19 ms·

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 earth

• 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.
      • ethbr1 3y ago
        That's brutal.
      • spacedcowboy 3y ago
        The cake was a lie ?
      • unixhero 3y ago
        Cake is terrible for you any ways.
  • allenu 3y ago
    Yup, when I read the blog post, my immediate thought was, "Hey, this sounds just like Microsoft when I was there." There it was blue badge vs. non-blue badge. All the other stuff, too –– wanting to innovate but finding everything so slow, lots of process, feeling very pampered, etc.
  • JSavageOne 3y ago
    Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing than being an employee
    • no_wizard 3y ago
      Not in practice, because they use a hiring entity to dictate the terms. You're expected to show up on a schedule, do the work etc. much like a FTE, but you're not an FTE. I think some folks have this illusion of software contractors that this is somehow common, it really isn't. The norm is you-are-almost-but-not-quite an employee type work environment, and thats at the better places. I've worked at a place where contractors were treated like they weren't human, basically. Worst equipment, forced to work in an old warehouse that barely passed code to be considered retrofitted for an office, people routine got sick out there because they were exposed to the elements. Not to mention, during fire season (this was California) they were in a building that didn't have a good enough air filtration system, so they were forced to sit in smoke all day, more or less I quit that place pretty quickly, but it was nothing short of terrible
      • ethbr1 3y ago
        As a contractor, you are an FTE... just for a different (almost always much worse) company. And that arrangement exists solely so that the company whose work you're actually doing can fire you more easily or avoid legal liability.
        • GreedClarifies 3y ago
          I wish we could somehow get this comment more visibility. Especially the 1st sentence. People that complain about the plights of contractors need to understand the above.
        • JSavageOne 3y ago
          I'm surprised this even legally flies. Seems like the legal equivalent of creating a shell company.
  • ponector 3y ago
    Every US company. European companies somehow have contractors without caste system. Obviously there are different policies for internals and contractors, but fruits and pizza are for everyone in the office.
    • tgma 3y ago
      European tech worker is compensated so measly everyone is equally poor I suppose. Just like every commun... ehem... socialist system, it achieves equality at epsilon.
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      Which is because it is extremely rude, like meanest of meanest, to not share food with each other. Like, of all mean but not illegal things you can do to contractors, not sharing food is probably what people consider the worst. Small every day things are way more provocative than abstract things like retirement funds or whatever. Been there. Done that. The FTEs got strawberries. I didn't. I don't think I have been that pissed off in my life. If someone had wrecked my car on purpose I'd be less pissed.
      • jterrys 3y ago
        I experienced something similar at a previous job. It was funny. I was working in a satellite office for an org based in a different country, and once in a while (minimum once a year) we'd be sent to HQ for a few weeks. Wrapping up projects, team coordination, whatever. So of course we'd eat together. The team got a new manager when I joined, and he was told that our treatment was equal despite satellite office status because we were on the same teams coordinating on the same projects, but in different timezones. Anyway, even though I was technically a FTE at the company, I didn't have the necessary prerequisites to pay for cafeteria food at FTE discounts. I was forced to pay contractor prices. A full extra $5 per meal. My manager was initially confused, then upset. Then we tried to talk with the cafeteria contracting company. They told him it was out of their control. So, we began investigating...eventually uncovering some internal "separate but equal" undocumented employment scheme were compensation, benefits, whatnot, unraveled into a weird caste discrimination system. The people that were pulling their weight were paid pennies while senior team members who were awaiting retirement just raked in the big bucks with benefits on contracts no longer offered, or offered through some backdoor deals before the company really expanded. In the end, the lunch situation was solved by just stating that I was a FTE because I had the same color badge. It turns out the cashiers didn't even scan badges or anything, just asked you if you were internal and to show your badge. But out of all the bullshit we uncovered, the food situation really broke his spirit the most.
  • szundi 3y ago
    In my company I almost fired someone from HR for constantly forgetting how these contractor people are part of the team, invited to every event etc
    • MattPalmer1086 3y ago
      In the UK at least, if you are a contractor you are legally not an employee. If you took any employee benefits, the tax man could retroactively classify you as an employee and demand a huge tax bill from you. So many contractors would refuse any such benefits even if they were offered. Some didn't care of course and took them anyway, but they were potentially setting themselves up for a huge legal and tax problem.
    • cdchn 3y ago
      Why "almost?" Who won out, HR or treating contractors humanely? Or did they come correct without firing required?
