This is a very good observation. Contracting employees has long been a solution for big medical device companies to control budget constraints. The way this usually works is a big project comes along for a specific department. The department director will have a set budget for the year. When additional resources are needed they will reach out to a 3rd party and tell them here is 80k to find us an Engineer. The 3rd party will post this job and offer the potential contracting Engineering 60k and the 3rd party will pocket that 20k difference. In most cases, it will be an hourly rate and not a salary rate for legal and benefit reasons. The hiring of contractors doesn’t exactly correlate to a decrease in quality but it can if the company continues to hire inexperienced contractors. If additional resources are needed, the best approach is to reach out to the director and explain to him/her why an additional employee is needed and explain whether this additional employee is needed based on a project or for the overall benefit of the team.