> If it's not and you hire extra people in order to work on this deployment, than when job is done, you end up with extra few thousands of employees that have nothing to do and you need to fire them. In this case it's easier, faster and cheaper to outsource the work than doing hiring of thousands of people, training them and then firing them when job is done...
Are there enough carriers that the contractors stay busy 100% of the time or do they just hire and fire people as needed?
I get why contract gigs can be mutually beneficial but it seems like either the demand is there for full-time trained technicians to do a particular job, or there isn't. If there isn't, then it does it really matter who does the hiring/firing?
I think what I always figured was that most deployments are rolling and there will always be new tech to train on and then deploy every few years, which sounds fairly sustainable as a full time labor force. I haven't ran a telco before obviously.
Hiring/training it's a time consuming process, especially for large scale project like this (think, 67k towers across entire united states).
Usually telecoms RFI pretty much entire project from third party vendors (or few of them, on order to reduce risks), with very long list of requirements covering everything from software integration to hardware deployment.
Vendors will bring teams of their own engineers for "higher level jobs" and a whole bunch of "licenses" subcontractors to do actual track rolls. In case it's a complicated project, like upgrade to 5G, vendor most likely can't provide entire solution by itself, so it will be a "consortium" of vendors that stich up complete solution that is organized by vendor that answers RFI. In this case each vendor may have it's own subcontractors who may have their own subcontractors etc...
Are there enough carriers that the contractors stay busy 100% of the time or do they just hire and fire people as needed?
I get why contract gigs can be mutually beneficial but it seems like either the demand is there for full-time trained technicians to do a particular job, or there isn't. If there isn't, then it does it really matter who does the hiring/firing?
I think what I always figured was that most deployments are rolling and there will always be new tech to train on and then deploy every few years, which sounds fairly sustainable as a full time labor force. I haven't ran a telco before obviously.