  • blagie 3y ago
    It's not the same. The Microsoft problem was *independent* contractors. I.E. treating people as self-employed. Normal contractors are employees of a temp firm. None of these issues apply there. Footnote: I started my career as an IC, before I had family or kids. It was great. 32 hour work weeks and time (and the legal right) to do startups on the side. Ton of flexibility relative to a real job.
    • taude 3y ago
      The microsoft lawsuit applied to the contractor staffing agencies, too. I'd google it for you, bute they had so many orange v-badges back in the day, that it has to be pretty easy to google.
      • blagie 3y ago
        Web search says that contrary to stereotypes, the problem was that they did NOT have contractor staffing agencies, and that as a result, they were not withholding taxes. This was resolved by bringing in a staffing agency. A second problem was that they DID have ambiguous language in their employee handbooks, which meant that once temps were ruled employees, they became benefit-eligible, including in retroactively. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-treat-c-idUSTRE53063S20090401 https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
  • dudus 3y ago
    I had the same experience as a contractor for IBM. Real IBMers got all kinds of stuff. We had to pay full price for the GR meal.
  • omoikane 3y ago
    I remember Google had something like contractors need to pay $1 to use the gym, meaning it wasn't free so it doesn't count as a benefit, but the amount was clearly not something that was material.
  • RajT88 3y ago
    Microsoft contractors while not getting the benefits package of an FTE, may actually make more money than the same role as an FTE. I have known some folks getting insurance through their partner's work who passed on going FTE because it would be a pay cut. Yes, they are not allowed access to a lot of stuff (source, telemetry, etc.).
  • OJFord 3y ago
    Ok, but at Arm my red (intern) badge was no more 'demeaning' than my blue (permanent) badge. Not least because they only left my pocket when I needed to open a door... (Colours from memory, I think that's right, they were certainly different anyway.) Point is you can certainly learn not to treat contractors like employees, have badged access, etc., without having such hostility attached to it. Edit: no! Red actually was a 'badge of shame', that was 'I forgot my badge today and had to get a spare from reception'. Anyway, it's beside the point exactly what was what. Different badges and access/treatment don't have to bleed into social treatment, they don't even have to be that visible.
    • bhelkey 3y ago
      This conversation isn't about the difference between intern and full time employee but rather the difference between contractor and full time employee.
      • OJFord 3y ago
        It's about 'demeaning' different badges, and an intern is inherently temporary, which is the T in 'TVC'.
        • lazide 3y ago
          Interns always got the FTE type experience (able to eat at celebrations, got Schwag, etc!). They weren’t temp in the same sense as T temps - which are temporary workers hired from temp agencies.
          • saagarjha 3y ago
            Yep. Some companies even give interns legitimate (taxable!) benefits, too, which almost no company will give their TVCs.
    • TreeInBuxton 3y ago
      Depends on when you interned! Before 2018 you would get a green badge as an intern, 2018 and onwards you got the same blue as everyone else, when they moved all the offices to GDAS. Contractors (cleaners, catering staff, etc) got yellow ones IIRC (I interned at ARM in Cambridge 2017 and 2018)
  • TheRealPomax 3y ago
    There's "contractors" and then there's "branded as outsider". The red hot iron kind of branding, not the marketing kind. Red badging is what you do when you view people as numbers in a spreadsheet instead of people.
  • bredren 3y ago
    Intel used to do this. I was a high school and college intern in the late 90s and it was this blue badge / green badge thing. The funny thing is, there was another level which was how worn out your blue badge was. The longer you had been there, the closer the badge was to white.
    • ngneer 3y ago
      If by "this" you meant a caste-like system, then my experience at Intel in 2010s was very different. Different people (contingent workers with green badges and others with blue badges) worked well enough together, and got well enough along (with one or two instances being the exception, not the rule). That's funny about the white badge. I am sure they could have gotten new ones, engineers have the funniest status symbols...
  • Roark66 3y ago
    Wow, somehow I missed all that despite being a contractor for about half of 20+ years of working in this industry... Perhaps it is a USA thing? Although I worked for a couple of US companies remotely and I never noticed it. I'm currently doing contracting for a Polish branch of a US company you would recognise a name of and the only difference between being a contractor (other than tax stuff of course) is that I can't fill security exception requests, and I get asked if I want to work during certain national holidays or not (employees get a day off per default, I have a choice).
