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The funny thing is that he's replying to me, one of the people who has stopped using California contractors except among trusted relationships (which is non-Upwork).

I don't know what your experience is with contractors (I use Upwork - which is an awesome platform - extensively) but that's not it. The savings come from the fact that you don't need 100% of their time, you don't need to recruit, and you can slide easily along the performance vs. price on the scale.

One is when you want an expert: for instance, we don't retain in-house counsel. We don't need it 100% of the time, but for the short periods we need it, we need the 99th percentile guy. And we can't afford the 99th percentile guy 100% of the time.

And then it's when you want drudge work but it's spiky: like you need things labelled or whatever. Upwork is like AWS for people and it's really, really good for all the reasons AWS is good.

If I suddenly have to work out payroll and benefits and all that shit, that's instantly non-viable. It's all right, the world is a big place, and things I can contract out I can just as well contract out outside of California and eventually outside the US. 90% of the time I'm doing Anglophone-adjacent nations anyway. Americans are too expensive for this work and they're equivalent performance anyway.

And for the stuff like law? Well, there I'll go with the 99th percentile guy. I know he's powerful enough to get his carve-out (as he has).