Percentage of Self-Employed IT Workers Increasing

dcblogs writes "The tech industry is seeing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%. A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization's IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts."

Comments

Re:Well..

[cold fjord]

It is an occupational hazard. When you are good at your job, have a decent architecture, and have at lest the bare minimum of resources, you can pretty often keep things running reasonably smoothly to external appearances. Since things aren't obviously wrong people won't complain, they think you have enough, and think your job is "easy" since nothing big seems to go wrong. What they don't see is you scrambling behind the scenes to compensate for the lack of resources, catching problems and the occasional disaster before they happen, and wishing you had one more person so that you could finally get some real vacation time in. They will be deaf to your resource requests. Then they outsource you and are shocked at the bill.

IT workers are basically self-employed anyway

[Gothmolly]

No training, so people build labs at home.
No laptop, so people BYOD.
Stupid corporate standard desktops, so people do VirtualBox/Cygwin/VMWare/etc/etc
Nobody hires FTEs because of (insert reason here) so people often contract anyway with middlemen pimps.

Re:Is that including "contracters"?

[cayenne8]

Hey..in this day in age, there is no such thing as a job for life anymore, and there is virtually no such things a loyalty from a company towards the employee any longer.

So, I figure, if you're gonna have the job stability of a contractor, you might as well be a contractor and at least get the bill rate that goes along with it.