While this Web site is dedicated to the trials and tribulations of being a freelance game developer, I’d also like it proves to be a valuable resource for clients and those that are interested in hiring contractors but aren’t sure how to go about it or whether it makes sense for them.

Contractors are, to a large degree, just like any other employee. You hire them to perform a particular task, you compensate them for this work, done. The difference is that contractors are are not obligated to work exclusively for their client, and come with much fewer encumbrances than an employee.

So let’s break down the advantages of hiring a contractor:

• expert help available on short notice
• lower cost
• fewer hiring/firing restrictions
• committed to a project, not an ideal
• direct accountability

Expert Help

Very often a company needs experts in a particular field, but experts, as you’d expect, are often hard to find and even harder to hire full time. If you’re a game developer that needs to start work on a PS3 project but you don’t have PS3 experience in-house, you may find it very cost effective to bring in an outside consultant that flattens the learning curve for your existing staff. On-demand expert assistance is incredibly valuable for those companies willing to take advantage of it. For example, I’m familiar with many of the issues getting multiplayer games off the ground due to my experience at Sony On-line and id software, and I’ve had clients in the past bring me in for a “core dump” that, in some cases, probably saved them six months of discovery through trial-and-error. Two days of a consultant’s time vs. six months of a company’s time? Not a very hard choice.

Lower Cost

Many clients get freaked out by the hourly rates for many contractors. Rates of $75/hour into the hundreds of dollars per hour feel exorbitant, but very often a contract worker ends up a long term cost savings. For starters, you don’t pay them for a full forty hour work week unless they work forty hours — if they’re part time, then you’ve reduced your burn rate right there. As a client you do not have to pay for holidays, sick days, or any time off. You are not responsible for maternity/paternity leave. Given the typical three weeks time off during a year, that’s a savings of 5% or more alone.

There’s no point paying for someone’s expertise for the life of a project if you only need them for a few weeks or months. Freelancers offer this flexibility — if you need someone to create a title screen for your game, just hire them to do that instead of bringing a full-time artist on board then struggling to keep them occupied. Need your SQL queries optimized? Bring in a MySQL (or whatever) performance specialist for 3 weeks, get the results you want, then let them go their merry way.

Related to this, you don’t have to pay contractors for idle time (unless you have an exclusivity with guaranteed work, but that’s a topic for another day). If a client is slow to provide materials or information, and the contractor can’t proceed, then very often the freelancer will only get in a few billable hours per week. Contrast this to a full time employee that may just sit around on the clock waiting for others to resolve a critical issue so he can proceed.

Clients are not responsible for freelancer’s mundane business costs, e.g. legal, Internet, phone, office space, computers, rent, workman’s comp, health insurance, etc. You may incur fees that are costs specific to a project (e.g. a devkit or maybe a particular software package you’re hiring them to develop plugins for), but you won’t be responsible for a lot of static overhead — overhead that is sometimes over a thousand dollars a month.

A client will pay a premium for all this — and the contractor will charge one for the instability — but in the long run the client will save money through enhanced efficiency.

Lower Friction Hire/Fire

Related to the beneft of lower overhead, a huge benefit to using contractors is that hiring and firing them is generally far less traumatic for all parties involved. Instead of firing a contractor a client opts “not to renew their contract.” Most contracts allow termination with fairly short notice, and with any cause. Contractors are used to this — it’s the reality of the business after all — and when a client decides that a contractor is no longer needed (or simply not very good) they can just cancel their arrangement and move on. No office drama necessary and, if the contractor is working remotely, many of the full-time employees may not even realize it has happened.

Most contractors are used to this as well, so usually they will handle the change in stride, whereas a full time employee will be far more emotionally affected.

No Emotional Investment

Contractors typically do not have an emotional investment in their employer. They do not have to deal with office politics and corporate advancement. If the client makes bad business decisions, the freelancer doesn’t care so long as it does not impact their payment. Intuitively one would think that this professional detachment would be a bad thing, but pragmatically speaking it is often a benefit.

It may seem odd that lack of emotional investment could be perceived as a good thing, but by divesting themselves of the emotional encumbrances associated with the corporate grind, the contractor avoids a lot of distractions. No water cooler conferences about who got promoted, who was just hired, who got fired, where the company is going, why this manager sucks, etc. The contractor is paid to do a job and he or she will be judged almost entirely on his performance.

In theory employees work the same way, but in practice they can be unpredictable. One day they’re in love with their employer and think it’s the greatest place to work, and the next day they’re upset at being passed over for a promotion or being put onto a less glamorous project. Resentment and bitterness grow, then one day they abruptly decide to leave for greener pastures — often at a bad time for the company and sometimes taking others with them — because their situation, in their mind, has become untenable. Their relationship with the company has become personal instead of purely professional.

Contractors are more likely to ride out rough times since they are invested in the project, not the company. While freelancers may be harder to retain in the long run, I believe they are far more reliable on a per-project basis.

Direct Accountability

One of the realities of corporate life is the blame game. When a project fails or is late there is usually a lot of blame passing as teams glare at each other or point the finger at individuals. The reaity is that fault is rarely clear cut, and managers have a hard time saying “Jim, you screwed this up” when there are so many mitigating factors. To make matters worse, many employees have vague or overlapping responsibilities, so confusion can arise as to who was really responsible for a particular task.

Contractors, on the other hand, typically work under a far more explicit agreement, i.e. “You will work this many hours at this rate to complete this very specific task.” The parameters are more rigidly defined, and due to the nature of their relationship, communications tend to be well documented and archived. Invoices describe everything that has been completed for that invoice period.

This means that accountability is much higher with contractors — you can point directly to their responsibilities and say “Yay” or “Nay” as to whether they held up their end of the bargain.

Freelance Help: Too Powerful To Ignore

A lot of companies refuse to consider freelance help for traditionally non-freelance positions, mostly due to incorrect assumptions about the costs and problems associated with hiring independent contractors. This article illustrates why freelancers offer flexible, expert assistance at a competitive price, while providing greater short-term reliability and accountability than salaried employees.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.