27 ms·

The "red badge" thing was very real. It was really weird having TVCs on your team. You'd all work hard together to launch a thing, and then everybody except the

The "red badge" thing was very real. It was really weird having TVCs on your team. You'd all work hard together to launch a thing, and then everybody except the red badge would get a celebratory team tchotchke or a team lunch or something. If you asked about it, the manager would say "we can't give Jim things directly because that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee." There'd be all-hands meetings they couldn't go to, or seemingly arbitrary doors they couldn't open or internal sites they couldn't see. If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google."

gnfargbl 3y ago
That's how it works with contractors in most large organisations. The other side of the coin is that they're usually rewarded better than employees are, on the basis that they can be fired at any time with no notice. In practice that rarely happens, as higher-pay => better-retention => becomes-most-knowledgeable-person-over-time.
- quux 3y ago
  I think this is why Google had (has?) a 2 year limit on TVC tenure.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Not necessarily. I was a tech lead where I could only hire contractors. The run of the mill CRUD staff augmentation contractors were making about $65 and the contracting company was billing $100 a hour for them with no health care benefits, no PTO, no 401K match. On the other hand, the “cloud consultants”, who were just old school operations folks who only knew how to do lift and shifts and make everything more expensive were billing $200 an hour. It was a small shop owned by the partners. Long story short, I left there went to a startup for two years to get real world AWS experience, got hired at AWS in the ProServe department (full time job) and when I got Amazoned three years later (two months ago), I was able to negotiate a side contract with my former CTO for $135/hour and even that was low. I did it because I found the project interesting and I consider my former CTO a friend. FWIW: I did get a full time job within three weeks.
- carabiner 3y ago
  Most large orgs don't have the perks of Goog, Meta. Amazon and Cisco don't have free food, massages, etc. so it doesn't matter contractor vs. fulltime.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    It very much matters - paid time off, benefits, employer paid FICA taxes (if you are 1099). All that is just money and if you are an SME you can negotiate for a high enough hourly rate to make up the difference. But if you are just doing staff augmentation, probably not.
- bastardoperator 3y ago
  I've never seen a contractor have better salary/pay unless they're a fully independent subject matter expert and have no interest in being employed. I've hired a quite a few contractors and there is usually two cases, I need workers, or expertise that is highly limited. Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract, at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper, but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even close to what in house staff are getting. It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    The staffing agencies benefits are always subpar and more expensive. And you’re right about the difference between “staff augmentation” contractors pay and SMEs. I just went into detail in a sibling reply. But to add on, the company I ended up being a tech lead at with a full time position. I came in at $65/hour. I only took the job because I saw a chance to eventually wiggle my way into a tech lead role and I wanted to be on the ground floor of a green field project. I ended up working so much overtime - and getting paid for it - I made out pretty well compared to the local market. I got on my wife’s health insurance. I also mentioned that now that I am a SME on a niche but growing AWS service [1], I am able to charge $135 an hour for a side project and that’s a discount. [1] I beta tested the APIs while working at AWS and I was a major contributor on a popular open source official “AWS Solution” that’s built on top of it.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  I’m don’t think it’s true at companies like Google that contractors get paid better. My impression was they get a similar salary but no equity and worse benefits. I’m assuming we’re talking about the TVCs who basically act like ordinary contributors on a team. Not some specialist consultant, I don’t know about them.
- unixhero 3y ago
  I will take my 66% better salary any day, than becoming an FTE.
woadwarrior01 3y ago
While FB had the same badge color for TVCs and FTEs, everything else was exactly the same. I later saw the red/white badge dichotomy at Google and thought that the explicitness of it was a bit better.
slater- 3y ago
thank you for mentioning this. i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died. the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game. i loved watching how Google would continuously pat themselves on the back about how good they are to "their employees," and then openly shit on the people who worked full time at the company but technically weren't FTEs. it's a caste system. a company that behaves this way should be run out of town with extreme prejudice. but instead they somehow took over San Francisco.
- depereo 3y ago
  IBM basically invented this particular kind of caste shaming in a business organization. Hardly their worst crime, and they're still allowed to operate.
- peddling-brink 3y ago
  This isn't just google, it's every company with contractors and employees. Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-treat-c/dont-treat-contractors-like-employees-idUSTRE53063S20090401 https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-... Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.
  - coldtrait 3y ago
    Yea I've experienced this in capital one. Some smaller non tech companies are chill, where there is really no difference in how they treat contractors and employees.
    - peddling-brink 3y ago
      I worked at a big insurance company for a while. Contractors could have their birthday celebrated, but cake was not permitted.
pcl 3y ago
In my time at Cisco, I was impressed with how well they integrated contractors. Wasn’t like this at all.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  Cisco has/had an outrageously large contractor contingent (this may be different between Business Units). That's a huge cultural difference between Cisco the tech giant sets
  - ponector 3y ago
    According to some reports, only half of the people in Google are full time employee. Isn't it a large contingent of second-class workers?
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      Whatever fraction it is at Google, I'm willing to bet Cisco's is significantly larger, especially on "core-business" teams whose work is mentioned in analyst calls
      - cdchn 3y ago
        Orders of magnitude.
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Google has a two-class system for employees. Cisco mostly eliminated the upper tranch of their two-class system.
- cdchn 3y ago
  Cisco didn't need contractors they just shifted their workforce offshore wholesale. Source: former Cisco.
ajross 3y ago
For those unaware, these rules are pervasive in the US corporate world, and stem directly from Vizcaino v. Microsoft in 1996. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the same perks) is construed by courts as evidence that they are not temporary. So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google. Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent. > If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google." Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same thing happen to them.
