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.