Big companies (rather, people at big companies) WANT to spend money on this kind of stuff for all sorts of reasons.

-A team might have use-it-or-lose-it budget, so they have to spend it on something, and a contractor might be the lucky recipient!

-Tax purposes!

-Spending a lot on a contractor gives them someone to "fire" when they need to explain why something wasn't getting done or something went poorly!

The list goes on!

All that being said, as a consultant myself, I consider those types of projects windfall, as they tend to be the ones that end abruptly. It's kind of a scary feeling getting paid without actual work to do. I have found I 100% prefer the projects where there are clear tasks, goals, and results to report, if for nothing else than my own sanity.

I remember growing up and going to work with my Dad. There was like a 3 hour period where he had no work for me to do. He told me I'd only get half wages for the day (I was like 12) since the last few hours I did nothing. I felt betrayed. He empathized with me, saying 'It sometimes feels like more work to not have any work to do'. I completely agree.

In my current role, there is no real roadmap or trajectory for what I should be doing or how I should report on it, etc. I have felt at times that I was just collecting a check, and that felt really scary. I expected I would love to have a job where I could kind of just do whatever I wanted on my own time table. But I have learned it's actually very stressful, and at best very boring. Luckily I got a roadmap created and prioritized, so I feel better. But it is an odd experience.

Better yet, at an internship, create your own roadmap (complete with a timeline, too) and, with no external validation, so it.

so hard

One of my bosses was the recipient of one of these during a corporate merger, and I think it did a lot of damage to him. He has been mostly was coasting off of his reputation from before he slacked off for 3+ years in that role. But it doesn't look like he's able to last for more than a year anywhere. I suspect that he was one of those competent-but-lazy types whose skills rusted out to to just lazy.

Its stories (and personal experience) like this that make me laugh when people try and say that governments are inefficient and lacks accountability.

Big things are more likely to be inefficient and lack accountability. Governments are big, so are big corporations.

My experience working my way up from small companies didn't really bear this out. Budgets at my bigish company are strict and audited; having a contractor results in regular check-ins from managers to see if it can be cut off. The smallest companies I worked for were family slush funds.

Interestingly enough there is also evidence, that a government structure with much smaller parts (decentralization) is even more inefficent, and especially prone to corruption.

Yes, this. It's worth emphasizing whenever someone trots out the inefficient-government dogma.

Big corporations are inefficient and lack accountability. Governments are like big corporations in that manner, but also can't be held accountable by the market.

Corporate monstrosities can get away with being inefficient insofar as they can stay out of the red overall. Governments can get away with being inefficient insofar as we are forced to continue funding them via taxation. Note: giant, unaccountable, inefficient corporations usually became so large through monopolies created through government force (i.e. regulation).

Getting bigger any organization inevitably achieves a level of complexity where it becomes less, and less efficient by spending increasingly more resources on communication, and politics (in wider meaning of the word, not electoral). Do you think governments are small organizations? UPD: Apperently, I'm not the only one here who came to the same thought :-)

Right - the government is the world's largest employer, with all the inefficiencies that come with that title.

Which government? Which world?

I'd assume in almost every country, their federal government is the biggest employer, but that'd actually be interesting data to try and find.

The world's three largest employers are apparently the US DOD, the PLA of China, and ... Walmart.

Pretty much every government's budget is a significant fraction of a country's GDP. By significant I mean 30% or higher.

Governments lack accountability because there is no incentive to be sustainable. They just tax people more or run a higher deficit.

If Whole Foods wastes their money and goes out of business, I don’t care. I’m not being forced to pay them to make up for it.

Private companies are also dependent on a highly developed society to make everything they do possible.

There are many reasons that Google and Amazon didn't exist a thousand years ago, and it isn't solely due to the lack of computing technology.

And so it is entirely sensible that everyone should contribute towards keeping the highly developed society functioning as best as it can.

How are dollars I have paid to the government any more mine than dollars I have paid to a company?

