I am curious at what job pays $250-300hr even as a contractor. Would you have to carry liability insurance and a business licensee also?
If that is the wage why would anyone be working for less then Half a million dollars for the same job?
That's not the contractor pay, that's the charge out rate. Unless the contractor is working for themselves they only get a portion of it. But that's a normal rate for a senior engineer, technical specialist etc. It gets higher that that.
We have a hard time filling LCMM jobs, and a lot of them have portions of the job (in some cases 90ish %) done by contractors. The charge out rate costs more than we'd pay for salary, and there are some restrictions around the financial approval side of things that still requires a DND employee to approve it (plus whatever the LOE is for the contract to hire and maintain the person, which isn't negligible). The contractors make a bit more than they would on salary, with the contractor covering any overhead, and whatever left is their profit.
So with some made up numbers for a contractor position where we would normally pay around $80k for an FTE, invoice might be $110-120k, actual wage to the person in the desk is $90k, with the remainder split between the prime contractor's overhead (office space, contract manager, admin support etc etc). For the portion of the work we can't do, lets say it's equivalent of about another $10-20k in salary for someone in DND to do the remainder and cover the delta off.
So basically a 50% cost increase (probably less when you factor in other SWE costs like EI etc paid in the background, but for the GoC that's paid to the GoC). for the same work output.
Why would we do it? Sometimes it's a term job (2-3 years?) so hiring a permanent employee might not make sense, most of the time is because we can't hire someone for other reasons. One big reason right now is a lot of people with expertise don't want to come to Ottawa, but I can hire them to do the techincal part of the job and work remotely as a contractor, provide the expertise, and get some non-technical person to cover off the remaining work (which is almost entirely general admin that doesn't need 20 years of expertise).
With the option last year for remote work, when we thought we could have LCMMs work remotely (ie coastal detachments), went from zero applicants to a dozen overnight. TBS screwed that up with their travel rules, and then the new mandate to go back to the office has a lot of people looking at other options again.
The reality is we have a significant portion of our workforce that we desparately need for their expertise/experience, close to retirement age, and financially stable enough where they could semi-retire now and be okay. Genuinely concerned about a mass retirement for some people who just don't want to go back to the broken ass commute, parking, all the costs with that, hot desking, and depending on the building, bats, asbestos, mould and lead in the water, just because someone on high arbitrarily says so.
Right now we give people the option to work where they prefer (if their job allows them to WFH), and do in person work where it makes sense (training, team building etc). It's not perfect, but neither was working from the office.
If an individual isn't productive at home, that's a supervisor problem to figure out (with the union).
If a supervisor isn't doing anything about unproductive individuals, that's a manager's issue to figure out.
It's a deep in the weeds issue that a 10,000' dictat can't manage, but that's what they want to do.
Personally I like a flexible hybrid option; some weeks maybe 1 day a week makes sense for in person, other weeks maybe it's 5, or zero, or whatever makes sense for the schedule that week. Maybe the next job will be all in person (which is fine), but this one isn't, and if they don't trust me enough to manage my time, then I probably shouldn't be trusted with a huge chunk of short, medium and long term life safety issues, which is my core job.
