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Well said! You'll never outbid a body shop. They'll essentially spend whatever it takes to get the workers here and bill them out for 3x whatever they paid. If
by jahmaiosullivan 12y ago
Well said! You'll never outbid a body shop. They'll essentially spend whatever it takes to get the workers here and bill them out for 3x whatever they paid. If you as the product company don't like it tough luck. This is because the people is the product for these companies, product companies have other things to concentrate on.
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoIf they're charging 3x whatever they paid, that pushes up prices for the companies hiring the body shops, which incentivizes finding cheaper competitors to body shops in the labor market -- like hiring domestic workers, for example. The pricing mechanisms of the market will optimize out a balance.
- tptacek 12y agoJust a random, unhelpful ping into this conversation to point out that the economics of billing out a programmer for "3x" (I assume you mean "3x the fully-loaded cost of the programmer as an FTE for the consultancy, broken out by hour") is a lot more complicated than this thread makes it sound. Companies aren't simply using those "3x" contractors as a shortcut to avoid finding and hiring full-timers. A big chunk of that "x" is business value created by the consultancy and sold to the client; the biggest chunk of that involves risk management.
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoSure, great. Honestly, I don't mind what companies want to do with contractors and contracting. I've been a contractor for a short time. If a big chunk of the 3x is business value created, great, go ahead. My only actual point here is that rather than trying to tailor a visa just for the special needs of Silicon Valley start-ups, we should be tailoring high-skilled work-visa programs for letting the market decide what constitutes high-value work, viz: work that people will pay a lot for.