The government isn't supposed to run a profit. Therefore it becomes very difficult to know which part of it is wasteful and which isn't. Companies simply fail if they don't make a profit or have an outside funding source.

Not nearly quickly enough to be a curb on wasteful behaviour at large companies, and these are the ones that affect public policy.

a company is accountable for the dollars you pay to it, and has to provide a commensurate value, or you take your business elsewhere. dollars paid to the government keep coming in no matter how wasteful their practices

That's not how people choose which health insurance policy is offered by their employer, or which private company won the contract to deliver their electricity.

You're right, at least in the case of highly regulated markets and when the state creates artificial monopolies (e.g. electricity).

I'll correct my original comment then:

At least private companies that compete in a relatively free market are losing their own earned money when they're inefficient, not someone else's.

That claim assumes a free market with perfect information, which is more than even Adam Smith was willing to do.

It’s still not right.

Private companies are losing money on behalf of their owners or shareholders.

You could say that the owners/shareholders are losing it themselves, because they voluntarily invested in the company, as opposed to the state, which takes your money even if you don't want it to.

I think most VCs would have some thoughts on the idea that a start up they just pumped millions into has lost "the start-ups money" in some stupid experiment and not theirs.

a key difference is that the largest shareholders are proportionally affected by the waste, and have a proportionately large amount of power to do something about it.

I think you’ve confused a discussion about how individuals make choices about their purchases for a complaint about the results of my personal choices?

government has people with guns to force its income stream. corporations do not.

Corporations lobby the government to change laws to boost their profit. Those laws are enforced by guns.

It is a myth that corporations like free markets.

Which law forces me to pay google money?

There’s laws to make you buy insurance. (Not taking a side here pro or con)

yeah, more like any 'large organizations' without a dictator

One would think the use-it-or-lose-it problem would've been solved by now. It's so obviously dysfunctional. Is there really no better way to determine budget?

I think the issue is management unwilling to trust other levels of management to make the call when they need money / a strong desire some folks have to filter / make decisions for others.

I don't know what the fix is for that except to take a chance and trust folks but ... it doesn't seem to be a thing and instead they come up with easy systems to just make arbitrary decisions and there ya go.

It boggles my mind sometimes that "Like if you don't trust that guy to make decisions... why is he a director here?"

Sadly it filters down, I've been places where it was clear the director of my department couldn't do much at all... at that point why should I be there, it doesn't matter if he and I talk, agree, or anything then ....

Steve Jobs said something about it making no sense to hire people in decision making roles and not let them make decisions. Granted, Steve was also able to hire some fine people.

The problem is the further down you go the more narrow the focus. When I worked on MS Office I was always annoyed they were spending all the money on other products with few users and no revenue.

After all we were the ones taking in the dollars. Of course at an organizational level it was understood they need to invest in the next big thing even if it’s not making money right now.

I don't think that really addresses "use it or lose it" type policies though.

Use it or lose it is a blunt hammer to basically say "You get enough for subsistence but no more". Sure there are smarter ways but intelligence costs time and money too.

He also had some experience hiring terrible people.

Practice may not make perfect, but it sure damn helps. As long as we learn from our mistakes.

Some organization have this issue where you get a budget for your group, and if you don't use it then upper management will think you don't need more resources next year and will budget less or even cut from your department. If you don't use it, they reallocate it to a department that needs it and you never get it back.

Another part is where if you get a hiring budget they expect you to use it because if you aren't spending it on personnel then it means you aren't hiring the best available people at that time.

Non-profits usually spend out their budget.

Regulated utilities can charge a % + the cost of hiring you if it is a capitalized cost, i.e. hiring a contractor to implement a project.If a contractor works 100% on a capital project it's profits especially in a low inflation economy or when the profits are not going to be as good due to forecasting issues it can pump the books.

There are probably other reasons I can't think of.

You just restated the problem in more detail.

What I'm asking is, if the above system encourages managers to waste money, why hasn't anyone come up with a better system?

