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I don't know if Peter's definition of freelancers includes consultants
or not.
If not, my experience has been that a consultant *may* be in the same
category as having more clout than employees of the company. In my
experience, their opinion can harm the regular employees effort.
At my first job, the VP of Product Ownership (my area) brought in a
consultant. He looked at our documentation and thought it was "awful."
Do you think he told the members of our department what he would do
differently? Nope. He reported to the VP and told the VP that our stuff
was awful. Hence, we were immediately put in a 'hole' as needing to
prove why our documentation was not 'awful'.
Whether our stuff was really 'awful' seems beyond the point: we were
just trying to crank out the documents as timely with the release as
possible. [At one time, doc was done for a project after it went out the
door, so we were playing catch the tail. Eventually that was changed to
include doc in the dev process. What I wanted to add to the thread was
that sometimes someone brought in to help the situation only hurt it.
Paul
> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: Re: 1099 -- What to ask?
>
> Peter Newman writes:
> > Many companies will take advice from freelancers, rather than their
> own employees.
