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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

> The California bill, known as AB5, expands a groundbreaking California Supreme Court decision last year known as Dynamex. The ruling and the bill instruct businesses to use the so-called “ABC test” to figure out whether a worker is an employee. To hire an independent contractor, businesses must prove that the worker (a) is free from the company’s control, (b) is doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business, and (c) has an independent business in that industry. If they don’t meet all three of those conditions, then they have to be classified as employees.

What does this mean for engineers who are independent contractors in California? It's arguable that an engineer would likely be working on something that is central to a company's business, and whether said engineer has an "independent business" in their industry.

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> What does this mean for engineers who are independent contractors in California?

The state’s Chamber of Commerce and dozens of industry groups have been lobbying for exemptions, and a long list of professions were excluded from the bill: doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, insurance agents, accountants, engineers, financial advisers, real estate agents, and hairstylists who rent booths at salons.

I'd be interested in knowing whether any of us would be considered "engineers" under the law, given that many of us don't have engineering degrees or certifications of any kind.

My job title at my current employer is "software engineer", but I don't have a formal education in engineering, and who knows if the California legislature sees that as engineering or a glorification of "what my nephew does on his computer with a thing called Word Press." Perhaps I'm too cynical.

The actual text would seem to be: "Require an active license from the State of California and involve the practice of one of the following recognized professions: law, dentistry, architecture, engineering, or accounting." http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml...

So, presumably no. Only engineers with a P.E. license (which has been pretty much phased out for software engineering).

Colloquially, we use profession to mean "I get paid for this thing." Traditionally, there are requirements for something to be a profession. A central licensing body must assert a professional has gained the requisite knowledge to practice. (The Bar serves this purpose for lawyers.)

The examples given imply this classical meaning of "profession". As you've pointed out, engineering in this context means jobs you'd need a license for, like civil engineering.

That's "law smell" if I ever saw one, already so many carveouts. It means the law/the ABC test is shitty as written, makes no sense, and should be scrapped.

I think it's clear it will cause a lot of contractors in the software industry to be reclassified as employees.

To me, the real test is what will happen is this passes. Will it move hiring to other states and offshore?

I'm in CA and I haven't hired someone from CA in a long time. Poland and Ukraine are the main places. The last 3 candidates wanted more than the CEO makes. We're small and can't afford Bay Area salaries.

That's an interesting angle I didn't think of. As someone who lives in California and has gotten to where they are now through various forms of contract work, I feel like this bill is potentially a bad idea, but I can see how it can also shift the "balance of power", if you will, away from California, which would probably be a good thing for the rest of world.

Still, I'm not a fan of losing more freedom, which is what my state government is seemingly doing. If I couldn't work as a contractor this last year, I don't know if I could have made ends meet in one of the country's most expensive cities and have the time to get hired making 6 figures as a software engineer. Maybe, but I imagine it would have been more difficult.

When I was driving for GrubHub, I was making about $17.50 per hour after tax, and the faster I was, the more I would make in cash tips. Not having the freedom to work when I want and only take the delivery orders I wanted probably would have meant flipping burgers for $11 an hour(minimum wage) pre-tax and having to work the hours dictated to me. That's if I could even get said minimum wage job, given that even when I was a college student employers would refuse me because I was "overqualified".

Either I would have had to stick to a job I didn't care for and not take a shot at starting a business, or I would have spent months or years trying to get on my feet on minimum wage without having as much time to do interviews and coding challenges.

Is that 17.5$ also include additional wear-and-tear on capital assets, e.g., your car? I spent years desperately poor, and having a very good idea of capital asset depreciation was critical to maintaining my weekly budget. For instance, my very cheap car, in the early 2000s, cost about 4.5$/hour-of-operation — and only because it was used as a shop car by mechanics who did all the maintenance for free. My current vehicle (a Kia Optima) is right at about 6$/hour to operate; although I’m “at the bottom of the tub” in terms of operating costs. In the next few years I expect that cost to increase to 7$/hour.

