[funkjunky]

It depends. For some contractor jobs, they need high level engineers short term and don't want to deal with the normal Google hiring process, which is expensive, difficult, and time consuming for many current employees (most technical interviews at Google are carried out by a random assortment of other engineers). In those cases, they can and will often pay equal or higher salaries to the contractor.

In my case, the equivalent job at Google definitely carried more responsibilities, and they were paid more. However, I believe Google paid my consulting company more than the FTE salary for each of us, with my company taking their cut off the top (at least, that's what I heard).

In short, it's complicated