There are systems that encourage the opposite behavior, but they tend to be damaging in other ways. It all comes down to the metrics that you are responsible for as a manager.

I used to manage a grocery department at a well-regarded supermarket chain. In retail, one of the only inputs you can affect at the store level that impacts the bottom line is labor, so metrics are usually organized around labor optimization. Each week, you would be expected to exceed the previous year's Units Per Labor Hour (UPLH). This can only be accomplished two ways: increasing unit movement (which you really have no control over and is largely driven by consumer sentiment and population density) or cutting labor hours. In fact, even if volume is increasing, you can't even add hours even though labor needs scale with volume in a brick-and-mortar retail setting. To exacerbate things, the reductions in labor have already compounded yearly since the policy was put into place. They want you to squeeze water from a stone. "Well, So-and-So (who you've never met) was able to increase UPLH by 10% 5 years ago! Why can't you?"

I guess my point is that systems that discourage waste often lead to insane work environments rather than cleverness or innovation, whereas encouraging waste leads to bloat and inefficiency.

In my experience, it's rarely about flagrantly wasting money for the sake of running up expenses to a budget level. Rather, it's usually more about pulling in expenses, doing something you had wanted to do anyway but didn't think you had enough money for, etc.

Budgets are a pretty powerful and widely used tool for managing organizations. And there are other checks and balances. It's not like a manager can necessarily just decide to have a team off-site in Hawaii because there's room left in the budget.

Maybe I just put too much stock in that one episode of The Office.

I think the disconnect is that you are describing it as a system, when in reality it's just a bunch of misaligned incentives and plain old human nature. It's unfixable.

It might be both of those things at the same time. This book claims so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics.

The money isn't wasted, it just goes somewhere else. Better that it go through you (and to the contractor), than through someone else at the company.

There is, but it’s hard—like, theoretically murky hard.

So the basic inefficiency is that you want to do top-down resource allocation, “I approve of this much budget going to that project.” We could call that bureaucracy, or The State, or whatever. There is a reason that every modern military in the world has this bureaucratic gene: you can track who is responsible for every dollar easily, which limits the scope of corruption. Corruption does not itself kill the other countries: it just places an upper bound on how much money, how many resources that military can effectively put to use. But the militaries who can inefficiently use unbelievable resources clobber the ones who efficiently use fewer, and you get a survival of the fittest thing.

So the basic problem is that bad actors exist within a sufficiently large organization, and the bureaucratic solution incurs the cost of making everybody into bad actors, but with the benefit of limiting the badness of their action by top-down accountability. It is also somewhat bounded in how much it wastes: non-bad-actors who really don’t need their big budgets do have a weak vested interest in allowing it to be cut, as it frees up resources for the organization as a whole and this can improve their job stability, year-end bonus, etc.; also business units that really are not pulling their weight can be reorganized over long time scales. That is bureaucracy in a nutshell, the natural top-down solution.

To solve the corruption problem with a bottom-up approach requires connecting individual interests to organization interests, so that in a game-theoretic sense there are no bad actors (albeit there may be irrational ones who want to hurt themselves in order to hurt society). This is a really hard problem in accounting. The basic thing that you want to do is to make sure that everyone gets paid some baseline amount, plus some proportion of “what they make for the company.” In cases where this is really easy to determine, nobody does it any other way. Salespeople get commissions, and they get them fairly universally. This solves any corruption problem bottom-up. [It is also 100% transparent: “Why did she earn more than you? Because she sold more than you”—top-down budgets are frequently confidential wherever possible due to the risk of one subunit (could be larger than an employee) discovering that another subunit which “does less” in whatever sense gets more of the pie.]

The problem is, we occupy complicated systems and it is not easy to determine how much the organization’s bottom line will be impacted by the loss of a particular individual. What is the “commission” that I should be paying to a janitor? Am I supposed to pay developers money for completing “story points?” And how do I do that without creating a toxic atmosphere where everybody wants to overestimate the number of story points in a task—how do I objectively measure those story points in terms of the hard cashy business value they create? What about managers or recruiters; how do I reward you for the business value of the people you managed/recruited?

