If I told you Cogwise has 15 contractors at our disposal would you think differently than if I told you we had 15 employees? One of our clients mentioned something to me about changing their passwords after we were done and telling us the new passwords because we used contractors and they were concerned it was a security risk. I generally agree that you should change the password for anything post-development and tell as few people as possible. But the implications of his concern was that contractors could be trusted less than if they were direct employees of Cogwise. Many times I think people measure success by how many people you have employed in your company. Our organization is different in that way as we are 80/20 or 80% contractors and 20% employees. We have local support staff for QA and internal management tasks. My partner and I manage some projects directly and most of our project managers work for us nearly full time and there are about 8 people out of those 15 contractors that work for us nearly full-time or completely full-time. Our goal is to eventually work toward a 50/50 split between contractors and employees as we grow and stay at the ratio. We do what I call "Seamless Contracting" right now. Seamless Contracting means that we manage the contractors as if they are employees, all of our contractors have been vetted and meet our high quality standards and we do our best to keep our contractors busy as if they were employees. Many of our contractors are highly technically qualified and very entrepreneurship minded.
Close your eyes and think what would happen if you had several highly business minded and extremely technically qualified people on your project. We end up consulting on a wide variety of issues besides code and many of our contractors have vast experience across industries. We don’t just throw some cheap foreign labor on a project and hope for the best. Our contractors hail from all parts of the world but are very organized using our tools, processes and standards we have honed from the many projects we consult on. Our overall costs are lower because we don’t have to host the equipment of contractors, have elaborate offices and we don’t have the major liabilities that employees incur. In many ways we are a business co-operative that works toward the overall betterment of our company and its individual members. We advise our contractors and help them with their own projects and they add value to our company’s projects. In return we create an environment of cooperation, innovation and ambitious quality standards. With each contractor added to our company comes an exceptional value add. We usually have a small 2-4 person team on a project and there are times that we end up cross pollenating contractors from other teams as needed for tasks they have experience with. We tend to pull from experts for specific tasks that one of our contractors have in-depth experience with instead of trying to train someone on the chosen team. This increases efficiency and keeps costs lower than if we had to train employees to do a task they had no experience with.
There is a propensity for people to think that employees means power in a business. This is an old school thought and now most of the really talented and exceptional folks work for themselves. As the corporate structure remaining from the pre-Information Age continues to dilute itself and people are even further disinclined to be loyal to their companies that force them in a 9am-5pm Cubical Cowboy/Cowgirl mindset and offer them little depth or incentive but a regular paycheck many will continue down the path of self-employment. The only thing that keeps most talented people from taking that leap is the fear that they will lack a regular paycheck. But as the economy continues to lay people off people will become more willing to do whatever it takes to continue bringing in an income. The recession will further push the new age of the contractor and we’ll be waiting to help the top tier of them find work among our ranks.