[AmericanChopper]

A contractor is supposed to be a person operating a business that provides services on a contract basis, a contractors business is no different from any other business that provides professional services. A contractor engages in this work knowing that they are exchanging all of their employment rights for better remuneration. This is how I personally manage to get paid anywhere between $200-$500/hour, and the only person abusing the system here is me taking advantage of companies inability to hire enough permanent staff.

[pjerem]

You, as an experienced adult contractor, can say this.

Now imagine being a naive post-teenager being offered to work in "the greatest video game company of all time" but under the sole little condition that you are hired as a contractor.

It works with any big name that you would be personally proud to work for.

And what is even more saddening is that the more the brand is loved (Nintendo is part of the childhood of basically any today engineer), the more they can abuse those tactics. For a lot of people, working for $BIG_COOL_BRAND is already felt as such a gift that they would sign anything without negotiating.

Like everything in life, the older you get, the less you fall in those traps, but that’s not a problem : there is a continuous influx of new people ready to fall for the same tricks.

[AmericanChopper]

This applies to any type of employment for a “prestigious” brand, or any other type of “dream job” situation. Any company that has that status can get away with inferior working conditions, because their passionate job applicants find the work rewarding for reasons other than money. This is why the entire video games industry has a reputation for poor working conditions.

Absolutely nothing you’ve said has anything at all to do with contracting.

[barry-cotter]

> Now imagine being a naive post-teenager

Adult. The word you’re looking for is adult.

[Sohcahtoa82]

While on a literal "definition of adult" level, yes, this is correct, let's not pretend that a 22 year old that likely just finished a degree and wants to work for Nintendo making games has a significantly different mentality than a 16 year old that looks forward to earning a degree and then working for Nintendo making games.

[EarlKing]

That's exactly the word they're not looking for. They don't want to admit that they made poor life choices and paid for them. Once you hit the age of majority you're a functioning adult and you don't get to make excuses anymore. If you make a bad deal then you make a bad deal. The trick is to realize that "bad deals" can be transmuted into good deals with a little spiritual alchemy. In my case I traded roughly a year at Amazon and some Bohemian-style living to make a pile of cash that I'm now pouring into my own business. That option is not for everyone, of course, so in other cases that alchemy simply means trading your time at $SHITCOMPANY for a better job somewhere else. After all: If you have the name of a FAANG on your resume that opens up a lot of doors, right?

TL;DR People really need an education in career development, and clearly they're not getting it.

[munk-a]

On whose shoulders does the lack of a good education about labour rights lie on? The individual or the society that values bootstrap-pull-up-ness above all else?

People should be allowed to make mistakes in life, that's how we get innovation and economic growth - experiments are sometimes good and sometimes bad. In a lot of cases these new labour market entrants don't have any comprehension of what working actually means.

Allowing big powerful corporations to beat up young individuals doesn't benefit society, it entrenches power which tends to lead to corruption.

The example you're offering is working for a year at Amazon and tightening your belt a little - a large portion of Americans make just enough money so that they can fall deeper into debt each year while slowly. I, unlike you, worked for a bit at a video game company and also had to tighten my belt... and I managed to save maybe 13k while not drinking or partying or indulging in any luxuries.

Your experience was extremely lucky.

[EarlKing]

> On whose shoulders does the lack of a good education about labour rights lie on?

Doesn't matter. You only have control over one person: You.

> Allowing big powerful corporations to beat up young individuals doesn't benefit society, it entrenches power which tends to lead to corruption.

No, it really doesn't, but do you have any control over that?

> The example you're offering is working for a year at Amazon and tightening your belt a little - a large portion of Americans make just enough money so that they can fall deeper into debt each year while slowly.

That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford, have families they cannot afford, and otherwise spend well beyond their means. They're trying to have the life their parents and grandparents had and they're trying to have it immediately even though economic conditions do not support that. In short: They made bad decisions.

> I, unlike you, worked for a bit at a video game company and also had to tighten my belt... and I managed to save maybe 13k while not drinking or partying or indulging in any luxuries.

Only? Did you live on your own or with your parents or roommates? Did you have a car or did you use public transportation? And how long is "a bit"?

> Your experience was extremely lucky.

Luck had nothing to do with it. I don't have a wife and kids. I don't own my own home. I sacrificed having that immediately in order to get ahead. Now that things are beginning to work out for me I can explore the possibility of having a family. That wasn't luck... that was planning.

[shadowgovt]

> Doesn't matter. You only have control over one person: You.

That's a good self-reliant attitude, but in practice we are social creatures and we have influence beyond our own bodies. One can consider what one can do alone without interacting with others and what society should do about a deficiency in its constitution (little c) at the same time.

In the middle of the 20th century, two school systems in Virginia shut down their public education for overtly racist reasons. One entire class of high school students just missed public high school. A lot of them pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got a GED. They deserve everything that their hard work brought them. And they also deserved The reparations the state government eventually paid them as a compromise around the fact that it violated their civil right to a public education because they had the "wrong" skin color.

