Those of you who are experienced contractors working in the IT sector will know exactly what I mean when I say I’ve devoted much of the last week ‘refactoring’ the code base of ContractorCalculator.
For the benefit of the non-techies, refactoring is when you give a really good spring clean to software that has been improved, extended, and amended so many times, it has started to get somewhat messy.
If you don’t refactor, then the underlying code can ‘rot’, which means the system that depends on the software becomes very fragile and prone to failure when you try to make further changes. That’s why software must be refactored periodically, to ensure the whole package is easier to maintain and extend in the long term.
Unfortunately, this is just the type of essential maintenance that clients often overlook, and not just in IT, but across the board. The rot is starting to take hold, and companies and their customers are going to pay for it. In fact, the true cost of these cutbacks is likely to be many times greater in the months and years ahead than the savings being made now.
In the world generally, and in contracting specifically, most of us understand that you get what you pay for. And a cheap contractor is generally cheap for a reason – they simply don’t have the full set of skills the client needs. So in IT contracting, for instance, they wouldn’t understand the importance of refactoring or be able to explain to the client why it is an essential investment.
Then there is the problem that lots of managers within end-user client organisations know quite a bit about their subject, but not quite enough. Imagine designing and building a couple of cars. You could have two that have very similar bodywork and styling, and even a similar chassis and engine design. However, in use the handling, drive, maintenance and other less visible, but often more important, features will prove in time that the two designs are worlds apart.
So a cheap contractor can build something that looks like the real thing, and might appear to the client to be as good as anything produced by an ‘expensive’ contractor. The client is likely to be delighted with a budget underspend, anticipating a fat bonus, and wondering why they paid so much for contractors in the past.
And that’s when it all starts to go horribly wrong. Or at least it will do for many of us in a few year’s time. The projects worked on by cheap contractors will suffer from rot and become expensive and difficult to maintain. In time, they are likely to have to be repaired or replaced at considerable expense. The negative effects in the meantime could mean that some client companies don’t even survive, as failures within vital infrastructure lead to internal and customer-facing issues that tip them over the abyss into bankruptcy.
For professional contractors, this is a painful process to watch. Rather than accepting pitiful rates, some are already taking a sabbatical to work on their own projects and leaving clients and poor-performing, cheap contractors to get on with screwing things up for the sake of short-term cost-savings.
No doubt, many of the best contractors realise that in time they will be forced to say the words every client dreads to hear: “Sorry guv’, you’re in a right pickle ‘ere. Best you throw it all out and start again.”