Without solving this sort of hard problem, you can’t guarantee that when someone uses nepotism to the organization’s great loss, that they don’t feel the full brunt of that loss and therefore have a selfish incentive to be fair in the first place.

Budgeting is basically forecasting, and in most businesses it’s not much better than guesswork.

There are ways that are arguably better, like bottom-up budgeting, but they take a lot more work, and are arguably more subjective.

Internal information systems can be so poor that the best prediction of next years budget is last years budget.

In government (usa) it absolutely still exists. As the financial period ends each department spends hugely and really wastefully to ensure their full budget is spent. Its actually quite infuriating.

It’s the same in corporations.

There are, of course, better ways; the thing is that non-dysfunctional methodology is not evenly distributed.

This comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve

I don't understand the relevance of that Wikipedia article

That nerve is a popular example of an optimization process that produced a local maximum which is highly sub-optimal.

For various evolutionary reasons, a nerve routing that was direct and sensible when the aorta passed to, say, the gills of a fish, now makes a silly, circuitous route in modern mammals from the brain, down under the aorta near the heart, and back up into the neck...close to the brain. Natural selection has proven incapable of fixing this tangle.

Similarly, organizational budgets that departments need to spend any way they can or suffer cuts next year seem silly. But they stem from reasonable policies, gradually changing and improving over time.

Just like an organism can't sever its aorta and have a better routing of the nerve, organizations are incapable of getting from the current budget situation to a better one.

Wow, that’s a great explanation, and I hadn’t even thought of it that way, myself.

My take was a much simpler “just because there is a better way that exists doesn’t make it practically relevant, because entrenched tradition is usually more popular/widespread than efficiency”... but your boiling the frog idea shows even better how the mess comes about in the first place.

Thanks for the context.

Unless you are getting taxed >100% I never understood why you'd want to throw away money for "tax reasons". Can someone please help me understand this, it always comes up and I feel dumb for not understanding.

They may have a tax rebate which requires them to "invest" $x each year and failure to do so will result in penalties, perhaps nullifying the agreement and requirement to reimburse previous rebates.

So the company hires a few contractors to help get them as close to $x as possible, but they don't really have any work for them to do.

Simple example:

My FSA card is pre-tax money to be used for healthcare expenses. Towards the end of the year, I ended up still having a balance that would go away if not used, so I bought things that I would not have otherwise purchased.

That's a bit different. You're effectively getting "taxed" 100% on whatever is left over so you might as well spend the money on anything that has non-zero value to you.

But if you, say, only lost 30% or 50% of the balance, it's not immediately obvious if you should spend the balance or not.

OT but this is such a weird aspect of FSAs. I can carry some amount over with my plan which makes things a lot easier.

From my experience, FSA's doing go away at the end of the year.

You have to spend X anyway, because the money is pre-tax or non-taxable, you can spend 1.5X-2X, so the extra money is 'free'.

I'm with peteradio, I also never understand this line of reasoning.

Let's say the company has earned 1,000$ and the tax rate is 50%. Your expenses X are 100$.

So 1,000$ - 100$ = 900$. Of which 50% (450$) are tax and 50% (450$) are profit.

Now double X to 200$:

Then 1,000$ - 200$ = 800$. Of which 50% (400$) are tax and 50% (400$) are profit.

That means your profit is 50$ lower (400$ instead of 450$) then if you hadn't increased your spending?

Clearly my thinking is wrong somehow, but where?

If you can "invest" the 1K into something that you don't get taxed, and, can give you some return then it is a win.

I remember being mentioned that the whole reason General Electrics bought a division of Alstom was to not bring the money back to US and get taxed, let's say it was 1 billion dollars and 50% tax.

Instead of getting net 500 million back to US they can keep that money abroad and invest 1 billion in another company that can net more than 500 million in the long term.