  • rkalla 3y ago
    THIS case is exactly why all these companies do this.
• fredsmith219 3y ago
  Not at Google but I was a contractor at a hospital. All the employees got active shooter training. I guess the contractors were meant to be fodder.
  • itronitron 3y ago
    No doubt there are some HR/legal folks wanting to avoid the liability of 'training' someone on something that goes badly. The workaround to that is to have the training in an auditorium and not keep attendance on who is in the room.
    • no_wizard 3y ago
      or mandate the contracting entity do the training. I've seen that in places that tried to be equitable about the relationship with their contractors. Typically the business gets billed for the privilege though
    • saagarjha 3y ago
      This is probably because the training costs money and they don't see the contractors as their responsibility.
  • xwdv 3y ago
    Why would they train you? It’s the responsibility of your parent company and for all they know you’ve already been thoroughly trained for active shootings in numerous other companies you’ve worked at. You are not their problem.
    • wnoise 3y ago
      For something like active-shooter training, location specific details could matter. A generic training isn't the same thing.
      • xwdv 3y ago
        Generic is good enough. Overtraining is bad.
• orangecat 3y ago
  a company that behaves this way should be run out of town It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.
  • gumby 3y ago
    But remember that is because these companies were exploiting the use of contractors to deny them employee protections. True contractors won’t care: they work for themselves and have multiple clients anyway. But these "red" people are employees in all but name, so that the companies can save money and other protections. A small slip up by Google (Apple/FB/MS/tons of others) and these folks get the protection they deserve.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      Exactly. The mistake was thinking that the responsibility stemmed from the employeeing entity. It shouldn't. It's clearly more linked to the type and structure of work performed.
    • bentt 3y ago
      Yeah being an actual contractor/consultant should feel GOOD. You should not be married to a single company for too long. You should have a sense of freedom. There should be a simple test that if a person is working at only one client for too long (3 mo?) then they are to be converted to an employee. There's no reason for these middleman employers to exist except to make people disposable to companies. If that's the case, then they should be cycled in and out with a higher frequency. Nobody should remain a "red badge" at Google for any significant length of time.
      • unixhero 3y ago
        Yes the reason is high risk high reward for the contractor - much higher salary.
    • saagarjha 3y ago
      > True contractors won’t care: they work for themselves and have multiple clients anyway. Some companies will even go as far as to prevent you from having multiple clients. Try asking anyone who contracts for Apple if they have any side work…
• fgsfds028374 3y ago
  [dead]
• resolutebat 3y ago
  > 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. Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion" does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC are discounted completely.
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    If what OP said is true, Google goes at least both ways, then.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Stratoscope 3y ago
    Conversion of Temps (but not Vendors or Contractors) did exist when I started working at Wing (the Alphabet drone delivery company) in 2018. We talked about it when I interviewed there. Well, "interview" is overstating it. They needed some airspace data importers urgently and knew I could do it based on my past work for Google and my experience as a pilot. So we met for lunch, talked about the project, and that was that. I actually thought the "temp" thing was a brilliant hack: we agreed on a decent rate (paid through Adecco), and if they liked my work and I liked working with them, I could convert to FTE at some point (and this was true at the time). Then in August 2019 a memo came out that Temps were no longer eligible for FTE conversion. Even those who were hired with promises of that possibility. And yes, the memo was exactly as you said. The people you'd worked with closely for the last year, who hired you because you were just the person they needed and you already were doing a great job for them? They couldn't vouch for you or communicate with the hiring panel at all. It would be a grind through the standard Google interview process, as if you had no history with the team you are already working with and delivering for. What kind of a fucked-up system is that? The thing that stung the most was that the memo also explained in detail that Interns were and remained eligible for FTE conversion, without any kind of full interview round like a Temp would have to endure. The rationale: Interns were already employees.
• castlecrasher2 3y ago
  >it's a caste system One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound, or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular employees and contractors.
  • thomasahle 3y ago
    > One required by federal policy. Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish between regular employees and contractors, the contractors are considered regular employees. It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as regular employees and treat them like regular employees.
    • oconnor663 3y ago
      If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you bought printer ink, and then lots of people started getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy printer ink. Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new insults might be complicated. But if the goal of a regulation is "do less X", and the chosen mechanism is "you must insult other people when you do X", I'd call that questionable policy design. Coming back from the metaphor, it seems more accurate to say that this regulatory situation with contractors wasn't explicitly designed at all, but rather "emerged" out of previous policies and court decisions. So maybe asking whether it was designed well or poorly is beside the point.