- gumby 3y ago
  > Blame the courts, basically. No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.
  - ajross 3y ago
    No, it's got nothing to do with workplace protection or wages. The original suit was actually about participation in the stock purchase program (which in the mid-90's was extremely lucrative at MSFT!), something that no contractor would normally expect to get. But because the contractors got free food at the cafe (or whatever), they did. Or rather they got a settlement making up for the stock the courts said they should have been able to get. Basically, the rule per Vizcaino is "Any benefit offered to salaried employees must be offered to temporary ones too unless you deliberately discriminate against them in all your other benefits not related to their job." And yes, that's a stupid rule. But it's the rule, and it's universally enforced at every US employer large enough to have a legal department.
    - 3y ago
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Corporate feudalism
ChuckMcM 3y ago
Ah yes, the TVCs. Nothing said "We're evil" more than the subclass of contractors. It is almost a trope in Sci-Fi literature that our characters in this Utopia world discover there are people who are essential to the utopia and yet aren't "part" of the utopia. Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is established. But that's why they call it fiction right? Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually kill Google as a company, I feel sad.
- cdchn 3y ago
  Serious Morloch/Eloi vibes. Kind of the reason I prefer mid-market tech companies. More likely to treat "contractors" as equals. The place I'm at now they're indistinguishable internally from regular employees, they're just paid by another company.
Nekhrimah 3y ago
>TVC Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.
- kyteland 3y ago
  Temps, Vendors, and Contractors
- dgacmu 3y ago
  Temps, Vendors, Contractors
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Temporary Vendor Contractor
- nlewycky 3y ago
  Temps, Vendors and Contractors.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Textured vegetable contractor
  - exikyut 3y ago
    The vegan effort option.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    Some of my favorite contractors :)
senderista 3y ago
Same at MSFT (I know because I was on both sides).
nineplay 3y ago
I went from full time employee to contractor at the same company once and it was honestly a huge relief. No awkward team lunches No useless tchotchkes No boring all hands No forced participation events like 'hackathons'. I just worked. It was great
- foota 3y ago
  It was Microsoft, wasn't it? :)
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Microsoft never had forced participation in hackathons. It was generally encouraged but at most maybe 25% of FT engineers participated.
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Your lack of participation at extracurricular activities will be recordlessly considered in your next compensation refresh.
paganel 3y ago
> And report them if they ever claim to work for Google. Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium to long term. In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for their wasted intellectual potential.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tgma 3y ago
I don't understand the concern. If a company has a choice of hiring more people with more elasticity, or not hire as much or at all, is that somehow a terrible thing to do? Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such. FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little margin, but a lot. If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing, comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A. Break.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  I would say the exact same thing as the author, and I was a regular-E-badger.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
My experience as a red badge person was very good. While it is true that I was unable to bring my wife to lunch and I didn’t get free massages, everything else was great. I was hired by someone with some clout who enjoyed reading two books I had written. He would occasionally call me to talk, and then one time he invited me to work on his pet project at Google. Some of the perks were amazing. I took an 8 hour class ‘end to end’ that I would have paid a lot of money to take and in one day I got to learn how to use all of the internal systems I would need for my project, plus lots of other interesting stuff. Pure joy, that one! I totally enjoyed the food (this was in 2013) and I went to invited speaker talks (I made sure that I wasn’t counting this against my 8 hours a day). Getting to meet Molly Katzen (author or Moose Wood Cookbook, etc.) and having a long conversation with her was great. Ditto for Alexis Ohanian. I also have a work eccentricity, that apparently was not a problem: I always like to start work around 6am, and then leave early. As far as I know, this was not a problem. I need at least two hours a day with no interruptions. Anyway, if you get a chance to work at Google for a while as a contractor, go for it!
hobofan 3y ago
> If you asked about it, the manager would say "we can't give Jim things directly because that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee." While extending it to things as small as a team lunch is going a bit far, it's understandable that they don't want to open up a slippery slope of it looking too much like an employment relationship. In many European countries that can result in false self-employment and get both the company and the contractor in legal trouble.
xyzelement 3y ago
The "TVC issue" is the flip side of Google etc culture and perks. When a company takes great care of its people, contractors seem unfortunate in contrast (since they are someone else's employees, there's no expectation of long-term investment from either side, etc.) On the reverse of that is a company that's mediocre to work for. The contractors might seem like the lucky ones in that scenario (hence, resentful language like "highly paid contractor" etc.) In fact, the same TVC might be the "highly paid contractor" at the same pay and treatment somewhere else. Other posters already explained why it's like this - mainly because they are employees of another company, with a much lower barrier to hiring (and firing), a different liability profile, etc.
alphazard 3y ago
This is a direct consequence of the infamous Microsoft case. Contractors used to be treated much better, similar to employees. Then some Microsoft contractors sued for shares worth a considerable amount. Their argument was that they were "treated like employees", and therefore deserve the same things as employees. They won the lawsuit. Now contractors have to be treated much worse because there is precedent for legal consequences if you treat them as well as your employees. It's just business, it's certainly not good for morale or productivity to create a class divide, but not creating that divide incurs serious liabilities.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
> that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee Blame government regulations in this case, probably? It seems implausibly evil that they would be that anal about things just to preserve the in-group club status. But, if it's about employee vs contractor distinction for regulations, it makes total sense (well, not at a global/system level, but the behavior in isolation).

