, part-time employee and an independent contractor is, from the business' financial point of view? They have to pay payroll taxes (and in some states unemployment insurance levies) for the part-time worker instead of forcing the worker to handle those costs themselves. And that's it. They aren't required to provide benefits or anything else until they exceed a threshold size in terms of employees (generally 50) or annual income (usually >$10 million/year). In your specific example, the startup could hire both the designer and the coder as employees or as contractors, so long as both were allowed to work on other gigs while they were temporarily contracting with you and your startup wasn't in the business of graphics design or software. (If your business is a software business, the analysis is more granular: is the coder working on the revenue-generating part of your software, or on a supporting part of the software like the networking code?) Since the 2006's "web2.0", progressive California regulators are at it for real, pitching entrepreneurship as an enemy of labor: it's no longer a place for small business and non-VC startups. Those have been fleeing. California went from being the world's 8th largest economy to the world's 5th largest economy over this time. Has lead the nation in small business growth for the past decade. California's regulations basically just filter out all of the fake businesses that don't have enough backing to at least attempt existence.
Splines 7y ago
I think if you hire another software engineer to help you it could potentially fail criteria C: "The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed.". Looking at https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-the-abc-test-for-independent-contractors-4586615 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-the-abc-test-for-indep... it appears the intent is to handle trades like construction subcontracting, which is very similar to what you want to do.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Yes, that is one of the three requirements. If it was logical "OR" this wouldn't be an issue, but you need to satisfy all 3 criteria, not just one.
ladon86 7y ago
I think hiring short-term contractors for a quick scale up is the practice most at risk. Let’s take an even more constrained role like customer support - say a company wants to hire more support reps over a period of busy sales like Christmas. Since these people are heavily directed and are just adding capacity to the existing business, it seems likely that would fail the ABC test. So what are companies going to do in this case? Well, California is an at-will employment state, so maybe they’ll get really good at onboarding and then hire and fire FTEs within one month to cover the busy season. That doesn’t seem desirable to workers either.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
  There are temporary or limited term part-time jobs, though. There is no real need to hire and then fire folks. Simply hire as a seasonal employee. This is what retailers do around Christmas, for example. Sometimes they'll hire an employees a permanent employee afterwards, but not always. There are folks that take these jobs year after year - both around holidays and during summer breaks. Sometimes this isn't ideal and sometimes it is pretty perfect for the employee. But these are not contractors. They are employees. The company pays all of the applicable taxes and handles payroll. The company is responsible for workplace injuries and so on. I don't see where this is really a big issue - and hiring these folks as contractors seems more a thing to take advantage of folks.
PorterDuff 7y ago
There's an irony that laws set up to protect workers at the low end mess with workers at the high end. As a SW contractor, I never much cared about insurance/time off/sick leave/etc. and was well paid to not care. From another article: " b) is doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business, " Bam. How many contractors lose their jobs from that sentence? Ridiculous. a quick edit: Now that I think of it, does FTE imply an hourly rate? If so, how do you reconcile an Uber model of piecework with that? Perhaps they could simply rent out an Uber medallion.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Employees cannot be paid a fixed rate per deliverable. They must be paid an hourly rate, or be paid a fixed salary per time interval, regardless of the number of hours worked. But the employer can mandate when and where an employee works. So, for example, they can require that you are on the road a certain number of high demand (surge) hours. They can also require that you respond to a call to pickup a specific passenger within a certain time period, etc. So the result will be their algorithm will ensure the hourly rate they are paying a driver is covered in the long term by the rides they are serving, or they could simply fire that driver. In a complex system, you could specify time slots which you would promise to be available, their system would determine a subset of those slots where they wanted to hire that driver which would work out to be profitable enough for them. Their system could suggest an alternate set of (partially overlapping) times to make a counter-offer of when they could hire you. If the driver didn't show up for work on the peak hours they really needed you enough times, the driver would be terminated.
gamblor956 7y ago
