usernamepc's comments

Not really. Tech stocks are more volatile because more of their value (compared to someone like GE or P&G) is based on hypothetical growth projections- revenue and profit. Any market news can swing these stocks wildly- up or down. Hortonworks HDP dropped 35% y'day just because they decided to raise more money $100M and investors felt that something is wrong.

Like many others have mentioned, the client companies don't want to be involved in hiring 1099s directly because of the liability (lookup google/odesk). What our startup http://www.oncontracting.com is doing instead is making the staffing space more transparent and empowering contractors with information- so you can lookup the various preferred staffing agencies that service certain clients and then shop among them to go with whoever charges the lowest markup.

Aww- my 5 year old twin boys had picked up their "Don't drive like my brother" from listening to their show and the Cars movie- and use it often. So sad they won't get to enjoy them. RIP Tom

There's already plenty of laws to regulate them and they work pretty well for the most part.

The problem is if a large company wants to hire contractors directly- and not use a staffing agency. Thats where the laws are unclear and contractors are the ones paying for it.

I'm not aware of how it works in those fields, but as I see it, trying to burden companies with unclear laws and force artificial behavior is what is causing the problem in this case.

For example- A large company needs a contractor and is willing to pay $75/hr for 12 months.

Option 1- Hires you as a contractor directly for $75/hr on 1099. You get paid well, but if they are not very savvy about independent contractor compliance, you can still go after them in the future stating you should have been an employee for various reasons. The IRS could also go after them for not classifying you correctly and claim taxes missed. Good for you- Risky for Client.

Option 2- Give the req to their staffing agencies and offer to pay them the $75/hr. A Staffing agency finds and hires you as a permanent employee- pays you $40/hr with benefits. Terminates you after 12 months. Large Company ended up paying the same but has much lower risk of being considered employer because the staffing agency was paying you and taking care of your healthcare, etc. Same deal for Client but low risk- Bad deal for you - Good deal for Staffing Agency.

In the quest to try and force the law upon a company, we successfully complicated and introduced a middle-man into this process.

They don't want job-seekers cherry picking or getting confused between full-time jobs and contract jobs (You can sometimes get a higher pay-rate contracting than as a full-time at the same company). I think, they also fear it reduces their recruiting brand. They want to make it appear that getting a job at X is really hard, which is why they boast about their low acceptance rate, etc. If people discovered there are hundred or thousands of contract jobs at the company, it reduces the allure. Use of contractors is also often not deemed as a 'good' workforce practice - similar to outsourcing, mainly because of stories of exploitation, etc. It also leads to complications- think customers buying some sophisticated or sensitive equipment or service from you discovering that you had a bunch of contractors building it.

I believe these laws were first put in place to prevent factory owners from exploiting poorly paid workers- and weren't really meant for highly paid tech workers. The problem with requiring companies to hire everyone as employees is exactly the reason companies try to find ways to dodge it in my opinion. If the Govt has a problem collecting taxes from contractors that is a different problem and should be addressed separately.

There are two reasons (both sort of hard to fix) for why contracting is screwed up.

1. Co-employment- Large companies like Google or Apple would love to hire contractors directly but are very scared of being sued by contractors that can claim they were actually employees-not contractors because of the unclear rules around who is/is not an employee. So they introduce a staffing agency in between to become the 'employer of record' and offset the risk.

Things like hiring and paying contractors directly, giving them laptops, keeping them for long terms, training them, etc. actually makes a stronger case for contractors that might want to sue them, which is why you see the weird ways these companies treat contractors (not allowing them into morale events, restricting how long they can work, etc.)

How to Fix- Labor laws would need to change, making it clear to companies how they can hire contractors without becoming liable to be held as employers. New labor marketplaces like Taskrabbit, Homejoy, Workmarket, etc. will push lawmakers into doing something soon, but this is going to be tough given how strongly labor unions are against this.

2. Non-transparency. Large companies don't like to advertise that they hire contractors. They instead give their open jobs to staffing agencies, who are not allowed to disclose the client name when they advertise the job on job boards. The staffing agencies are incentivized to provide the lowest cost engineer that meets the minimum bar and these are usually the engineers on visas that need to find a project soon or leave the country.

How to Fix- If large companies publicly share all their current contract job openings (reqs) just like they do their full-time jobs. If that happens, anyone can apply to those jobs and even nominate the staffing agencies they'd be willing to work through. They already have Vendor Management Systems (VMS) that they use to share their reqs with staffing agencies, so its just a matter of will.

In the meantime, we (http://www.oncontracting.com) are trying to solve this non-transparency by crowd-sourcing the list of preferred staffing agencies for the Fortune 1000 companies. Contractors can avoid bad labor brokers and instead discover who the preferred staffing agencies for any Fortune 1000 company are and approach them directly.

I'm sure I could learn but I'll never be at a level to be really productive, so I find it better to use my time on doing customer development, product management (which I can do), sales and finding ways to make money to pay the rent and the contractors I hire to design and code. This model, while often considered 'bad' by the experts, works for me- so just running with it. In case you are curious we're live at http://www.oncontracting.com. A website that makes it easy to find onsite contract jobs at Fortune 1000 companies.

The best recruiters at staffing agencies function like talent agents and prefer to place contractors on gig after gig because they know what they are looking for and won't waste their time with irrelevant opportunities. The spammers you see are usually newbie recruiters from bad agencies.

Our website http://www.oncontracting.com aims to help contractors discover the best staffing agencies and recruiters based on the clients they have. The idea is if you are interested in contract jobs at Google or eBay, you should be able to discover and connect with only recruiters that can get you gigs there.

As expected. Single non-coding founder. Why do i bother? For a few weeks after the rejection I find myself very highly motivated.

Maybe it was to preempt something like this. Seattle City council calling out Amazon to treat its security guards better and to let them unionize. http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-city-council-amazon-sec...

The host was Mark Haines, a long time host of Squawk Box, a daily morning business program on CNBC following the stock market. He passed away recently. He had a no-nonsense interviewing style that would make many CEOs, used to softball questions, uncomfortable - was fun to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Haines

I think they took IT staffing companies like Adecco, Manpower(contractors that work 40hrs/week at clients) instead of IT Consulting (Accenture, etc.) or freelance tech consultants to calculate this- It is too low for someone that calls themselves "tech consultant".

May I humbly suggest my site http://www.oncontracting.com I'm still testing it in Seattle but would happily work on adding new content from elsewhere.

Ah- No horror story - but I did have to bid my time in Corporate America for 10 years waiting to get my greencard and eligible to start my own business. So now I'm in my 40s doing a startup. I feel like Ed Bundy in Modern Family having a baby in his 60s. There's pluses and minuses, but I'll get by!