alt Hacker Newswhen i worked for an australian bank, one co-worker in a nearby team had been working on the the banks systems as a sysadmin for over a decade.
the bank would go through cycles of "we need to reduce our headcount and outsource everything" and then 4 years later "we need to reduce spend on contractors and retain more knowledge and expertise in house". he'd survived multiple waves of it, switching back and forth between being an employee or a contractor through some external agency, as management trends changed, while essentially doing the same job.
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Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job.
The uncertainty never goes away. You can pay someone else to suffer it, but it will always cost more than dealing with it yourself.
And that can be ok. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a bargain.
Have y'all hit the "can genai do his job?" phase yet...
Early on I used to try to explain that things don't work as advertised. There are a lot of advantages but you need a human reviewing and directing.
These days I don't even bother. Call it being desensitized to the bullshit, but I'm waiting for some fancy AI agent to take out stuff in a way that no one can do anything. Past that I don't see a way for C suite to wake up.
Sir Humphrey explains the role of a civil servant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM
"Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic."
I know a large public sector organisation that had two extremely experience engineers take an early retirement package because there was a big restructure and they were getting 20 grand under private market rates. Six months later, they're hired back in for a year at 20 grand *over* market as contractors.
And they wonder why they're pissing out money like a drunk in a bus stop.
This is what I do.
I love watching them cringe when they see my new daily rate.
Something I hated about working in corporate America was surviving multiple leadership regimes, watching the same lessons being learned over and over, having to recount history to new regimes, it got really tiring, and particularly dealing with the attitudes and self regard of some.
I want through the same processen three times already.
I work in civil service but in a very specific job that needs certain degrees by law.
I've heard they were going to outsource my job (because civil servant are expensive) and registered a company that delivers the requested services. I entered a public procurement and upped my price a little because I knew there aren't many people with the right certifications. I won the public procurement and went from a civil servant to a self employed expert with a company car and all the perks.
Near the end of my contract they thought about hiring their own expert again because... money.
I applied for the job and went through an external hiring process and got selected. Because legislation changed my job went from middle management to a senior management position with extra benefits. Had to drop the car though...
A few months ago my colleagues were doing prekilinary budget talks and considered on finding an external company to do my job and getting me another position. I had to point out the cycle they fell into and somehow they forgot about it.