Short term contracts are a surefire way to get bad results. A dev that knows they don’t have to maintain the systems doesn’t have a reason to care about long term sustainability. So you have to have senior devs babysit them instead of writing code. Some seniors are fine with that, others will start interviewing elsewhere when they can’t code.

There’s also the old joke of “it’ll take a month to get done. ok what if we double your manpower? Three months to get done”.

Not to mention the multiple months of on ramp that happens as a dev learns what the codebase actually does.

After a hire I wouldn’t expect them to be meaningfully architecting anything in a codebase for 2 months. Only doing minimal patch fixes, small 1 and 2 point tickets. A contractor would never be trusted with arch and would never graduate off those short tickets.

I don’t see the down side

Being able to draw talent in.

As a dev myself, a short term contract would have to be pretty favorable for me to consider it.

This is literally a microcosm of the whole issue with gamedev right now. Constant churn of short duration contracts terminating the second the money coming in is below a predetermined threshold. Good on Arrowhead for trying not to be part of the problem.

He mentions looking into contractors which is basically exactly this. Going through a 3rd party can make that process easier for short term needs, which is what he is saying the current situation might be.