CABL Forum - Re: Sub or Employee.....here we go again

In this economy I would say go inhouse, that is if you can.

I did both and here's what I found.

In-house benefits:
-Hourly wage plus overtime (they start you off at 18 an hr if you have experience, 15 w/ zero experience, monthly bonuses based off a point system (rework% etc). So if you do an average of 50 hours a week that equals 720+270= 990 a week. thats 3960 a month, plus you can get a susperstar bonus of $500 or $250 a month (ask any time warner in house guy, they run a point system and if you average above 9 pts an hr, etc...) so if you're a "supertech" you can make up to 4460 a month. Even at 15/hr you're still making $3800 with gas, tools, truck, 401k AND pension plus free cable (premium channels included, not the broadcast channels we all hook ourselves up w/).

In house we did mostly service calls and it'd be an insult if we had to do installs (those were for the newbs). There is definately an "us vs. them" mentality, contractors had a bad rep of being hacks. (i mean look at those broken down pos minivans w/ ladders attached w/ ground wire, I thought most of these guys couldn't speak english or their driving records were too shitty so that's why they weren't in-house.

The only reason Time Warner has contractors is it's cost beneficial to them (duh!). Back when i asked, I was told it costs Time warner about $100 for an in house tech to roll out (they're calculating his gas, insurance, hourly pay etc) for any type of call. Contractors they only pay $40 for a video reco assuming the sub gets 50-50.

The only benefit for being a contractor is money. Well that was the case back when you can make $2k plus a week. In my last month of contracting was making about $500 a week net. I spent about $300 for gas and $100 for cell phone, and $80 for renting the pos meter which doesnt work. So in theory my TRUE net was only $1500. I averaged about 60 hours a week. So w/out including overtime, I was making around California minumum wage.

Did i mention in house guys get 2 weeks paid vacation, paid holidays, sick and personal days. I can't speak for construction or lineman contractors (never worked in that field) but it just doesn't make sense to pick contractor for installs if you have the option.

I'm not knocking on contractors, the last company I was with had better numbers than in house guys for 2 months. They're faster than most in house guys and definately competent but if you ask some of these guys what SNR or QAM, even ingress, egress you'd be suprised at the blank stares they give you. I could go on but do the math, choose whatever puts the most money in your pocket at the end of the day.

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Re: Sub or Employee.....here we go again