That's much less efficient for big software projects. The knowledge built up over time is one of the core things making you effective, so you have a big productivity loss if you don't retain the same people for a long time. With a continual middleman, the overhead from that "hiring" process is usually proportional to work done, so after a period of time it will have been more efficient for the employer to hire directly (even at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars) rather than to go through the middleman.
> leaves reviews
We've seen how well that works in every other part of the market.... Interviews are necessary because of a lack of trust. In your system, every party has an incentive to lie, and the incentives are strong enough that it's worth paying people to facilitate your lies. You see that with various contractors all the time, having somebody with good reviews take the contract and somebody with fewer skills actually do the work, the employer understating the work to be done, etc. Good people exist, but they're hard to find in a low-trust environment.
> always employed and getting paid
Interestingly, that usually benefits everyone except the programmer. As a rule of thumb, the person taking risks will have higher returns, so if you can afford those risks you should choose to take them yourself. Examples include various forms of device "warranties" (if you're paying, it's insurance, not a warranty, and I can afford the financial hit when a thumb drive fails, so I'm not going to pay a premium to insure against that possibility), some forms of actual insurance (full coverage on used cars is an example -- if my car is ever totaled I'll just buy another -- I have liability insurance out the wazoo, but full coverage isn't worth it), etc. Programmers often make gobs of money, so except for potentially the very beginning of your career you should be able to easily weather a few years without work. The exact contract details vary, but that would suggest then that programmers are better off on average cutting out the middleman providing those risk guarantees (and they're not really guarantees in the first place, right? people are currently without jobs because there are fewer programming jobs than there used to be, and no middleman scheme is going to fix that; you have to wait for this economic blip to blow over).
I could go on. Contracting is fine, but it's not a replacement for all salaried work.
That's much less efficient for big software projects. The knowledge built up over time is one of the core things making you effective, so you have a big productivity loss if you don't retain the same people for a long time. With a continual middleman, the overhead from that "hiring" process is usually proportional to work done, so after a period of time it will have been more efficient for the employer to hire directly (even at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars) rather than to go through the middleman.
> leaves reviews
We've seen how well that works in every other part of the market.... Interviews are necessary because of a lack of trust. In your system, every party has an incentive to lie, and the incentives are strong enough that it's worth paying people to facilitate your lies. You see that with various contractors all the time, having somebody with good reviews take the contract and somebody with fewer skills actually do the work, the employer understating the work to be done, etc. Good people exist, but they're hard to find in a low-trust environment.
> always employed and getting paid
Interestingly, that usually benefits everyone except the programmer. As a rule of thumb, the person taking risks will have higher returns, so if you can afford those risks you should choose to take them yourself. Examples include various forms of device "warranties" (if you're paying, it's insurance, not a warranty, and I can afford the financial hit when a thumb drive fails, so I'm not going to pay a premium to insure against that possibility), some forms of actual insurance (full coverage on used cars is an example -- if my car is ever totaled I'll just buy another -- I have liability insurance out the wazoo, but full coverage isn't worth it), etc. Programmers often make gobs of money, so except for potentially the very beginning of your career you should be able to easily weather a few years without work. The exact contract details vary, but that would suggest then that programmers are better off on average cutting out the middleman providing those risk guarantees (and they're not really guarantees in the first place, right? people are currently without jobs because there are fewer programming jobs than there used to be, and no middleman scheme is going to fix that; you have to wait for this economic blip to blow over).
I could go on. Contracting is fine, but it's not a replacement for all salaried work.