> When the engineer was actually placed I learned from someone that he was being paid ~$100/month so Cisco was skimming about 90% of what we paid for him. Not

> When the engineer was actually placed I learned from someone that he was being paid ~$100/month so Cisco was skimming about 90% of what we paid for him. Not exactly. These are contract employees. How it works is that corporates often have tie-ups with certain HR firms to provide them employees with certain skills, on demand. Depending on the requirement, these tech employees work remotely or on-site, but on the payroll of the middle-man HR firm. So when you ask Cisco for a network engineer, they contact these HR firms and send them the requirement. The HR firm sends a list of candidates, and Cisco selects the most-suited one. This person is then sent to you. But they are not paid by Cisco as they are not really a Cisco employee. Cisco pays the HR firms a fixed contract rate and the HR firm pays a percentage of that to the worker. Cisco definitely skims some of the money, but a large portion of it does go to these kind of contract HR firms.