gnfargbl 3y ago

That's how it works with contractors in most large organisations. The other side of the coin is that they're usually rewarded better than employees are, on the basis that they can be fired at any time with no notice. In practice that rarely happens, as higher-pay => better-retention => becomes-most-knowledgeable-person-over-time.

quux 3y ago
I think this is why Google had (has?) a 2 year limit on TVC tenure.
scarface_74 3y ago
Not necessarily. I was a tech lead where I could only hire contractors. The run of the mill CRUD staff augmentation contractors were making about $65 and the contracting company was billing $100 a hour for them with no health care benefits, no PTO, no 401K match. On the other hand, the “cloud consultants”, who were just old school operations folks who only knew how to do lift and shifts and make everything more expensive were billing $200 an hour. It was a small shop owned by the partners. Long story short, I left there went to a startup for two years to get real world AWS experience, got hired at AWS in the ProServe department (full time job) and when I got Amazoned three years later (two months ago), I was able to negotiate a side contract with my former CTO for $135/hour and even that was low. I did it because I found the project interesting and I consider my former CTO a friend. FWIW: I did get a full time job within three weeks.
carabiner 3y ago
Most large orgs don't have the perks of Goog, Meta. Amazon and Cisco don't have free food, massages, etc. so it doesn't matter contractor vs. fulltime.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  It very much matters - paid time off, benefits, employer paid FICA taxes (if you are 1099). All that is just money and if you are an SME you can negotiate for a high enough hourly rate to make up the difference. But if you are just doing staff augmentation, probably not.
bastardoperator 3y ago
I've never seen a contractor have better salary/pay unless they're a fully independent subject matter expert and have no interest in being employed. I've hired a quite a few contractors and there is usually two cases, I need workers, or expertise that is highly limited. Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract, at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper, but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even close to what in house staff are getting. It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  The staffing agencies benefits are always subpar and more expensive. And you’re right about the difference between “staff augmentation” contractors pay and SMEs. I just went into detail in a sibling reply. But to add on, the company I ended up being a tech lead at with a full time position. I came in at $65/hour. I only took the job because I saw a chance to eventually wiggle my way into a tech lead role and I wanted to be on the ground floor of a green field project. I ended up working so much overtime - and getting paid for it - I made out pretty well compared to the local market. I got on my wife’s health insurance. I also mentioned that now that I am a SME on a niche but growing AWS service [1], I am able to charge $135 an hour for a side project and that’s a discount. [1] I beta tested the APIs while working at AWS and I was a major contributor on a popular open source official “AWS Solution” that’s built on top of it.
fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
I’m don’t think it’s true at companies like Google that contractors get paid better. My impression was they get a similar salary but no equity and worse benefits. I’m assuming we’re talking about the TVCs who basically act like ordinary contributors on a team. Not some specialist consultant, I don’t know about them.
unixhero 3y ago
I will take my 66% better salary any day, than becoming an FTE.

