On Oct 8, 2006, at 9:21 AM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
>
> It seems they are many independent consultants here in US. I tend
> to think they can not survive in many parts of Asia where companies
> will be very skeptical of an indivisual doing the job for them.
>
There's some sort of accounting funniness in the US that makes it
possible to hire consultants even under circumstances when you
don't have enough money to hire a full-time employee.  Part of this
is that US employees have a high overhead; easily 50% or more of
the salary in benefits, taxes, and other stuff not applicable to
consultants.  Part of it is the potential short-term nature of a
consultant; you can hire a consultant to work on a project of short
duration, and get rid of them when the project is over, or even if
the project fails to take off.  "Real" employees can be very difficult
to get rid of once hired.  I was never enough of a manger to understand
ALL the nuances, but I suspect that this sort of non-technical
consideration has a LOT to do with why there are so many consultants
in the US.

There are consulting management "groups" that might not be a bad
starting place for a career; they handle a bunch of the bookkeeping
and job hustling, leaving the engineer with some of the variety of
being an independent consultant with less risk and less trouble.

BillW
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