      • pessimizer 3y ago
        This isn't printer ink, this is somebody working for you full time who you don't want to call an employee because it's cheaper not to. The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees. The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to operate in an identical way with identical costs, just meaner. It's not even a perverse incentive resulting from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only superficial, administrative features define an employment relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered to, the fact that you work full time completely under the control of someone for years on end is not sufficient. There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have ever met your "actual" employer. This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the people who pay the people who work in government, it's ideal.
• actionfromafar 3y ago
  Can we please just starting using the term House Elf for this sort of thing? It would be awesome shorthand.
• orochimaaru 3y ago
  This is a case with contractors in all big companies. You are not a company employee. The expectation is that your employer will compensate you and take you out to lunch, etc, etc. But otoh you don’t need to deal with performance appraisals, office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work, take the money.
  • ponector 3y ago
    In such companies you are not truly a contractor, but employee of the bodyshop company which lease you to the client. As the result you deal with politics in both companies: your employer and their client. And bodyshop has performance reviews as well.
    • orochimaaru 3y ago
      Not really. A staffing co like randstadt won’t give you perf reviews etc. You just work through them for tax reason. You hardly even interact with your account manager.
      • pseg134 3y ago
        That’s incredibly disingenuous, randstadt is not a body shop. You are basically lying.
        • orochimaaru 3y ago
          That’s a strange accusation. I never said they were a body shop. They are a staffing company. I’ve known people who have worked through them. Have had good experiences. I just said you could freelance through them. A lot of people do.
  • NetOpWibby 3y ago
    Just a lil' nitpick, you absolutely do have to deal with office politics. Everything else you said was accurate though.
  • 3y ago
• teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I'm sorry to hear about that. I always went out of my way to make the contractors feel seen and important. I'd find their manager from the contracting company and write glowing reviews. I'd talk with them, treat them as equals, give them extra swag I got as an employee. To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.
• _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  I worked at a small company in London and got treated the same way: feeling left out, excluded. It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was actually being done for my own benefit, as I was a contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was fine with it, but it did hurt initially. I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter, he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as his own of course!)
• BMorearty 3y ago
  I've worked as an employee and as a contractor in Silicon Valley (never at Google). While it was nice to be treated like an employee by some companies, my attitude was that it's just understood that as a contractor I'm not as much a member of the team as the employees are, and I'm the first to be let go if the money gets tight. Those were the tradeoffs of the flexibility I got. If contractors are the same as employees, why even have a distinction?
• tgma 3y ago
  You were an adult when you took the job, weren't you? Many people are unhappy and/or quit Google's FTE employment too, and feel undervalued at Google as FTE. The employment agreement is consensual.
  • lmm 3y ago
    Working alongside someone with significantly better employment conditions than you is disproportionately unpleasant, to the point that working under objectively worse conditions feels better.
    • xyzelement 3y ago
      I don't think that's a universal thing. I would rather make 10X working for someone who makes 10X (eg, very common situation in finance) vs making 1X sitting next to someone who also makes 1X (eg, DMV) I get what you are talking about, but it's your choice to obsess more about what the other guy's getting rather than what you are.
    • lazide 3y ago
      Sounds like a personal problem?
    • mtnGoat 3y ago
      So what about when two people have the same title, and tenure but one makes $50k more per year? This is a similar situation and is happening at many companies. I know I make more than some peers that have higher job levels(and tenure in company) then I do.
      • lmm 3y ago
        > So what about when two people have the same title, and tenure but one makes $50k more per year? Strangely enough that's a lot less viscerally unpleasant - perhaps because money is quite abstract (and you never actually see person A get a bigger pile than person B, whereas you notice immediately if there's a team pizza that person B isn't allowed to eat), perhaps because it's understandable that companies want to pay some people more and others less, whereas limiting who gets cheap perks feels like it's just nastiness.
• firecall 3y ago
  It sounds truly awful. In Australia we have laws protecting de facto FTEs. We even have laws mandating that co tractors must add extra to invoices to cover their Pension fund contributions! They have to charge this by law!
