I mean, you joke. But this is just the definition of contract labor.
In theory, contractors earn sizably more than salaried workers. If you’re bringing in $200/hr, you can get away with working six months a year. Or working two years and then taking a year off.
But because so much of this contract work has been outsourced overseas or managed through networks of subcontractors, you end up with people actually earning a $30-60/hr salary for work that’s getting billed at $200/hr by some gatekeeping intermediary. And you end up with a steady stream of people in-between jobs whose skills atrophy and whose interests in the long-term function of the project don’t align.
Alternatively, you’ve got a bunch of these little indie pop-ups that churn out reskinned GACHA crap based on whatever happens to be popular at a given moment. And the name of the game is to get enough end-users to win yourself a corporate buyout, then dash out the back door with all the cash you can stuff in your pockets.
The idea of seasonal or boom-bust employment isn’t unworkable on its face. But without labor solidarity or a professional organization to prop up wages, you just end up with a bunch of middle-men and corporate suits draining the lay workers dry.
I had a job as a programmer consultant once making $50,000 a year and I was being billed out at $185 an hour so I was making like 1/7 of my bill rate. And my bill rate was only that high because I have an advanced degree in a field utterly unrelated to programming. I want to say the company I consulted at was getting screwed even worse than me, but I was actually good at programming and cleaned up a mess they had already thrown millions of dollars at in-house.
I mean, you joke. But this is just the definition of contract labor.
In theory, contractors earn sizably more than salaried workers. If you’re bringing in $200/hr, you can get away with working six months a year. Or working two years and then taking a year off.
But because so much of this contract work has been outsourced overseas or managed through networks of subcontractors, you end up with people actually earning a $30-60/hr salary for work that’s getting billed at $200/hr by some gatekeeping intermediary. And you end up with a steady stream of people in-between jobs whose skills atrophy and whose interests in the long-term function of the project don’t align.
Alternatively, you’ve got a bunch of these little indie pop-ups that churn out reskinned GACHA crap based on whatever happens to be popular at a given moment. And the name of the game is to get enough end-users to win yourself a corporate buyout, then dash out the back door with all the cash you can stuff in your pockets.
The idea of seasonal or boom-bust employment isn’t unworkable on its face. But without labor solidarity or a professional organization to prop up wages, you just end up with a bunch of middle-men and corporate suits draining the lay workers dry.
I had a job as a programmer consultant once making $50,000 a year and I was being billed out at $185 an hour so I was making like 1/7 of my bill rate. And my bill rate was only that high because I have an advanced degree in a field utterly unrelated to programming. I want to say the company I consulted at was getting screwed even worse than me, but I was actually good at programming and cleaned up a mess they had already thrown millions of dollars at in-house.