Above is likely the way of thinking for those sort of occasions.

It should be a choice between spending pre tax dollars or spending post tax dollars. I doubt many would argue in favor of “burning” money just for the sake of not paying some fraction tax on it.

Imagine that you must access $100 of labour/whatever somehow.

  $20000 - sales
  ($10000) - cost of sales
  ——————
  $10000 - gross profit
  ($100) - extra labour paid for with pre tax money
  ——————
  $9900 net
  ($4950) tax
  ——————
  $4950 ending sum (pay dividends or do whatever you feel like with this)

vs

  $20000 - sales
  $10000 - cost of sales
  —————
  $10000 - gross profit
  ($5000) - tax
  —————
  $5000 - after tax profit
  ($100) - extra labour, post tax money
  ————
  $4900 - ending sum

It’s a bit unrealistic because (1) labour should always be pre tax (2) there are rules about what goes where in an income statement and you can’t just decide to put stuff where you want but there is some flexibility.

In particular, the one easily controllable lever is how much interest you pay on debt (pre tax spending)

Think of it this way: the “cost” to realize a net profit of $450 is a tax expense of $450. What if you could reinvest that full $900 so that next year your revenue and income are higher? High-growth businesses will optimize for reinvesting because they expect the Return on investment to be higher than the return on realized profit going forward.

This is what Amazon has done for years - it generates a monstrous amount of cash (free cash flow) from retail and funnels it back into expanding current businesses and creating new ones such as AWS. AWS now generates its own surplus, so the cycle continues.

Edit to clarify: Amazon in the past has shown a relatively small net income vs large top line revenue because most cash is reinvested. It’s been a few years since I paid attention to their financials so things may be different now.

It doesn't make sense in terms of raw profit, I agree. But many expenses are paid pre-tax effectively making them cheaper than if you had paid for them with post-tax dollars.

Not really. A good example is business meals. You can only deduct 50% of a meal with a substantial business purpose.

What matters in your example is where that extra money is spent, you might try to invest it in the company by purchasing new machinery rather than just wasting it on a new luxury company car (or an overseas 'business meeting'). That way if you are making a 10% return on your company/investment each year it continues to grow.

I guess in some situations you can either pay $1 in taxes or burn $1. it's probably better to burn $1.

You paid $50 (the decrease in profit) to get $100 of value.

Under what situations does this happen? We use marginal tax rates...

In limited cicrumstances it can make sense. If you're investing in a multi-year project you may as well maximize your investment in one year and take the loss against other taxable income that year. Then, when the project is finished, you pay taxes on the income that year. Only you can take those funds and invest them into a new multi-year project...

Some companies get tax breaks for hiring X number of workers in certain locations. Which is why sometimes you get companies hiring a bunch of people at a data center who don't do anything related to the data center, but mostly exist as a way to get a tax break and good press.

I was tempted to ask if you have any tips for finding such jobs ;) but actually the times when I’ve been most unfulfilled in my career have been when I’ve been bored at work. I’d much rather be working like crazy (within certain parameters), keeps things interesting!

That said I do know people who’ve been paid to turn up at an office and just work on their side projects. Could probably handle that!

Get going for a few of these simultaneously and you are set.

Happens all the time. We can hire only at certain times when budgets open, so you go ahead and hire but you have no time to deal with the person. It’s better to have the person sit around until you have time because the alternative is losing the contractor and not being able to hire when you really need someone.

Stupid but very real. I always find it funny that wasting 100k this way is perfectly fine but a 5k raise is almost impossible.

> I always find it funny that wasting 100k this way is perfectly fine but a 5k raise is almost impossible.

This is too real.

At my current job they are incapable of even small raises to keep up with inflation or even investing money in making a better product. Although the company has no problem redecorating the office, sending management to a useless international fair where they spend their time in bars getting drunk, or spending exorbitant amounts of money for sending someone to CNN and getting $0 ROI from that.

