A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

5+ years "consulting" would probably be reclassified as employment by most courts.

In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where employees, just with a different company. They just opted to station the same people at the same client for all those years.

In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently" bump into each other in the cantine, but not go together), or share the same office equipment for coffee, having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.

The one that is most ridiculous and sad IMO (I'm in the US) is that contractors aren't invited to the Christmas party.

Why is that ridiculous? Contractors are not employees, so why should they be invited to a give thanks party for employees? Become an employee if you want to partake. Feelings of entitlement are wrong here. Decency though tells us to invite everyone.

Yeah, that's the line at a Christmas work party. Is it about Christmas, or is it about work

I don't know. We get to invite clients and all the other business partners, why not contractors and people that work for them with us on a project?

Christmas part is not special "give thanks to employees" party, it is more of end of a year party. It makes perfect sense to invite contractors. Even if it was "give thanks" party, contractors worked on projects.

That's a manifestation of your specific environment and not a general rule. I guess it is the work of some overeager compliance department, because it is the kind of overreacting self-mutilation that happens if people do not understand a law and want to be absolutely sure (cf. GDPR).

[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!

[1] https://www.sup-kanzlei.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Scheinselbs...

> Become an employee if you want to partake.

It's not necessarily up to them.

Its caste. The cleaning lady is part of the company and its a horror that the dalit are dis-included from all company activities. The only actual reason is to divide and conquer and prevent them being part of any employee unionization.

> In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities

AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.

Consultancy has no such protections.

I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.

What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.

In most places, it doesn't work that way.

Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?

I remember a work Christmas party attended by a contractor. The company was an sme and as usual we closed the office at mid-day and headed for a local restaurant to eat and socialise. The contractor as chatty and sociable, and seemed happy to be dining on the company's bill. Wine flowed.

Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.

Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties.

I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.

I’ll admit “consulting” is an overloaded term.

I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.

I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.

Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.

I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.

That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.

Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants.

If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.

If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.

There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project?

If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.

But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.

Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.

My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.

wait - was that me? Because I don't drink.

Because contractors most of the time deliver as much as many employees.

You get that at many companies whose legal department is too worried that AÜG might somehow be triggered for them, or have a strong union that would rather see all consulting folks be gone, which I understand when placed in the shoes of internal folks.

I've been a consultant/contractor, less than 4 months in, and I still have been invited to (great) Christmas party, and even shared paid buses that took whole company and also given free accommodation.

Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.

No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.

Nothing ridiculous about it. That came out of the permatemp lawsuits in the US by contractors a couple of decades ago which resulted in employers avoiding doing anything that made it look like contractors were being treated like permanent employees. Squeezing for money by a few contractors ruined a good thing for the rest of them.

If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers?

This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.

OK sure, but I never once mentioned any of this and have no idea what the social customs are around hiring general contractors to build buildings or asking CIA-adjacent consulting companies how to jack up the price of bread. I just know that half my coworkers have a slightly different email address for "legal reasons", and they aren't allowed to come to the Christmas party. This is, in my opinion, simply mean. Basically we seem to have invented a kind of at-will apartheid that 0.0001% of the population understand and even fewer benefit from.

It was was a long time ago. And based on your id, not you.

That’s staff augmentation which is completely different. If your company doesn’t know anything about Salesforce for instance and you just need a one off large project, you are going to hire a consulting company to go off and do the work and leave.

It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s

I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building

OK, have a good day. Hope you're feeling well.

> Feelings of entitlement are wrong here.

How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.

I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".

There was an lawsuit against Microsoft in the past that they lost because they used to treat contractors almost like employees. I'm guessing that is why these days most contractors are employed by someone else and not truly independent.

https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/companies/dont-treat...

> Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.

Or, maybe, had better things to do. :)

At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why).

The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know

yeah it was just my facetious way of observing that there could be other explanations that he was gone as soon as he couldn't charge for his presence, in fact when I consult I would never charge for going to one of those things - but I would of course expense it on my taxes.

I have seen employees doing exactly the same, so I do not see anything worth anger here. It is never the case that everyone goes to christmas party. Unless not going is punished in some way, in which case they go, but only to avoid punishment.