[mouzogu]

You can see it's quite prevalent: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-20/contra...

In my experience they operate with 100s of external partners. You will find a Faang engineering team with maybe 1-3 internal devs, and 5-10 sub-contracted.

It's a bit frustrating because you're expected to do same level engineering work for maybe 1/2 or 1/3 of the pay.

[nivertech]

That's not about SW devs, more about data entry / dataset labeling / "turkers".

I did saw something that you described long time ago at a multinational company, where the employees were mostly managers and team leads, and most devs were contractors. But they gradually moved to a model were they have R&D centers in a lower cost regions were the developers are hired as local employees.

Advantages of hiring SW devs/engineers as contractors at big public companies:

1. they can be hired and fired with the short notice (elasticity)

2. the HR process is less scrupulous and/or bureaucratic (since it's not a permanent position)

3. usually contractors are still can be hired, even when there is a freeze on hiring new employees

4. it can be treated as a trial period for potential new employees

5. most contractors (i.e. those hired via agency, not self-employed) see employee status as a coveted promotion

6. public companies don't count contractors as employees but as service providers, so Revenue-per-employee / Profit-per-employee will be much higher

[mouzogu]

> elasticity

these are human beings you're talking about.

> most contractors (i.e. those hired via agency, not self-employed) see employee status as a coveted promotion

there are non-hire agreements between vendor and the clients.

whatever kind of euphemistic spin people want to put on it, it's a form of exploitation.

[nivertech]

> these are human beings you're talking about.

I know, I was a contractor, and I think I'm mostly human being.

> there are non-hire agreements between vendor and the clients.

Large companies have a lot of leverage on agencies supplying contractors (I myself run one in the past). They dictate the margins and after which period they can hire the people supplied by the agencies. I think it's about the same cost as paying a headhunter.

As a rule usually the larger company dictates the contract terms to the smaller one.