don't quite understand mailing list

[Michael F. Stemper]

On 2018-09-07 21:23, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 00:07:36 +0000 (UTC), Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> declaimed the following:

>> (A mild rebuke for a mild social faux pas is not ridicule.)

> 	If I wanted to get snarky -- I'd suspect a /contractor/ might be
> someone skilled in editing technical documents for a project, with little
> actual computer skills. Justification for the harsh opinion: 30 years as a
> software engineer at Lockheed Sunnyvale

Maybe Lockheed only used contractors for documentation. My previous
employer used them for much more than that: coding, testing, design.
We had one guy who only contracted to us for a year, who was a guru in
Oracle redundancy. He helped us through some rough design decisions.

Sometimes (as with the Oracle guru) we used contractors because it
didn't make sense to keep particular skills on staff. Sometimes, it
was to meet a crunch that was anticipated to be brief. Sometimes, it
was to fill an open slot while trying to find somebody to hire for
that slot.

-- 
Michael F. Stemper
87.3% of all statistics are made up by the person giving them.