Never before have I felt quite so intense a need to pick holes in an article, but Computerworld’s recently published opinion piece, written by the managing director of Intergen Wellington, has provided just such an incentive.
The article has been written with just the right amount of skew to the facts, that it comes across as the worst kind of turf protectionism. And since it is somewhat broadly aimed in my direction, I feel qualified to make a few comments.
To provide a bit of background, for the click-lazy, the basic premise is that contractors are -not- the answer to an IT skills shortage. On the hypothesis, I make no immediate comment. But I disagree with the evidence Stewart uses to arrive at his conclusion:
Why can’t I employ someone for less than $X an hour? The answer to that one is that demand has created contractors and contractors have created soaring rates that then elevate hourly rates in the IT sector across the board.
Demand may have created contractors, but it’s a bit rich to blame the freelance industry for soaring rates. Particularly without a good deal of statistical evidence to back it up.
In the past, I’ve worked as a permanent employee of an IT services/development company. I now work as a contractor for an IT services/development company. My external rate as a permie was about 50% higher than my current external rate as a contractor (the former company had vastly inflated ideas about the value of its services). This is one, albeit anecdotal, example that contracting has not unnecessarily driven up rates — in fact, from the client’s perspective, my being a contractor has arguably had little impact on the overall dollar figure for the project, if you compare the cost of doing business with the other company.
When an IT worker steps out on their own and becomes a contractor, they are stepping out of the mainstream and out of the fold where, more often than not, their learning curve diminishes to a horizontal path since they are generally no longer in a realm where they experience ongoing training, mentoring and the opportunity to learn.
This is trite to the point of being insulting. The idea that the mainstream, permanently employed “fold” holds some mystical ability to aid in the career path and ongoing education of the worker is nothing short of hyperbole. My personal experience as both a permie and a contractor (in both NZ and the UK) holds that there is -no- difference between permanent employment and freelance positions offering the opportunity to learn. In fact, I think I may have learned more in contract positions than I have elsewhere.
As a contractor, you are expected to be a self-starter, able to jump straight in and be immediately productive. In-depth knowledge of every aspect of software development is impossible (I defy anyone to cover the entire Java API set, all the external/3rd party libraries and packages that are available, without burning out a good percentage of brain cells in the process) so the dilligent contractor learns what he/she needs to know on the spot, or after hours. Chances are, you’ve done something similar before, so you draw on that knowledge in a new area. Or you burn the midnight oil and figure it out at home.
This is not to mention the long-term ‘tenured’ employees, so rooted in their knowledge that they’ll spend years without learning something new, and the legacy support tasks given to junior employees, whom are left with little opportunity for personal growth.
There are plenty of other examples on both the contract and permanent sides of the fence.
It’s these very people that we have invested time and resources into in the hope that they will be around to mentor the next generation of IT workers moving through the ranks. It’s for this reason that we invest so heavily and believe so strongly in a graduate programme. But without a pool of experienced mentors to take the graduates under their wings, the value of such programmes is devalued and the quality of training is diluted.
This, of course, assumes that a contractor, jealous of his/her skills, and resentful of those in permanent employ, will thus hoard said knowledge, perform only the task at hand, and reject communication with the ‘unworthy’. Quite the opposite is true in reality. Contractors are just as suitable a mentor from a technical perspective. I can think of a number of cases in my career where mentoring has come from both permanent and contract sources. But perhaps Stewart is justifiably worried that one of the lessons the naive employee may learn from an evil contractor, is that freelancing is a good career choice.
Some vendors have endeavoured to combat the skill shortage by jumping on the contractor bandwagon themselves and employing contractors, or even outsourcing overseas. While this is a financially practical solution in the here and now, it does nothing to invest in the ICT sector in New Zealand or help pave the way for a robust and leading edge pool of IT talent in the future.
I agree that outsourcing overseas does little to invest in the ICT sector in NZ. But to use that flimsy argument to cover his contractor angst is a bit of a stretch. The assumption, once again, is that the nasty contractor clasps their hard-won knowledge to their bosom like Gollum with the One Ring, and thus contributes nothing to the overall pool of IT talent.
Finally, Stewart lists a number of pros and cons comparing vendor delivery with, I assume, a project staffed entirely by contractors (which is, in itself, contrary to every project I’ve worked on where there has been a modicum of freelance involvement). He chooses this point to descend into almost complete fantasy.
The first benefit of a vendor sourced solution over contractors, is that with one you get a team “with one unified purpose and clearly delineated roles working towards agreed objectives and timeframes“, and the other, “a collection of individuals with no common purpose“.
We’re all milling around like a headless chickens, I suppose?
I couldn’t disagree more. Commonality of purpose for a contractor team who, by his own admission, are more senior in experience (and thus, less likely to be milling around in purposeless confusion) is that of product delivery. Purpose is driven by strong leadership and stronger vision, which can be found both in permanent and freelance staff.
I also disagree that somehow a vendor “ensures you are getting the best, most suitable and up-to-date technology for your solution“. This may be true of some vendors — but not all. In the past, I’ve had the misfortune to see technology solutions promoted because of the most base financial reasons, and out of political (in the business sense) expediency. Stewart provides no evidence that there is any difference between vendors and a team of contractors, in this regard. Oh yes, we can read between the lines here, but his intent is so blatant, it seems churlish to point it out.
I also find myself disagreeing with a number of the “cons” he lists for the use of a contract team. That they somehow “strip the ICT sector of mentors for graduates and juniors” — which I’ve mentioned earlier has never been the case in my experience — and that the “hourly rate often means that there is no urgency for deadline“. As to deadlines, I personally have never felt any less pressure to meet a deadline as a contractor. Agile methodologies may have helped, but much as I’d prefer a contract to continue longer, I certainly don’t drag my feet to ensure that longevity.
His poorly thought out missive aside, I agree with the fundamental premise. Contractors are not the answer to a skills shortage. They are but one of the answers. A healthy market requires a variety of different sources: vendors, contract, internal IT departments with graduates moving through the ranks, etc.
The problem is that Stewart draws a picture villifying the freelance IT worker as both cause and effect. Some kind of vicious circle that must be broken free of for the greater good of the industry. He paints for us a stereotypical contractor that is more caricature than portait… and tars companies that use contract staff (be they IT service vendors, or otherwise) with the same brush, as he does so.
Conveniently forgetting the fact that some contractors use the freedom this career choice offers, to start their own businesses, some band together into partnerships, and many put just as much effort into a project as might the permanent employee of an IT vendor.
In many different ways, contract staff can contribute just as much to the ICT sector as a whole.
I still need to tidy up some of my layout ‘messes’, plus re-check all example code, and a few other bits and pieces. Another positive aspective of converting to LaTeX is that I found a bunch of naff typos that appeared in latter chapters (and appendices), where my editing prowess obviously rather severely tailed off…