  • melbournegrad 3y ago
    Do we? Could you describe the law? I don't think we have much protection for these types of labour hirec(as we'd call them in Aus) arrangements
    • dhx 3y ago
      Refer to the Casual Employment Information Statement (CEIS)[1] and due-to-be-released-on-6-December-2023 Fixed Term Contract Information Statement (FTCIS)[2]. [1] https://www.fairwork.gov.au/sites/default/files/migration/724/casual-employment-information-statement.pdf https://www.fairwork.gov.au/sites/default/files/migration/72... [2] https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/national-employment-standards/fair-work-information-statement https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/national-e...
      • mianos 3y ago
        Refer to the actual relevant pages: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/find-help-for/independent-contractors https://www.fairwork.gov.au/find-help-for/independent-contra... This said, referring to the section 'sham contracting', actually covers, by far, the majority of contractors, which are effectively full time staff.
    • mianos 3y ago
      Correct, we don't. There have been some recent court cases, sponsored by the unions, seeking to include full time benefits to subbies, but it's all a bit hand-wavy and, on the whole, people working with an ABN are not yet equivalent to full time employees.
  • dhx 3y ago
    There are a few patterns common in Australia: 1. Person directly employed on an ongoing basis. The employer pays all insurances, professional memberships and generally contributes to the professional development of the employee. 2. Person directly employed on a fixed-term basis. The employer must offer employment on an ongoing basis if the employee has been engaged for a certain period of time. The employer pays all insurances, professional memberships and generally responsible for professional development of the employee (but generally more limited than what is available to employees under option (1)). 3. Person contracted from a consulting firm, where the consulting firm directly employs the person on an ongoing basis. Once one client engagement ends, the consulting firm try to place the person with a different client as quickly as possible, and will keep paying the person during this process. The consulting firm pays all insurances, professional memberships and generally responsible for professional development of the employee. 4. Person contracted from a labour hire firm, where the labour hire firm directly employs the person on a _casual_ fixed-term basis. The labour hire firm may be required to offer employment on an ongoing basis if the employee has been engaged for a certain period of time with a regular pattern of work apparent. The employee doesn't have to accept (and it typically wouldn't be in the persons or labour hire firms interests to do so). Labour hire employment agreements will typically specify a base rate and then a casual loading on top, so it is clear what the remuneration changes would be if casual employment is changed to ongoing employment (including if this occurs retrospectively). This option is generally used by professionals in unregulated professions such as ICT. Labour hire firms pay insurance, taxes, etc and clients and/or employees generally provide facilities and tools of the trade. 5. Person directly contracted through that person's "personal services income" "business" (note: it's technically not considered a business). This option is generally used by professionals in highly regulated professions such as medicine. The person's "business" pays the person wages, insurances, professional memberships, and more commonly than (4) also facilities and tools of trade. For total remuneration benefits from highest to lowest, it's generally (5) > (4) > (3) > (1) > (2). Ongoing employment of (1), (2) and (3) are generally detrimental versus casual employment of (4) and (5) because a person could be employed for 6 years and have accumulated months of personal/sick leave and be close to having long service leave payable, and be forced out of their employment arrangement for an external reason such as a bad boss, a spouse needing to relocate or a family member some distance away needing care. When the person leaves their employer, they lose all accumulated benefits and start from scratch with their new employer. Options (4) and (5) ensure the person is no worse off when changing employers as the person has been paid the benefits upfront on a continuous basis, rather than waiting for a day that may never occur to obtain those benefits. For job security, there isn't much difference. Sometimes directly employed persons are made redundant before labour hire persons. Sometimes it's the opposite and labour hire persons are first to go. The main difference is whether a person gets 1 day notice and pay (casual employees of labour hire firms), 4 weeks notice and pay, or longer if a person has worked for the same employer for over a year. As employees have to change jobs every few years to grow a career and gain higher remuneration, the redundancy payouts for extended service are minimal compared to missed opportunity cost of not changing jobs. 1 day or 4 weeks notice and pay is negligible in the grand scheme of things, and most of the time labour hire employees would get much more than 1 day notice anyway to avoid the client gaining a bad reputation amongst the pool of labour hire employees. For the order in which people progress through these options in a professional career, it's generally (2)|(1) > (3)|(4) > (5). For overall employment preference of professionals, I'd suggest perhaps most to least preferred of (4) > (5) > (3) > (1) > (2). (4) has less overhead and distraction of (5) as one can focus on their profession without having to worry about frequent changes to tax laws, changes to insurance policies, etc. But eventually to grow further, a professional would be required to switch from option (4) to option (5) and then may need to switch focus away from their profession and towards business priorities such as hiring support staff, engaging other professionals such as accountants, lawyers, insurance brokers, etc. (3) generally provides better remuneration and career growth over (1) and (2) because client engagements are shorter and more varied. But sometimes (1) is a good way to get a foothold into an industry or move into more senior positions (particularly management roles), and may make more sense than options (3), (4) and (5).
