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Don't Hire That Developer

itmanagement.earthweb.com

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Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#31

Post by ivenkys »

cookiecaper wrote: post #28
ivenkys wrote: post #22

I am not sure why this is not self-evident. Practical Definitions: An Employee is part of the liability on a company's balance-sheet, its a cost to be pruned when the going gets tough. IN any large company worth its name he is just a number on the wrong side of the Balance Sheet, how good/loyal he is almost completely irrelevant. A Contractor is a resource and his cost comes from the Project's budget. A manager's pos…

"Given a choice a Manager will almost always opt for a contractor and to top it all of Contractors earn more cash." This hasn't been my experience at real-world medium-size companies around here. I have friends in several, but almost everyone's IT department has a VP or director that has a policy of "absolutely no contractors", so I can't get a foot in the door at any of these places. If they want something done, the…

My experience has been mainly with large/very large Financial institutions and this is almost always the case.

Manager gets money for Project , hires contractors , if project deemed successful , more money, more contractors , if project deemed failure , fire contractors move on. Cycle repeats.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#32

Post by ojbyrne »

"but once you get let go as an employee it’s harder to find your next job because you aren’t always in that job-seeking mode like a contractor is"

From an employee's point of view, the solution is simple. Always be in that job-seeking mode.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#33

Post by Revisor »

Let me turn that around: What is a better course for an employer, say an internet startup or a small software / webdesign company? To hire contractors or employees?

My first thought would since software/web is the core activity, employ them (bind them closer).

What do you think?

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#34

Post by notahacker »

philwelch wrote: post #26
zepolen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you could split those 60 hours between 3 projects making it 20 hours a piece which won't be as tragic for accounting.

Or just do 40 hours of work every week. If you cut out some of the time-wasting employees have to endure you might be able to get the work done in that amount of time anyway.

surely you have your own additional "timewasting" when it comes to looking for opportunities, convincing employers you actually have the skills to do the job, dealing with corporate departments who think you should be filling in the same paperwork as the regular employees do at the start of their employment for each individual project (the only part you might actually be able to say no to...) and managing your own accounts.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#35

Post by felideon »

After all, I got an invitation to the company holiday party while Sam stayed home counting his stack of contracting money.

Keep the holiday party, give me my check---I have a family to take out to a nice holiday vacation.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#36

Post by mgkimsal »

donaq wrote: post #2

Speaking as someone who is currently a contractor dealing with arcane legacy code without documentation (as is usually the case in my experience), institutional knowledge matters.

Your point has some merit, but just by being an employee some place vs a contractor doesn't mean you'll automatically have that institutional knowledge. The only benefit I've had in some employment situations is knowing early on that the people with answers had already left, rather than spending time researching who would know the answers to XYZ.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#37

Post by stuff4ben »

MJR wrote: post #6

He got paid more and he has more expenses. No health coverage - he'll be lucky to find a group policy with an organization or professional association. No matching 401K, no tuition reimbursement, and on and on. It's not a valid comparison. Line up the employee's benefits and income against the contractor's expenses and income and then see where you come out. Then realize you've only looked at one piece of the equatio…

He said he was getting paid more than twice the amount his fried was. Are you saying that your benefits equal your salary? Highly doubtful unless your salary is artificially low (I assume you're a developer-type). Benefits aren't that high for contractors, usually it's just the healthcare that gets you. But even if you pay a non-group, family rate, it's only 15-20K a year which is chump change if you're charging $100+ an hour. Then you get into tax deductions that you just don't get as a full time employee.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#38

Post by ollysb »

donaq wrote: post #2

Speaking as someone who is currently a contractor dealing with arcane legacy code without documentation (as is usually the case in my experience), institutional knowledge matters.

Most developers only tend to stick around in a job for a couple of years. Going the employee route isn't a guarantee that you'll always have the original developers available.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#39

Post by davidw »

notahacker wrote: post #34
philwelch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just do 40 hours of work every week. If you cut out some of the time-wasting employees have to endure you might be able to get the work done in that amount of time anyway.

surely you have your own additional "timewasting" when it comes to looking for opportunities, convincing employers you actually have the skills to do the job, dealing with corporate departments who think you should be filling in the same paperwork as the regular employees do at the start of their employment for each individual project (the only part you might actually be able to say no to...) and managing your own ac…

You don't bill for that stuff, though.

Re: Don't Hire That Developer

#40

Post by sethg »

The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience, which, as I understand, is not atypical for a developer working at a startup.

I worked for five years for MetaCarta, which sold geographic search technology, primarily to government agencies and oil companies. In April we were aquired by Nokia, which runs its own search engine (http://maps.ovi.com/) and wants to improve its local search capabilities. Nokia hired all of the MetaCarta engineers, offering us retention bonuses. In July, Nokia sold the government-and-oil end of MetaCarta’s business to Qbase, a company in Ohio that I had never heard of before, licensing the technology to Qbase and keeping the engineers.

If Nokia had considered the institutional knowledge of MetaCarta’s engineering staff to be worthless, they would have just bought the IP and not given the engineers any particular incentive to stay on.

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