> That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford...

You may not have heard because the news is not widespread, but this upcoming generation (and the one currently in their twenties) will statistically on average have a worse life than the generation you're thinking of that bought houses with the money they made working. Everything is a McMansion now. Housing prices are insane for the same houses relative to the average American paycheck. There is no amount of bootstrapping and rugged individualism that will make life better off for the average American unless something changes drastically. And those young people have an absolute right to be pissed that the social structures that their parents' generation took advantage of were looted and gutted or allowed to rot by the time they came of age, and that the people with authority who should be solving new problems as they came along have proven utterly inept at dealing with modern challenges.

> That wasn't luck... that was planning.

Well, planning and luck. You didn't get in a car accident and end up stuck with debilitating medical bills when you were working a job that wouldn't offer insurance (And if every job you've worked came with health insurance, statistically that's an extraordinary stroke of luck). You have the luxury of living somewhere where public transportation was possible, either you were born there or at some point you had the means to get there.

And even with all that luck, you have sacrificed things that the previous generation could have assumed were a given by your age. Things you would have had access to if salaries had kept pace with the GDP. A pace that is set by policy that can be changed by law.

So by all means, in the context you find yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and have pride in your accomplishments. You have earned them. But living in complacency that things just are the way they are when they were simply not that way for the previous generation or pretending you have no control over that and representative democracy is a cop-out. It's abdicating your fraction of citizen responsibility to build a better democracy for the next generation.

(... Primary elections are this month, and on average only a quarter of voters show up. If you vote, your vote is proportionally speaking four times as valuable ;) ).

[Dylan16807]

> That's exactly the word they're not looking for. They don't want to admit that they made poor life choices and paid for them.

Why are you making this personal?

> Once you hit the age of majority you're a functioning adult and you don't get to make excuses anymore. If you make a bad deal then you make a bad deal.

That's a very cruel way to look at the situation, when many new adults have zero negotiating experience.

> TL;DR People really need an education in career development, and clearly they're not getting it.

Yes, they do. Not getting that education, as a child, is not a poor life choice! It's not a high schooler's fault to not get a good education there, and it doesn't suddenly become your fault the day you turn 18.

You can expect someone to learn these things after some years in the workforce. Before that it's all the more important for society to keep things in line and prevent abuses.

[EarlKing]

> Why are you making this personal?

Why are you avoiding responsibility? You don't control the world. You only control yourself. Change the things you can change.

> That's a very cruel way to look at the situation, when many new adults have zero negotiating experience.

Almost no adults have any negotiating experience. That doesn't change anything. You're still responsible for your own actions. You will make mistakes. You will fail. You're still expected to get up and try again.

> Yes, they do. Not getting that education, as a child, is not a poor life choice!

...but refusing to seek it out as an adult is. I didn't have someone to teach me these things. I learned them the hard way like everyone else.

> It's not a high schooler's fault to not get a good education there, and it doesn't suddenly become your fault the day you turn 18.

Actually, yes, that's exactly what it means. As an adult you are responsible for your own condition. No one else owes you anything.

> You can expect someone to learn these things after some years in the workforce. Before that it's all the more important for society to keep things in line and prevent abuses.

...which isn't going to happen. OTOH, individuals can learn how to adapt to the way things are and make things better for themselves. I find it interesting that teaching people how to take advantage of the present system and better themselves is viewed as "making this personal" and somehow a bad thing, whereas complaining and accomplishing nothing is not.

[Dylan16807]

> I find it interesting that teaching people how to take advantage of the present system and better themselves is viewed as "making this personal" and somehow a bad thing, whereas complaining and accomplishing nothing is not.

Yeah I sometimes find stuff I completely imagined interesting too.

The 'making it personal' part was the part I quoted. You took a general comment about contracting relationships and turned it into a claim that pjerem specifically "made poor life choices and paid for them".

It wasn't about anything else you said.

[pjerem]

> You will make mistakes. You will fail. You're still expected to get up and try again.

Ok true. Nobody said otherwise here. But are you implying it’s ok for companies to exploit this natural naivety ?

[crooked-v]

> a person operating a business that provides services on a contract basis

That's obviously not the case with the contractors described in the story, who are blatantly just direct employees in all regards except with less benefits.

[AmericanChopper]

That’s how pretty much all of my contracting engagements work.

[shadowgovt]

You are in a radically different industry from game testing. Game testing is taking advantage of loopholes in contract law and the naivety of a relatively young employee base.

[AmericanChopper]

What loopholes do you think they taking advantage of specifically? Because the article doesn’t describe any. It’s mostly about how they’re treated like “second class citizens” compared to the permanent staff. Which is exactly what contracting is, and exactly how it works for me. In reality, contractors aren’t citizens at all, and not being allowed to use the nice facilities, or eat the free snacks or whatever is just a part of the role. Whether you’re a games tester or anything else.