Contractors are often hired for budgetary reasons. It can be easier to get sign off to hire a resource for 6 months at $x per month than to hire a full time employee whose salary is seen as an ongoing cost, year on year.

6 month cost can be an easy sell. Lifetime employee can be more difficult.

I work as a contractor myself in Ireland, and it's usually large companies, consultancy companies or government agencies who hire contractors. It's rare (but not unheard of) for startups here to hire contractors.

Those 6 month contracts usually roll on, so effectively you're working as if you were a permanent employee, but on paper you're always only ever a 6 month expense.

Another huge reason is HR salary restrictions. In large companies, a senior individual contributor cannot make more than X, while the going market rate for people in hot specialities of the day is often higher than that. Contracts are a way to circumvent the HR restrictions. Many contractors are staying for a couple years within the same company and are essentially an employee in everything but a name.

Thanks for the super valuable insight. Would you be actually up for connecting on LinkedIn? Got some additional question I would love to ask you!

I think we're already connected. You're name seemed familiar. https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrendevitt/

Wow! What a coincidence! I will be in touch with you.

At my company, we hire contractors usually as a way of staffing at least 30% of the resources in a flexible way. Meaning we keep them for about 3 years, let them go for about 18 months, and they are free to come back for another 3 years. This way the company can just cut them loose if we see a market downturn without having to fire a regular employee.

That's interesting way of keeping to company flexible for market downturns. But do you hire contractors for even shorter terms? If not, I am curious to hear why. Is it because 3 months are not enough to get them up to speed? Thanks for jumping in!

This seems fairly typical for large non-tech companies. They all seem to flirt with the line when it come to shadow employees.

We usually don't do less than 3 months for a contractor. If it's that short of a time, we are usually looking for a consultant/vendor just to get the system or new technology set up correctly for regular teams to take advantage of.