Honestly, I didn't think much about wear-and-tear and I probably should have. When I calculated it, it was way below a dollar per mile, which makes me curious how you arrived at $4.5 per hour of operation. That sounds like an awful lot. Are you talking USD? Just curious because you used the dollar sign as a suffix.

It's certainly possible that I'll end up paying down the road for the increase in wear and tear from when I was driving, but at least now I'm in a secure position where I could actually afford the repairs or to get a new car without worrying about paying the bills.

$/hr is sort of an odd way to measure depreciation that is mostly mileage based. In the US, IRS reimbursement for business driving is 58 cents per mile and that's probably not a bad estimate to start with for vehicle costs. (It probably overstates it if you would own a car anyway and you have a vehicle that's more efficient/cheaper to operate than average, but it's a reasonable stake in the ground.)

You're probably aware, but it bears repeating that a lot of that mileage figure goes towards fuel costs, and there have been emergency/out-of-band updates to the figure when fuel costs have increased significantly in the middle of a year.

I don't think the IRS officially breaks it out but the estimates I've seen say that gas is about 20-30% of the total. (30 mpg @$3/gal is 10 cents/mile.)

The mechanics I lived with were boat & big diesel. Those engines (and aircraft) are maintained on an hourly basis. In fact, your car is too: you change your oil every 3000 miles or 3 months. The idea being that there is an expected speed, and you’ve accumulated (say) 100 operating hours after driving 3000 miles, or in any 3 month period. As such, all these guys computed engine/vehicle life in terms of cost-per-hour.

It’s weird to me that just about every piece of mechanical equipment you’ve ever heard of is measured in terms of operating hours, but not cars? Color me skeptical.

As to the 0.58$/mile: an hour at 55mph would be, what? 31.90$?

Certainly there's a correlation between operating time and total mileage. It's going to be different for city driving and highway driving but there's a relationship that holds for most normal use cases.

That said, there are specific costs that are primarily about distance (fuel, tires). Furthermore, probably overly conservative oil change recommendations notwithstanding, essentially all car makers express maintenance intervals in terms of mileage not hours (which could easily be measured). I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they're doing.

> In fact, your car is too: you change your oil every 3000 miles or 3 months.

Most synthetic oil I’ve seen can last 10,000 miles or even more.

The bill exempts a number of professions explicitly (including engineers), but for some reason it doesn't do the obvious thing of exempting by pay. I think it'd be reasonable to include an exemption for >$100k in annualized revenue, regardless of industry. If you're paying someone that much or more, which works out to roughly $50/hour, then I don't see any reason to automatically classify them as FTEs, especially against their will.

Are you in the Bay Area though? If you are, then the people applying may well not be able to afford living without Bay Area salaries.

That's kind of the point, right? We in the bay area have basically priced ourselves out of the remote work market because that "making ends meet" salary here is much higher than practically anywhere else in the world.

Alternatively, companies are able to keep a larger share of the value generated by labor by exploiting differences in living conditions and standards of living (usually unfavorable conditions/standards).

That's a two way street, As a media person, I can't survive in the bay area without freelancing for various media companies. My rates are far higher than salary if I can stay in demand. I guess I could survive, but it's a huge cut to what I could make in a good year.

> What does this mean for engineers who are independent contractors in California? It's arguable that an engineer would likely be working on something that is central to a company's business, and whether said engineer has an "independent business" in their industry.

Are they, though? It's not just related to the business, it's central to the business. If you're an engineer working as an IC at a bank to beef up their IT security, for example, I don't see how that'd classify as being "central to the company's business." Similarly if you're an IC hired to help with QA or testing would that ever really be central to the business? It's a part of the companies product/offerings, yes, but is it central? Does the company's existence hinge on your role specifically?

Take away most IC engineers from most IT companies and the company gets worse but probably still exists. Take away the drivers from uber and there's literally no uber anymore.

Journalists, photographers, video editors, live/TB production crews, movie crews, artists, illustrators, designers, programmers, almost EVERY construction worker...

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