Ask HN: Are there systemic reasons for contractors being unreliable?

[taneem]

Why are home contractors often unreliable? Typical example: a contractor is scheduled to come in on day x, but creates delays and comes later than expected.

From what I've seen, both through personal experience and anecdata, it seems that home contractors are frequently unreliable both with respect to time commitments and quality of work.

I am wondering if this is fundamentally because contractors overbook and over-commit themselves because they can only compete with rates that force them to try and do too many jobs at once.

Or is it something that can be explained other reasons? E.g. - typical contractors simply don't have the background, training or perspective to build completely reliable service levels in their business?

[brudgers]

I've spent years wondering about this and living it and I've come to understand the problem in terms of scheduling theory...and when I did, it was both a moment of amazement at the clarity it brought and disappointment at the tautological obviousness that the scheduling problems of contractors were explained by scheduling theory. I'll skip a description of scheduling problems and the difficulties and tradeoffs of creating a schedular because these are well described in computer science literature. Not because I would not get something out of writing about them at length.

Because the scheduling problems of contractors are much worse. There's no central schedule. Contractors schedules must be built around client's schedules which they do not control. Contractors have multiple client schedules to work with. Contractors have a different scheduling weights than clients, like cash flow which prioritizes tasks closer to billing points and the expected lifetime values of clients and the cost of pushing each project to the back burner.

Even worse, when initial cost rather than lifetime economic benefit is a primary consideration of the client when selecting a contractor, the contractor must default to running as lean as possible. Without surplus staff, the contractor can only scale up by employing subcontractors. Subcontractors have exactly the same scheduling challenges and considerations.

To put it in a nutshell, a contracted project where low initial cost is a primary consideration is dependent on the schedules of the clients of the contractors subcontractors. And the initial low cost pressure runs all the way down to resource constrain those subcontractors.

The last thing I will add is that many projects start by the client and contractor sitting down and having no idea what the project actually is, how it will be done, or how long it will take. But the client wants a fixed price and a low one.

Good luck.

[taneem → brudgers]

The subcontractor dependency is thought provoking. I hadn't thought of that.

[CyberFonic]

I have dealt with contractors that are on-time, get work completed on schedule and those that are late, if they even turn up, unreliable, late on finishing and often require remedial work after hand-over.

In my experience, most contractors come from a trades background so they have never learnt the principles of effective business management. The reliable ones seem to have an intuitive sense for what their clients expect and how to satisfy their needs. The unreliable ones think that all they need is their trades skills.

[emteycz]

In my experience, only underpaid and/or inexperienced contractors are unreliable.