woadwarrior01 3y ago

While FB had the same badge color for TVCs and FTEs, everything else was exactly the same. I later saw the red/white badge dichotomy at Google and thought that the explicitness of it was a bit better.

slater- 3y ago

thank you for mentioning this. i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died. the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game. i loved watching how Google would continuously pat themselves on the back about how good they are to "their employees," and then openly shit on the people who worked full time at the company but technically weren't FTEs. it's a caste system. a company that behaves this way should be run out of town with extreme prejudice. but instead they somehow took over San Francisco.

depereo 3y ago
IBM basically invented this particular kind of caste shaming in a business organization. Hardly their worst crime, and they're still allowed to operate.
peddling-brink 3y ago
This isn't just google, it's every company with contractors and employees. Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-treat-c/dont-treat-contractors-like-employees-idUSTRE53063S20090401 https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-... Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.
- coldtrait 3y ago
  Yea I've experienced this in capital one. Some smaller non tech companies are chill, where there is really no difference in how they treat contractors and employees.
  - peddling-brink 3y ago
    I worked at a big insurance company for a while. Contractors could have their birthday celebrated, but cake was not permitted.

pcl 3y ago

In my time at Cisco, I was impressed with how well they integrated contractors. Wasn’t like this at all.

sangnoir 3y ago
Cisco has/had an outrageously large contractor contingent (this may be different between Business Units). That's a huge cultural difference between Cisco the tech giant sets
- ponector 3y ago
  According to some reports, only half of the people in Google are full time employee. Isn't it a large contingent of second-class workers?
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    Whatever fraction it is at Google, I'm willing to bet Cisco's is significantly larger, especially on "core-business" teams whose work is mentioned in analyst calls
    - cdchn 3y ago
      Orders of magnitude.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Google has a two-class system for employees. Cisco mostly eliminated the upper tranch of their two-class system.
cdchn 3y ago
Cisco didn't need contractors they just shifted their workforce offshore wholesale. Source: former Cisco.

ajross 3y ago

For those unaware, these rules are pervasive in the US corporate world, and stem directly from Vizcaino v. Microsoft in 1996. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the same perks) is construed by courts as evidence that they are not temporary. So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google. Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent. > If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google." Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same thing happen to them.

gumby 3y ago
> Blame the courts, basically. No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.
- ajross 3y ago
  No, it's got nothing to do with workplace protection or wages. The original suit was actually about participation in the stock purchase program (which in the mid-90's was extremely lucrative at MSFT!), something that no contractor would normally expect to get. But because the contractors got free food at the cafe (or whatever), they did. Or rather they got a settlement making up for the stock the courts said they should have been able to get. Basically, the rule per Vizcaino is "Any benefit offered to salaried employees must be offered to temporary ones too unless you deliberately discriminate against them in all your other benefits not related to their job." And yes, that's a stupid rule. But it's the rule, and it's universally enforced at every US employer large enough to have a legal department.
  - 3y ago

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Corporate feudalism

ChuckMcM 3y ago

Ah yes, the TVCs. Nothing said "We're evil" more than the subclass of contractors. It is almost a trope in Sci-Fi literature that our characters in this Utopia world discover there are people who are essential to the utopia and yet aren't "part" of the utopia. Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is established. But that's why they call it fiction right? Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually kill Google as a company, I feel sad.

cdchn 3y ago
Serious Morloch/Eloi vibes. Kind of the reason I prefer mid-market tech companies. More likely to treat "contractors" as equals. The place I'm at now they're indistinguishable internally from regular employees, they're just paid by another company.