When I was out of the vendor side of the business doing consulting for a number of years, I always had to shake my head a bit when clients wouldn't use paid-for time with us or would apparently never make use of some materials like a whitepaper we did at their request.

But it's exactly like you say. People wouldn't get their act together sufficiently to have a team meet with us on some topic for a day or some marketing campaign would be canceled or changed so they no longer specifically needed what we had created for them. Easier to just forget about the whole thing and move on.

I've lived this. Myself and a very expensive team of EY kids were waiting eagerly every day for anyone in corp management to throw us any kind of tasks.

On the rare occasion that we were given a task, we would all descend upon one computer like vultures, group-solving the problem typically in 60minutes or less. Then it was back to doing nothing.

Diplomacy (the game) became our primary activity. It was fun, but such a terrible waste of time, talent, and money.

That's awesome. What group were you in?

I wasn't EY, I was in through a small local firm. And we billed much less :). So the weekends when the EY guys didn't fly home, they had a few hundred $ to burn. We lived well on the weekends!

What are EY kids?

Earnest and Young placed contractors?

Yes, billed at $120/hr for a recent college grad programmer, with per-diems and weekend travel allowances to go back home (fly cross-country). I should note that this was pre dot-com bust... late 1990s, so $120/hr was pretty good then.

But the client company had more cash-flow than they could burn, so they didn't care. Unsurprisingly, they hit serious financial difficulties within a few years.

I had a similar experience a few years ago.

I quit at a company I was contracting at because they kept dangling the whole, "We're going to convert you to an FTE next." in the meantime, I was working less than 20 hours a week. If you didn't have a project to bill hours to, you didn't get paid, period. I was floating between teams, fixing bugs and doing minor stuff, not being able to bill much of anything. Once I quit I was offered another contract role. I basically told the recruiter, "Listen, if I'm in the office, I'm getting paid for my time, period." Recruiter got it cleared with HR and the hiring manager.

My first day went like this:

Manager: "Ummm yeah, the two major projects we had you slated on, ummmm those got put on hold for the time being. Get your desk and PC setup and we'll have something for you soon."

I literally went 4 months and barely billed any real project work. My last two weeks I had 36 hours of non-billable time. I had two weeks where I actually billed a full weeks worth when a dev took off for his honeymoon and did exactly zero work he was assigned. The funny part is when I quit, the hiring manager told me he would hire me in a minute and to keep in contact.

In the meantime, I was able to learn AngularJS and some other stuff while I was sitting at my desk all day. In a sense, I was very productive when I was there.

> I was able to learn AngularJS and some other stuff

Yeah that's what I would hope to do too. Lots of time, let's dig in to that stuff there's never time to learn!

I've seen the same thing, off and on, for over 20 years.

Employee or contractor gets stuck somewhere with nothing much to do... speaks to manager about it repeatedly... gets the "just find something to do, we'll get to you" speech... fails (often despite good-faith effort) to find anything useful to do... and eventually gives up.

Worst case I personally witnessed was a quite talented dev going six months without any actual project, then another couple before quitting.

Another case was a guy who tried to use his abundant free time to learn other skills but mostly ended up playing Myst, which proves this phenomenon is as old as dirt. :-). (He ultimately gave up the Myst Gig and quit, I'm sure to the consternation of his manager who probably lost a head-count over it.)

That's why I offer a retainer package. Get paid for just being available when needed and work a non-conflicting contract elsewhere.

Do you keep those packages reasonable? Have you ever found yourself with too many retainers being called in at once?

Reasonable is relative to the situation.

No, I learned how to manage my work load (potential and actual) from clients for my physical/mental health.

The motivation is what determines the actions.

I know a guy who founded a software company and started contracting work overseas. He became too confident and over-committed to clients without managing expectations. For a couple of months he looked terrible. Thankfully, he found an escape path and closed the company. He's now employed full time in a dev role.

This path isn't for everyone.

