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Comment by Inthenameofmine | Hacker News Reader

It's funny. The smart companies I know are all moving away from hiring full-time devs. They want a very small core team of highly skilled devs, all with relatively high equity, combined with tons of freelancers/consultants on a call-list.

By far the biggest cost to software companies is employee turnover because the second greatest cost is employee education and training. We've measured developer productivity in multiple ways and time to full productivity within any new team/project generally is 3-6 months. Average empployment time at any single company in the tech industry is now 18-24 months. It makes more sense to pay 3-4x for most work, rather than have to deal with HR, education, and retention overhead.

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Do freelancers/consultants magically need no onboarding and become fully productive on day 1?

No, but they can adjust much quicker than regular employees. Adapting to new environments is a skill that can be trained. Freelancers who do a lot of different jobs for different companies have a lot of training.

But you are missing the point. The idea is to have a small core of highly skilled devs who can chop complex tasks/systems into bite sized chunks that can be outsourced.

I've seen it work, but it's very difficult to pull off. I've seen it fail more often.

According to the job ads that need someone to "hit the ground running" they do.

As a dev employee turned freelancer, the onboarding is still there but much different. Much more focused on learning just enough to work on specific tasks vs poking around for a week or two and figuring out the whole system. I'd say I spend 1/4 the time onboarding as a contractor vs as an employee.

With freelancers you can just stop paying them after day 1 if they don't and try another. In some verticals of software development there is a ton of supply.

That tends to get you a reputation, which makes it harder to find more freelancers.

IME companies that do this are always crippled by technical debt. Why worry about maintainability when you won't be here in 6 months anyway?

> Average empployment time at any single company in the tech industry is now 18-24 months.

The devs who are ok with this have no idea how bad this will bite them later when they're older and nobody wants to employ them. Hope y'all are good at saving money.

Maybe it will hurt them, but it may not as well.

Tech, for better or worse, is moving so fast that working on the same codebase for 5+ years is likely to greatly reduce your marketability for a new job. While that loyal individual may have been very valuable to his former employer, much of what he learned/specialized in is specific to that company and provides little value to someone else.

One can always blame the individual for not spending his free time staying current, but not everyone is at the life stage where they have the ability/energy to end a 10 hour day at work by coming home and spending another few hours coding.

Personally, I agree with you someone with a string of 18 month jobs would put me off as an employer. However, if you find yourself stagnating in your job, you must move on.

It really astounds me when I see resumes for people who spend 6-12 months at a job before moving on. Sure, where it's contracts, that's often out of the individuals hands and I pay no attention to the duration.

A remarkable number of these are people who have taken full time jobs and moved on soon after. The only thing that results in is the resume going in the trash.

I think it's a different generation. Companies don't invest in people, people don't stay long term in companies. You can also get big pay jumps early in your career - spending 2+ years in your first company is just pouring money down the drain.

I'm kind of in this position. My first job out of university was a 3 month contract, then I had a 9 month "permanent" position which ended when they closed the office, then two back to back contracts at the same place spanning 12 months, and now another permanent position which I am 6 months into. Before this most recent position I had the most interest of potential employers to date.

I suspect you are right in one sense - as you get further into your career the length of time you stay in positions should be longer, or you should move into contracting. I certainly plan on staying at my current position for at least 24 months. But I feel like 5 and 10 year tenures will start to be the exception rather than the norm.

That's the problem, our accounting; we treat people and training as a cost when it's the intangibles that are making the most cash. That crazy cool idea that was prototyped by a software engineer in two weeks could be a cost savings of millions a year; and it was all because you chose to spend the $1000 to get them the video course or books and give them a few days here and there on the job to learn.

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