alt Hacker News> If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
I've worked with several small contracting businesses, including some that came highly recommended.
They were all very inefficient relative to having someone in-house. They also came with the problem that institutional knowledge was non-existent because they had a rotating crew of people working for you.
Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge. The companies he applied for specifically did not want to contract the work out to a body shop.
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You just described why consulting makes big bucks
> Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge.
Then make it part of the contracting deal that the contractors have to give the in-house people sufficient training about the code/project that they worked on.
That's what happens when you hire bad contractors. There are so many bad contractors and selection bar for contractors is much lower compared to employees.
If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees. Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).