How to manage contractors

This series of posts, story here, analysis here, and conclusion in the current post, together describe an ongoing problem in the high-tech industry.  Since I've been a contractor for many, many years, I've seen quite a bit, and I know in particular how companies can benefit hugely from contractors, and how they consistently get it wrong.  The contractors are almost always the losers, receive the blame, and are almost always manifestly not the real problem.

For those readers who feel I am setting up a straw man, I would caution you that I'm not.  The straw man fallacy is different, and here is an exact description of what it really means.  There are legal and tax consequences for treating contractors as employees.

First, understand what a contractor role really means.  You, the principal company, the hiring company, are proposing to pay top dollar to some smaller company to find you a Magic Unicorn^TM. This person or persons will be expected, by you, to fix your problems, with very little support, in a hurry. You are trying to trade money for relaxation of your problems.  This does not work in general, mostly because of failure to understand the nature of contracting.

Second, Real human beings cannot go faster than the conditions they face allow.  Any high-tech worker can only type so fast.  Thinking is always the slow step.  Testing is even slower. The power imbalance between you and the poor contractor is so huge, that contractor can only win by luck and being very, very savvy.

Third, Problems with tools and data can dramatically limit the output of even the most competent worker.  Hire them and then fire them at the two-month mark for not meeting expectations?  How did that work out for you?

We are all going so fast now that no one really understands what they are doing.  In fact, even remembering what you did in a high-tech job two weeks ago requires very complete and aggressive documentation.  Do you have time for it?

So let me be very, very clear.  If you are a manager in a "big" company, and you are contemplating hiring contractors to do a portion of the work, you need to do several things before you hire them.  Here is the list, hopefully complete enough:

1. You must gather together in a single document everything they need to know to do the job you require. Failure to do that renders the entire exercise moot.  You will lose, just as Jen in my narrative did. If you don't do it, then you erred, and are solely responsible.  Yet, you still blame the poor contractor.
2. If you are not willing to support them, don't bother to hire them.  They cannot win under those circumstances, and neither will you.  Contractors are human beings, and treating them as resources will not save you from the judgement of reality.
3. Contractor just want to do a good job.  They are there for the work, period. They don't care about your company, its history, anything else. They just want you to supply them with a queue of work, properly prioritized, so they can peel off the next task and just get it done.  Don't give them verbal orders, write it down, exactly as it needs to be done.  Deliver to your contractors quality write-ups of what they have to do.
4. Take responsibility for the efforts of your contractors.  Your (upper) management should be holding you responsible for any contractor work under your (personal) management.  It is likely they are not.  Your problem, not the contractors.  If your management doesn't care, you are on the menu. You should defend your contractors even more vigorously than your employees, because they are at much higher risk.
5. Make sure to always have useful work for them to do.  Under no circumstances should you ever allow contractors, even long-term contractors, to decide what they will do next.  That is your responsibility.