The point is that full-time employees are looking less and less attractive to someone like me who's starting a new company. The path of least resistance is to just adjust my business structure or model to minimize the number of full-time employees I might need in the future.
I don't know if this is generally true. But it's something it's a behaviour I noticed in myself, and others, over the years.
People starting their first company don't like hiring full time employees. They see a lot of extra responsibility - and a loss of control that they get from working with contractors.
People starting their Nth company positively look forward to the time they can hire full time employees. They realise that they can't control or manage everything themselves, and the quicker they can move from being the keystone that holds everything together the better it's going to be for the long term survival of the organisation.
There seems to be a inflection point where the company gets big enough where working with contractors becomes more beneficial again.
Whether this is to be flexible around seasonal demand or scaling up for particular projects, this can avoid long term costs involved having full-time employees. I've seen that larger organisations are far more willing to bear the short-term costs of flexibility than smaller ones.
My outlook will probably change over time. However I wonder if the software development ecosystem will change at a faster rate? Someone in 1998 who looked forward to hiring employees probably has a different outlook today given the availability of, say, Amazon Web Services.
What's interesting to me is how much things have changed in the last 10-15 years and how much they could change in the next 10-15 years.
I don't know if this is generally true. But it's something it's a behaviour I noticed in myself, and others, over the years.
People starting their first company don't like hiring full time employees. They see a lot of extra responsibility - and a loss of control that they get from working with contractors.
People starting their Nth company positively look forward to the time they can hire full time employees. They realise that they can't control or manage everything themselves, and the quicker they can move from being the keystone that holds everything together the better it's going to be for the long term survival of the organisation.