A lot of people on HN seem to think that this bill mandates (a) full-time employees and (b) fully independent contractors without anything in-between. There is such a thing as a temporary, part-time job (as an employee). See, e.g., every single Walmart ever. Most major fast food chains. Most retail stores during the holiday season. Etc. The primary change is that companies will start having to handle payroll taxes for part-time workers rather than pushing these administrative costs onto the workers by claiming that the workers are actually their own businesses.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  Temp workers and contractors are very different types of employees...
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Yes, they are. Temp workers are part-time employees that can be performing any task your business requires, including your primary business activity. While working for you, they aren't working for someone else (though they might be working for someone else when their shift ends for the day). A contractor is someone with their own client base who handles a specific project that is not your primary business activity (though the project may support that activity). While working for you, they could be working for someone else as well (as long as they're not billing both clients for that time if the contractor bills on a period-basis). These distinctions above are generally how the difference between employees and contractors are laid out internationally, and especially when dealing with cross-border worker classification issues. These distinctions have also been part of US jurisprudence for many decades, though they've only been formally or informally codified relatively recently.
amyjess 7y ago
I'm okay with this. Software development contracting, as it is right now, is intensely problematic at pretty much every level. Hiring closely-managed contractors to work on-prem basically creates an underclass in the industry: they're just like employees, except they get no insurance or PTO, and they're excluded from most company functions, and it looks bad on a resume because they're rarely at one company for long. Hell, they tend to get treated differently because they typically wear guest badges instead of employee badges. This is simply harmful, and while a lot of companies may feel like they're financially pressured into doing so, society has a vested interest in stopping this practice. On the other hand, hiring a remote consulting company where you give them a requirements sheet and say "do your thing and get back to me with something that fulfills this"—i.e., actual, proper contractors—inevitably turns into a nightmare. I've seen these consultants go incommunicado for weeks at a time, find every excuse to push deadlines back, and when they do turn something in, they turn in a pile of awful code that needs to be rewritten by the actual engineering staff. My experience with these people has lead me to start referring to them as "dairy farmers" because they just milk their clients, and every one of my colleagues who I've introduced the term to has fallen in love with it. Honestly, I think software engineering contracting should just go away. Either you create and exploit an underclass or you get screwed by dairy farmers. The only way I can see to save this situation is to legally delineate "temp employees" as a class. Temps would be employees in every way except that they have a fixed term of employment stated up front (where "fixed" can mean either a set amount of time or until a specified project is delivered). They would have benefits and PTO, just like other employees. They would be employees for the purposes of who can attend company events, what kind of badges they wear, etc. It still wouldn't be perfect because the short length of employment would look bad on a resume, but it's a far cry better than the current situation. And if it costs companies more to hire them, then that's just the cost of doing business in a society. I've seen the same arguments used to demean basic dignities such as minimum wage, overtime laws, mandatory sick leave, paid vacation time, etc., and they're all spurious.
- zaroth 7y ago
  In my case, the situation is hiring a remote contractor (an individual contributor, not a company) to perform a well defined task at a fixed price within a specified timeframe. The job will be closely monitored and controlled to ensure progress is being made, and the job is being done in a way that the final product can be successfully integrated into the code base. The work is central to the company, but may be outside an area of expertise, or an added work item beyond the scheduled capacity. In otherwords... pretty much any software-related contracted task, done by any bootstrapped startup, ever.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Mostly this is to be able to quickly scale up development capacity during a project where there are isolated pieces that can be worked on concurrently. Hasn't this been proven to rarely ever actually work? I've been on multiple corporate projects with strict deadlines / late penalties approaching where management from every angle wanted to "just throw as many contractor bodies as possible" at the problem. How did we get the product shipped without missing the deadline? A handful of really high level, non-contractor full time engineers swooped in and saved the day. Another use case at the same company: Stuff is blowing up all of the time in prod. Who is around to fix it? Contractors who have no clue what is going on and only make the code worse. The stuff is blowing up in prod in the first place because of pure lack of competency. That's my contractor experience at least. Probably worked with 1-2 good contractors out of 100-200. Most couldn't pass FizzBuzz, knew nothing about the concept of consistent style / linting. $75/hr+ to just got tossed from project to project/fire to fire, on average making things worse.

