Full-time Contractors?

We're going to be hiring contractors, but we're going to expect them to behave as full-time employees. Often when we think of contractors we think of expensive developers for short-term projects. We do not think of them as employees that we'd want to invest in and grow.

When you see the word "recruiting" you might think about sending messages via LinkedIn or attending meetups to meet software engineers. For our purposes, we're talking about motivating devs to apply to work with us.

Similarly, many companies only think of hiring full-time, W2 employees. In the United States this makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of rules and regulations about who can be hired as an independent contractor and this has a number of implications related to taxes and benefits.

However, from the perspective of the company, what we actually care about is taking money that we set aside for headcount and converting it into product features and fixes for our customers. Ultimately, the more efficiently we can convert that money into customer value, the happier we are.

Typically when we think about hiring a software engineer, we think about hiring them full-time for an annual salary. From an efficiency standpoint, we should be indifferent between paying that same engineer $150,000 per year or $75 per hour, if we know they're going to work 2,000 hours per year. Of course, a $150k full-time salary comes with a bunch of other costs and taxes. Not to mention it's unlikely that engineer is giving you their undivided attention for all 2,000 of those hours.

Hiring international contractors through platforms like Upwork and Freelancer.com simplifies this a great deal. We can get the "full-time" (30-40 hours/week) undivided attention of talented engineers without having to worry about additional costs and regulations--the platforms take care of that for us.

Additionally, while that same $75/hr would be unappealing to a US dev accustomed to making a $150k/yr salary (they would have to actually bill 2,000 hours and would have to cover taxes and benefits), that rate is sky-high for devs in countries like Ethiopia, Egypt, India, Morocco, Nigeria, Nepal, Gaza, and the Philippines.

By using a platform like Upwork, we get the best of both worlds. We get the efficiency of paying contractors hourly and the commitment of full-time work, but the platform takes care of the operational and regulatory headaches.