Hacker News Reader

Is this a codeword for "not contractor"? I heard that at google contractors are second class citizens.

>at google contractors are second class citizens

This is the case at many companies to avoid contractors being considered employees.

Yes, but that is usually more relating to pay/benefits. At google (from what I heard) contractors are put on the bad projects, maintenance work or support functions. As in there is a big separation between work done by full-time employees and contractors in most teams.

I think FTE is mostly used as a 'unit'. E.g. if two people work on something 50% of the time, you get one "FTE-equivalent", as there is roughly one full-time employee of effort put in.

Though in this context it just seems to be the number of people working on the code on a consistent basis.

Yeah, 1 FTE just equals 40 work-hours.

FTE can mean either:

* “Full Time Employee” (which can itself mean “not a part-timer” in a place that employs both, or “not a temp/contractor” [in which case the “full-time” really means “regular/permanent”]) or

* “Full Time Equivalent” (a budgeting unit equal to either a full time worker or a combination of part time workers with the same aggregate [usually weekly] hours as constitute the standard for full-time in the system being used.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com