by zaroth 7y ago

xemdetia 7y ago

I see your logical out being close to (IANAL): 1. with a contractor you are creating a contract around the deliverables and the time frame for those deliverables. You do not have the ability to reach into the contractor and have any say in how the work gets done (e.g. can Bob work on this task Tuesday instead of Thursday even though it's not related to interfacing with me). To me this satisfies the "person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work" part. 2. "the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business" is the tricky one, but I think it more has to do of what you explain your business to be. If you are running a SaaS platform and enter into a contract with someone who provides software development expertise the relationship between your business and the contractor is different. In the cleaner case in one of the other trajectories there is a difference between someone providing supplemental cleaning services for existing cleaning businesses and someone who provides cleaning services. The relation is probably distinct enough to be interpreted this way, as someone pursuing to sell their capacity to someone else is different than a business acquiring a contractor to deliver the goals of their business. In the Uber case a driver who works for Uber to deliver their core business is different than a company formed to provide taxi service capacity to other companies who are running a taxi service. 3. Then the last clause "the person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business" I think for software development this is easy to say when someone is trying to demonstrate themselves as a contractor vs. someone who is 'hired' as a contractor. I think if you are worried about really the first case that is just something that should enter your contract language as a deliverable of the other entity. The relation between you and the entity you are contracting is different than discussions with the downstream contractors. Since the smaller contractors inevitably have this end up being the same person this could be confusing. Based on the writing of this rule I feel like you would be able to ask the entity for updates, information related to the deliverables, schedule meetings, and so on. You may be able to ask for accurate accounting for hours worked but you can't have any say when those hours were because the entity would be billing you the number of hours. For the second case I think you would be fine if you were soliciting someone to contract some hours to work for you because the other person would be representing themselves as a consultant who has hours to sell. You would be buying hours of work in expertise X which is different than your goal of selling Y. If the relationships were built this way then I think this satisfies the third clause as well as because then this contractor would be in an independent business who could satisfy the terms of a contract between entities. I feel like as long as you treat the other party as a business and not a person, and the other party understands this you are able to operate normally. You may have to emphasize this nature more to be compliant with this rule and focus on milestones and deliverables and contractual obligations (it is still fair to say to enter a contract that says it has to be delivered by 2pm Friday), but you have to keep your hands off defining hours to be available/hours on call/punch in and punch out times, etc. I would stick with buying and selling hours of work for some contractual outcome.

nickodell 7y ago
>"the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business" is the tricky one, but I think it more has to do of what you explain your business to be. If you are running a SaaS platform and enter into a contract with someone who provides software development expertise the relationship between your business and the contractor is different. This argument seems too general. One way of looking at Uber is that it's a taxi service. Therefore, Uber and an Uber drivers are engaged in the same line of business. Another way of looking at Uber is that it's a platform to connect drivers and passengers. Therefore, Uber and Uber drivers are engaged in different kinds of business. If you need to explain what your business is in a particular way, then you're on thin ice.

sfifs 7y ago

In general you'll very likely have to let go of the "closely control" piece to be able to contract the kind of work you refer to out safely. Contracting to experts would probably be pretty safe. Note that nothing will happen unless someone complains but it's a business risk you're taking. The reason for these types of regulations is basically that society benefits from people having secure jobs and benefits and the security translates into higher investment back into economy (ie people save, buy houses etc) I'd suggest to consult a lawyer.