• raincom 3y ago
  I worked as a contractor for a decade before, I didn't find it demeaning when employees didn't invite me to team lunches or special meetings. Just charge more for your services. Do you care when you get paid $200 per hr, if you are not invited to employee only meetings/lunches? Definitely not. The issue is about the right pay, not so much about demeaning/or that 'caste system' everyone invokes whenever someone sees unfairness.
  • scottru 3y ago
    Agreed 100%. Our (informal) manual for consultants used to say something like "The cupcakes in the break room are not for you. Most people will not care if you take a cupcake, but somebody will, and we will hear about it. We give you money instead, and we will certainly bring you a cupcake if you want one."
• OJFord 3y ago
  'Caste'? I charitably assume that's not intended as it sounds, that you just meant social class, that it creates a social divide.
• wglb 3y ago
  I had the same issue when I was a contractor at Allstate in the investment department. They were frightened by the Quaker Oats decision where they paid folks as contractors who "forgot" to do their own tax withholding. This was in the days of cubes, and contractors got the ones that were two folks per cube and there were other things. Some of us did get hired and became "real". But the concerns that led to this kind of treatment were quite real.
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• phs318u 3y ago
  I worked for one of the largest banks in Australia as a contractor. When I first joined, "we don't discriminate based on the employment type". The perm staff were wonderful in that regard. Then a new COO joined. He was a fucking sociopath. First we started getting locked out of various internal sites, needing to "reapply" for security reasons. Then they introduced the email badging that appended a big "(EXTERNAL!)" to your name in the address book. Then, if anyone attached anything to an email that included even one contractor as an addressee, they'd see a big WARNING! reminding them that they were potentially leaking the keys to the kingdom to us untrustworthy SOBs. Then in November a big rumour started going around that contractors were going to be "surprised" with a forced 6-week holiday (normal shutdown for contractors was 2 weeks over the break). I politely called out the COO directly on the internal Yammer, asking him to please put an end to the rumour mill and just confirm or deny whether it was true. I said the company would be within its rights to make that call but reminded him that "contractors are people too" and given the time of year, might want to know if their services weren't needed in January. I got a bunch of support from employees (and the managers I worked for) - perm and contractor alike. Many perms were embarassed and apologetic for this outcasting of contractors (way to increase morale Mr.COO). Anyway, within 24 hours, I was pulled out of a meeting and escorted out of the building. The entire Yammer forum was nuked from orbit (I still have a couple of screenshots) and I ended up in their non-existent "black book". I know this latter point because in the intervening years I would occasionally get pinged by recruiters for roles at that bank. I'd laugh and told them I was probably still in the black book and to contact so-and-so to confirm whether I'd be welcomed back. They were always surprised when they did so and were bluntly told that I was not welcome. Since then I've been a perm at a couple of places were I had hiring responsibility and teams that included contractors and I ALWAYS made a point of treating them EXACTLY the same. I also never encountered another organisation that was as fucked in their treatment of contractors.
• lazide 3y ago
  Blame the IRS and Microsoft. [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-...]
• 77pt77 3y ago
  > it's a caste system All social institutions eventually become that. It's inescapable.
• skellington 3y ago
  LAWYERS and insane politicians are the reason why it is this way. Google is just working around all the BS which unfortunately leads to these bizarre behaviors.
• sirsinsalot 3y ago
  Referring to it as a caste system is pretty offensive tbh. It's a distinction between different types of highly paid tech worker ... not a system of oppression. In the UK we have IR35 laws that say contractors must be distinct from employees in various ways. The legislation is a shitshow. It was supposed to be a way to protect people from zero-hours contracts but ended up being a way to extort more tax from businesses. As a result, contractors face very odd rules to ensure that if HMRC (the UK tax body) comes knocking ... everything seems legit. This means everything is policed from how you write emails to if you pay for the Christmas team meal.
• TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
  The way you should think about it is they didn’t want to spend the money on a full employee for that position. If they were forced to do that they just wouldn’t hire for that position. Or that position would be as competitive as any other job at Google and probably would not be the same people that are currently red badges. There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.