Nekhrimah 3y ago

>TVC Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.

kyteland 3y ago
Temps, Vendors, and Contractors
dgacmu 3y ago
Temps, Vendors, Contractors
no_wizard 3y ago
Temporary Vendor Contractor
nlewycky 3y ago
Temps, Vendors and Contractors.
tomjakubowski 3y ago
Textured vegetable contractor
- exikyut 3y ago
  The vegan effort option.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Some of my favorite contractors :)

senderista 3y ago

Same at MSFT (I know because I was on both sides).

nineplay 3y ago

I went from full time employee to contractor at the same company once and it was honestly a huge relief. No awkward team lunches No useless tchotchkes No boring all hands No forced participation events like 'hackathons'. I just worked. It was great

foota 3y ago
It was Microsoft, wasn't it? :)
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Microsoft never had forced participation in hackathons. It was generally encouraged but at most maybe 25% of FT engineers participated.
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Your lack of participation at extracurricular activities will be recordlessly considered in your next compensation refresh.

paganel 3y ago

> And report them if they ever claim to work for Google. Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium to long term. In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for their wasted intellectual potential.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tgma 3y ago

I don't understand the concern. If a company has a choice of hiring more people with more elasticity, or not hire as much or at all, is that somehow a terrible thing to do? Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such. FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little margin, but a lot. If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing, comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A. Break.

saagarjha 3y ago
I would say the exact same thing as the author, and I was a regular-E-badger.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

My experience as a red badge person was very good. While it is true that I was unable to bring my wife to lunch and I didn’t get free massages, everything else was great. I was hired by someone with some clout who enjoyed reading two books I had written. He would occasionally call me to talk, and then one time he invited me to work on his pet project at Google. Some of the perks were amazing. I took an 8 hour class ‘end to end’ that I would have paid a lot of money to take and in one day I got to learn how to use all of the internal systems I would need for my project, plus lots of other interesting stuff. Pure joy, that one! I totally enjoyed the food (this was in 2013) and I went to invited speaker talks (I made sure that I wasn’t counting this against my 8 hours a day). Getting to meet Molly Katzen (author or Moose Wood Cookbook, etc.) and having a long conversation with her was great. Ditto for Alexis Ohanian. I also have a work eccentricity, that apparently was not a problem: I always like to start work around 6am, and then leave early. As far as I know, this was not a problem. I need at least two hours a day with no interruptions. Anyway, if you get a chance to work at Google for a while as a contractor, go for it!

hobofan 3y ago

> If you asked about it, the manager would say "we can't give Jim things directly because that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee." While extending it to things as small as a team lunch is going a bit far, it's understandable that they don't want to open up a slippery slope of it looking too much like an employment relationship. In many European countries that can result in false self-employment and get both the company and the contractor in legal trouble.

xyzelement 3y ago

The "TVC issue" is the flip side of Google etc culture and perks. When a company takes great care of its people, contractors seem unfortunate in contrast (since they are someone else's employees, there's no expectation of long-term investment from either side, etc.) On the reverse of that is a company that's mediocre to work for. The contractors might seem like the lucky ones in that scenario (hence, resentful language like "highly paid contractor" etc.) In fact, the same TVC might be the "highly paid contractor" at the same pay and treatment somewhere else. Other posters already explained why it's like this - mainly because they are employees of another company, with a much lower barrier to hiring (and firing), a different liability profile, etc.

alphazard 3y ago

This is a direct consequence of the infamous Microsoft case. Contractors used to be treated much better, similar to employees. Then some Microsoft contractors sued for shares worth a considerable amount. Their argument was that they were "treated like employees", and therefore deserve the same things as employees. They won the lawsuit. Now contractors have to be treated much worse because there is precedent for legal consequences if you treat them as well as your employees. It's just business, it's certainly not good for morale or productivity to create a class divide, but not creating that divide incurs serious liabilities.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

> that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee Blame government regulations in this case, probably? It seems implausibly evil that they would be that anal about things just to preserve the in-group club status. But, if it's about employee vs contractor distinction for regulations, it makes total sense (well, not at a global/system level, but the behavior in isolation).