dangxiaopin 7y ago
Contractors send 1099 they receive from a company to FTB. They don't need to complain. This means that a bootstrapped start-up cannot temporarily hire a graphics designer or a coder in California anymore, without the budget to make him an employee. But non-VC entrepreneurship has been hardly possible here for other reasons: building and rent control regulations driving the housing and office space costs. Since the 2006's "web2.0", progressive California regulators are at it for real, pitching entrepreneurship as an enemy of labor: it's no longer a place for small business and non-VC startups. Those have been fleeing.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  This means that a bootstrapped start-up cannot temporarily hire a graphics designer or a coder in California anymore, without the budget to make him an employee. This is so completely wrong. You know what the difference between a temporary, part-time employee and an independent contractor is, from the business' financial point of view? They have to pay payroll taxes (and in some states unemployment insurance levies) for the part-time worker instead of forcing the worker to handle those costs themselves. And that's it. They aren't required to provide benefits or anything else until they exceed a threshold size in terms of employees (generally 50) or annual income (usually >$10 million/year). In your specific example, the startup could hire both the designer and the coder as employees or as contractors, so long as both were allowed to work on other gigs while they were temporarily contracting with you and your startup wasn't in the business of graphics design or software. (If your business is a software business, the analysis is more granular: is the coder working on the revenue-generating part of your software, or on a supporting part of the software like the networking code?) Since the 2006's "web2.0", progressive California regulators are at it for real, pitching entrepreneurship as an enemy of labor: it's no longer a place for small business and non-VC startups. Those have been fleeing. California went from being the world's 8th largest economy to the world's 5th largest economy over this time. Has lead the nation in small business growth for the past decade. California's regulations basically just filter out all of the fake businesses that don't have enough backing to at least attempt existence.

Splines 7y ago

I think if you hire another software engineer to help you it could potentially fail criteria C: "The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed.". Looking at https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-the-abc-test-for-independent-contractors-4586615 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-the-abc-test-for-indep... it appears the intent is to handle trades like construction subcontracting, which is very similar to what you want to do.

zaroth 7y ago
Yes, that is one of the three requirements. If it was logical "OR" this wouldn't be an issue, but you need to satisfy all 3 criteria, not just one.

ladon86 7y ago

I think hiring short-term contractors for a quick scale up is the practice most at risk. Let’s take an even more constrained role like customer support - say a company wants to hire more support reps over a period of busy sales like Christmas. Since these people are heavily directed and are just adding capacity to the existing business, it seems likely that would fail the ABC test. So what are companies going to do in this case? Well, California is an at-will employment state, so maybe they’ll get really good at onboarding and then hire and fire FTEs within one month to cover the busy season. That doesn’t seem desirable to workers either.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Broken_Hippo 7y ago
There are temporary or limited term part-time jobs, though. There is no real need to hire and then fire folks. Simply hire as a seasonal employee. This is what retailers do around Christmas, for example. Sometimes they'll hire an employees a permanent employee afterwards, but not always. There are folks that take these jobs year after year - both around holidays and during summer breaks. Sometimes this isn't ideal and sometimes it is pretty perfect for the employee. But these are not contractors. They are employees. The company pays all of the applicable taxes and handles payroll. The company is responsible for workplace injuries and so on. I don't see where this is really a big issue - and hiring these folks as contractors seems more a thing to take advantage of folks.

PorterDuff 7y ago

There's an irony that laws set up to protect workers at the low end mess with workers at the high end. As a SW contractor, I never much cared about insurance/time off/sick leave/etc. and was well paid to not care. From another article: " b) is doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business, " Bam. How many contractors lose their jobs from that sentence? Ridiculous. a quick edit: Now that I think of it, does FTE imply an hourly rate? If so, how do you reconcile an Uber model of piecework with that? Perhaps they could simply rent out an Uber medallion.

zaroth 7y ago
Employees cannot be paid a fixed rate per deliverable. They must be paid an hourly rate, or be paid a fixed salary per time interval, regardless of the number of hours worked. But the employer can mandate when and where an employee works. So, for example, they can require that you are on the road a certain number of high demand (surge) hours. They can also require that you respond to a call to pickup a specific passenger within a certain time period, etc. So the result will be their algorithm will ensure the hourly rate they are paying a driver is covered in the long term by the rides they are serving, or they could simply fire that driver. In a complex system, you could specify time slots which you would promise to be available, their system would determine a subset of those slots where they wanted to hire that driver which would work out to be profitable enough for them. Their system could suggest an alternate set of (partially overlapping) times to make a counter-offer of when they could hire you. If the driver didn't show up for work on the peak hours they really needed you enough times, the driver would be terminated.

