The one that is most ridiculous and sad IMO (I'm in the US) is that contractors aren't invited to the Christmas party.
I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.
I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.
I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.
Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.
I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.
That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.
If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.
If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.
But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.
Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.
My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.
It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s
I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building
Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
Or, maybe, had better things to do. :)
It's not necessarily up to them.
Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.
How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.
I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".