[LRUG] Hiring a pair rather than an individual contractor

Mark Burns markthedeveloper at gmail.com
Tue Dec 17 04:31:17 PST 2013


I've been actually thinking along the exact same lines myself. I know I
work better when pairing, and even if at first the training period is kind
of
using someone to a certain degree for rubber-duck debugging, I think it can
be a massively mutually beneficial venture.
A lot of companies are quite afraid of the idea of doubling their costs,
especially when paying for contractors, something like this could be a
foot in the door for pairing. As well as benefitting people who aren't
quite as privileged as us.
I've been thinking of the overhead of taking on an employee. I think it
could be difficult at times for a one-man contractor organisation to
guarantee work for
a very junior dev, but at the same time, it could be considered as unfair
taking on only people who can afford to take the risk of a few weeks/couple
of months project.
E.g. quitting their low-paid but stable job for a short-term gig, then
struggling to get back on the labour market.
Hearing that there's a bunch of companies out there that would be prepared
to take on a pair like this would certainly make me consider
trying to improve employment prospects for inexperienced developers.


On 17 December 2013 12:19, Tim Cowlishaw <tim at timcowlishaw.co.uk> wrote:

> Inspired by Ali's 'Technical  Intern' job ad, I've got a few questions for
> those of you who hire independent contract engineers!
>
> Some context: I've thought a great deal about stsarting an initiative like
> Ali's, whereby I take on a more junior engineer to pair with me on contract
> work. Being a freelancer is an insane privilege, and I've thought it'd be a
> great opportunity to both help train people starting out on a career in
> software, as well as encouraging more people to work independently who
> might not otherwise consider it, or have the opportunity to do so.
>
> With that in mind, I'd be very interested to know, from those of you who
> hire contractors, whether:
>
> (1) You'd be open to the idea of hiring a mixed-ability pair in place of
> an individual engineer? Would such an arrangement work within the structure
> of your organization?
> (2) You'd perceive this is an arrangement with potential productivity
> gains (or just as a deadweight loss since the more experienced engineer
> would spend some time coaching the less experienced one). What sort of
> multiplier would you be prepared to attach to the cost of a single engineer
> for such an arrangement?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tim.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20131217/0b941b25/attachment.html>


More information about the Chat mailing list