The Coming Tech Gig Economy (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: The rise of contract and contingent work is shaking up the traditional IT career path, with the days of decades-long careers in corporate environments dwindling for many IT pros. "And it's not only nonstop cost cutting that has businesses favoring IT contractors they can bring on — or scale back — as necessary without paying benefits. Emerging platforms, in particular around the cloud, have many organizations shifting their staffing models toward project-based, contingent work in hopes of landing the key skills necessary for their businesses to stay competitive in a constantly evolving technical landscape. ... How should you adjust to this shifting employment landscape? Should you broaden your skills or specialize? Should you develop a plan to strike out on your own or double-down on the skills that will remain invaluable for retaining long-term, full-time employment?'

Comments

Dump them as fast as you can

[Anonymous Coward]

Organizations willing to take on itinerant contractors instead of hiring employees will soon learn a painful, and very expensive lesson in the dollar value of organizational memory.

Re:Dump them as fast as you can

[Tablizer]

value of organizational memory.

I agree. Most rotating-contractor-made systems I worked on were a fricken mess.

It seems contracted work is best for easy-to-define "grunt work" (for lack of a better way to describe it). For example, data entry, simple back-end CRUD ui's that don't have to be pretty, researching an easy-to-reproduce bug, formatting documentation prettier, etc.

Domain knowledge is under-valued in IT. My work is often far better after I learn the domain, often because I ask better questions or present better alternatives that simplify things rather than interpret initial instructions literally.

It's true that some permanent IT staff are also screw-ups. But, the solution is either better management of them, or get more disciplined staff, NOT outsourcing.

Re: Dump them as fast as you can

[LDAPMAN]

The "gig" economy is not about replacing in-house workers or saving money. Organizations are doing this to bring in specific skills and domain knowledge they could never hope to hire as a normal employee. I'm brought in as an addition to the team, not a replacement. I also usually provide training to the normal employees as well.

Re:Dump them as fast as you can

[Anonymous Coward]

The days of a lifetime job at one company have been over for at least 3 decades really.

Wrong. It's just less likely at bigger commercial concerns for work requiring less brainpower. But if you show yourself as invaluable to the survival or steady growth of a small firm, well, your boss will be as keen to keep you on as they are keen on the survival of their business. Ditto in academia, or even many larger non-profits. And most people aren't even working for big boys.

network....make business contacts and friends,

This is a way to get all the wrong sorts of jobs, though. "What qualifies you to be here?" "My friends put in a good word." This is just the sort of place I don't want to be.

and hone your skills to become marketable.

Although much less necessary now the pace of technological change has slowed. You need to keep your buzzwords up to date, learning a new set of syntactic sugar every couple of years, but the skillset remains relatively unchanged. What I had to learn between 1995 and 2005 was incredible. Last ten years not so much... I'm mostly reusing virtual machine / rent-a-computer concepts I had to deal with in '80s.

But if doing contracting...INCORPORATE yourself.

I expect this works better in certain jurisdictions and fields, as some countries are really good at making sure you do NOT benefit from incorporation-as-tax-avoidance.

You are your own boss. You get to call the hours you work.

This is misleading. A contractor's bosses are his clients! Work hours depend respectively on the requirements of the client / employer in a contractor / employee relationship, and can be stringent or flexible in either case.

Yes, you have to learn your worth and learn to NEGOTIATE..

You don't "have to" any more than as a regular employee, and - even more for contracting than employment - it's about knowing what the job is worth to the person who wants it done. Except in cases of nepotism, you find the cheapest person who fits all your requirements.

so that you can cover your expenses, money needed for retirement and insurance, and vacation time off. But this isn't rocket science, you just need to learn to become an adult and take care of yourself and learn how to protect your interests.

This is weirdly patronising and passive-aggressive. Every adult has to "take care of yourself and learn how to protect your interests", and the extra expenses of incorporation are barely more complex than household budgeting. What was once a creative use of the limited liability company has become quite routine.

One last piece of advice....if you are an American citizen, try to get into Federal Contracting... [...] That and you can save more of your hard earned tax $$'s this way too.

Ah, the moneyshot: to maximise your profit, get your snout in the trough while minimising your personal tax burden! I'd rather see half the government contractors I've met collecting welfare/unemployment/whatever-your-area-calls-it government money than collecting fat salaries from public funds for doing nothing.

Re:Dump them as fast as you can

[davester666]

All that stuff is valuable next quarter. We need to beat the numbers THIS QUARTER you idiot!

Then I get my bonus, and I leave for another company.

IRS and others need to crack down on 1099 abuse

[Joe_Dragon]

IRS and others need to crack down on 1099 abuse.

1099's are ok when used right but lot's of places want the control of a w2 worker but don't want the ACA, taxes, labor rights, worker comp, overtime, etc that comes with them.

The longer view

[MountainLogic]

Please excuse someone from outside of IT as I work on embedded systems (who could possibly need more than 640 bytes of RAM), but at some point IT really needs to mature and stop making every application one off in-house prototypes. Some applications have stabilized and are expected to be delivered as COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) products, for example word processors and spreadsheets. Far too many business products have to be (or needlessly are) customized to death. ERP, HR, accounting, etc. Seriously, does a HR program have to be more flexible than a spreadsheet? Should an ERP program require more expertise to setup than a workprocessor? Someday someone in charge is going to catch on that all of this flexibility and customization if far more expensive than any promised gain and just work with a cloud product out of the box. Sure there will always be a super user in every dept/company who is the goto person, but that person really should not be in the the IT department. Everyplace I've worked the most knowledgeable Excel folks are the MBAs, not dev engineers or IT. When this happens you can expect to see a quick death to many IT departments. At one time every factory had an electrical engineer to run an engine to make electricity. With very few exceptions, those practicing EE jobs are now at utilities, architects or electronics companies. It is not that folks working in IT departments may not be doing good work, the problem is that the same problem is being solved in a thousand different companies. At one time IT excellence was a competitive advantage, for example Fed Ex, but now it is a common commodity base utility line like water or power. Why can't it be a something bought as a commodity?

adjusting

[Gravis Zero]

have many organizations shifting their staffing models toward project-based, contingent work in hopes of landing the key skills necessary for their businesses to stay competitive in a constantly evolving technical landscape. ... How should you adjust to this shifting employment landscape?

the "gig economy" actually isn't new. this happened with blue collar work and they got abused badly until they formed unions. why do you think this will end any differently?

Re:unionize

[OhPlz]

Long term disability coverage is meant to protect you in situations like that. Every employer I've ever worked for either provided it outright, or at least offered it. You can also get such a plan yourself, do it when you're young and it won't cost much.

Unions are great if you're dead weight and want to be protected. Those with marketable skills generally don't have need of them, nor want of them. Do you want to pay dues to an org that's going to fight to keep the dead weight around? I don't.