gamblor956 7y ago

A lot of people on HN seem to think that this bill mandates (a) full-time employees and (b) fully independent contractors without anything in-between. There is such a thing as a temporary, part-time job (as an employee). See, e.g., every single Walmart ever. Most major fast food chains. Most retail stores during the holiday season. Etc. The primary change is that companies will start having to handle payroll taxes for part-time workers rather than pushing these administrative costs onto the workers by claiming that the workers are actually their own businesses.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sieabahlpark 7y ago
Temp workers and contractors are very different types of employees...
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Yes, they are. Temp workers are part-time employees that can be performing any task your business requires, including your primary business activity. While working for you, they aren't working for someone else (though they might be working for someone else when their shift ends for the day). A contractor is someone with their own client base who handles a specific project that is not your primary business activity (though the project may support that activity). While working for you, they could be working for someone else as well (as long as they're not billing both clients for that time if the contractor bills on a period-basis). These distinctions above are generally how the difference between employees and contractors are laid out internationally, and especially when dealing with cross-border worker classification issues. These distinctions have also been part of US jurisprudence for many decades, though they've only been formally or informally codified relatively recently.

amyjess 7y ago

I'm okay with this. Software development contracting, as it is right now, is intensely problematic at pretty much every level. Hiring closely-managed contractors to work on-prem basically creates an underclass in the industry: they're just like employees, except they get no insurance or PTO, and they're excluded from most company functions, and it looks bad on a resume because they're rarely at one company for long. Hell, they tend to get treated differently because they typically wear guest badges instead of employee badges. This is simply harmful, and while a lot of companies may feel like they're financially pressured into doing so, society has a vested interest in stopping this practice. On the other hand, hiring a remote consulting company where you give them a requirements sheet and say "do your thing and get back to me with something that fulfills this"—i.e., actual, proper contractors—inevitably turns into a nightmare. I've seen these consultants go incommunicado for weeks at a time, find every excuse to push deadlines back, and when they do turn something in, they turn in a pile of awful code that needs to be rewritten by the actual engineering staff. My experience with these people has lead me to start referring to them as "dairy farmers" because they just milk their clients, and every one of my colleagues who I've introduced the term to has fallen in love with it. Honestly, I think software engineering contracting should just go away. Either you create and exploit an underclass or you get screwed by dairy farmers. The only way I can see to save this situation is to legally delineate "temp employees" as a class. Temps would be employees in every way except that they have a fixed term of employment stated up front (where "fixed" can mean either a set amount of time or until a specified project is delivered). They would have benefits and PTO, just like other employees. They would be employees for the purposes of who can attend company events, what kind of badges they wear, etc. It still wouldn't be perfect because the short length of employment would look bad on a resume, but it's a far cry better than the current situation. And if it costs companies more to hire them, then that's just the cost of doing business in a society. I've seen the same arguments used to demean basic dignities such as minimum wage, overtime laws, mandatory sick leave, paid vacation time, etc., and they're all spurious.

zaroth 7y ago
In my case, the situation is hiring a remote contractor (an individual contributor, not a company) to perform a well defined task at a fixed price within a specified timeframe. The job will be closely monitored and controlled to ensure progress is being made, and the job is being done in a way that the final product can be successfully integrated into the code base. The work is central to the company, but may be outside an area of expertise, or an added work item beyond the scheduled capacity. In otherwords... pretty much any software-related contracted task, done by any bootstrapped startup, ever.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

> Mostly this is to be able to quickly scale up development capacity during a project where there are isolated pieces that can be worked on concurrently. Hasn't this been proven to rarely ever actually work? I've been on multiple corporate projects with strict deadlines / late penalties approaching where management from every angle wanted to "just throw as many contractor bodies as possible" at the problem. How did we get the product shipped without missing the deadline? A handful of really high level, non-contractor full time engineers swooped in and saved the day. Another use case at the same company: Stuff is blowing up all of the time in prod. Who is around to fix it? Contractors who have no clue what is going on and only make the code worse. The stuff is blowing up in prod in the first place because of pure lack of competency. That's my contractor experience at least. Probably worked with 1-2 good contractors out of 100-200. Most couldn't pass FizzBuzz, knew nothing about the concept of consistent style / linting. $75/hr+ to just got tossed from project to project/fire to fire, on average making things worse.