Yes, this outsourcing/staffing firms model is a big problem.
They are not at all how we imagine traditional employers, and to the detriment not only of their workers but also the projects they work on and the health of the industry they participate in overall.
For example: staffing firms are not really experts in the domain, and they do not have the knowledge to mentor workers, the way a normal team anywhere else would.
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@Stegosaur @yogthos
Furthermore, the people who do have the knowledge to mentor those workers are the people from the big corporation. And those guys are very strongly discouraged from doing so, by their own corporate training, to maintain the legal distinction between employee and “contractor”.
Now, there are better and worse contract gigs. My grapevine has had a low opinion of google for a while based on their experiences.