Yeah a sort of

"Hey I'm already up to speed on this so if you want to pick it up again quickly ...." proposal probabbly would seem like a good idea to the company for a while at least.

i worked for lockheed martin 10 years ago (give or take) on a client site. I was W2 (although I wish i was 1099). Anyways, when the government changed from W -> Obama a lot of the DOD contracts were changing because everyone anticipated the Obama was going to cut defense spending (which he did). The project found out that the DOD was not going to be able to re-fund the project, but we had to continue to the end. I ended up forced to "work from home" for about six months until the contract ran out. I legally couldnt get another job, but I went on vacation for a month or two. So I calculate I got paid 1/2 my salary at the time + benefits for doing exactly nothing.

I worked for another large defense contractor auditing government IT systems. To do this, you needed a clearance and auditing certification designed by the gov. Well, they would just go ahead and hire people WHILE the clearance process went through (which can take months) and only schedule certain technology certification classes every few months. There were people sitting at home for 4-6 months getting paid in full while they waited for either a class or their clearance to go through. I sadly already had a clearance and "only" had to wait a month for my class.

i have a clearance for my job also, worked in a SCIFF all day ...

I left government work a while back for the private sector. The nice thing about SCIF work is the privacy and autonomy :)

not to mention you cant really be distracted by the internet ...

You can have unclass internet access in a SCIF - i can't imagine not having that while sitting there all day! Maybe it was a program requirement for your team?

not sure but we had to leave the SCIF to access the internet and it was very annoying.

Maybe a result of cost-plus?

Anywhere where employee hours are getting charged out, a company can increase profits by increasing headcount.

It also seems to happen more indirectly. A contracting company is often motivated to increase red-tape (such as complex and unnecessary health-and-safety, because everyone agrees safety is good). That has a double win: less competition (side effect of complex requirements) and more hours charged (each hour charged increases profits with little risk).

Yeah this happens more than you’d expect! Never had it myself but I’ve worked st places where it’s happened to colleagues (usually assigned unimportant BAU work than actually doing nothing but I do know of people who’ve basically had nothing to do!)

I sort of suspect all these people I've met that I've wondered why they like being a contractor .... are all on that system.

I kinda want to be a contractor now.

I have been in this situation and you have to strong nerves. You always expect to be sent home any time soon.

Yeah I would certianly feel like I had to be ready to move on unexpectedly.... but you know if I could work from home and clean the house a bit... worth it.

I've worked at pretty big companies and the only way I've ever gotten away with not producing any code was because I was going through onboarding hell. At the worst 2 weeks to get onboarded.

Were you an employee? I think the situation being described here is almost always with contractors and freelancers.

I was a contractor - as a general rule I find companies expect contractors to be productive really quickly because they are paying more for them then they are for employees.

In 5-ish years of consulting I only had this happen once. BigCo hired LittleCo to produce one piece of a very, very large system with many parts. I was consulting for LittleCo. Our part was on schedule, but no other parts were. They couldn't let us go because they needed support for initial roll out, but they didn't have anything for us to do.

We did some make-work projects, optimizations and stuff. We also picked a random technology stack per week and spent a day building "something" to learn those tools. Also, we played a lot of video games. This period lasted about 3-4 months.

I had a friend working on contract for the local city government. The contract was I believe for 2 years. A year in the project got cancelled but since his contract has already been signed they just kept paying him with no work for him to do. He just went in (because of course he still had to show up for some reason), and played games all day. Now I partially understand why so many government projects go over budget.

I know a couple of friends who worked at the major banks. They all started out as contractors. I remember one guy told me during their first year that all they did was browsing Reddit at work. He was a close friend and didn't want me to join their team because he knew I would display the level of work ethic that would make him look bad.

If that happens then you're definetly charging too little. In a lot of places you can't actually just work for just one client for an extended time as a consultant or freelancer as you then might just as well be an employee.

Sometimes having resources on standby, ready to start really is the fastest way to get through a project (sometimes it is just waste though)...

Yeah I know a guy who had that waiting gig for 1.5 years before he was finally assigned his first bit of work.