Why should you become a contractor?

Have you ever considered working as a contract developer?

• You can earn much more as a contractor than a salaried employee (often twice as much). For example, as a senior Rails or JavaScript developer in London, you can make £600-£700 per day (that's around $1,000 per day).
• You can take breaks and holidays more often. Most contracts are around 6 months long. It's fairly common for people to work for 6 months, take a break for a month or two and then get another contract.
   
• Explore your interests and side projects without conflict of ownership or interest. Companies tend to enforce far stricter rules on their full-time employees when it comes to work outside the job. As a contractor, you have more leverage for making clear that the employer does not own anything you do outside of that contract.

• You can have much better work-life balance than salaried employees. I'm not sure what the reason is, but in my experience, employers expect a lot more time commitment out of their full-time employees. Employees (especially developers) are somehow expected to always be on-call. And with Slack, it's easy to get sucked and guilted into it. You don't want to be accused of "not being a team player" or "not committed to the mission" or "not part of the family". As a contractor, I found it much easier to draw clear boundaries - both in terms of responsibilities and work hours.

• Related to the same point, as a contractor, you will learn to be a professional and run your own business. Whether we like to admit it or not, overworking is often a sign of amateur behaviour. Instead of getting your work done in good time, you waste time shooting the shit at the virtual watercooler (haha look another NFT meme) and then work late hours to ship that feature. As a contractor, companies expect you to know what you're doing, hit the ground running and get things done on time.

• You can get a variety of experiences in a short amount of time - you can work in many different companies for 3-6 months at a time. For example, in a span of a few years (and only working a few months at a time), I worked for a 2-person startup, a large government department, an ecommerce company, and an enterprise SaaS company among others.
   
• You can get pay rises much faster. Every time you get a new contract, you can increase your rate by 10-30%. And since you can change contracts at least once a year, that adds up quickly.

• It's easier to work part-time. For example, you can get a 3 or 4 days a week contract much more easily than you can get a part time job with that kind of arrangement. That gives you the time and mental space to work on your own projects.

• It's a good way to ease into freelancing. You can find contract work through the same channels as salaried jobs. But for freelancing, you have to start selling your services through completely different channels on day one. So it's a much bigger leap for someone coming from an employee background. Once you have some contractor experience under your belt, you can try your hand at freelancing with confidence.

• No paid holiday - if you take a day off as a contractor, you don't get paid for that day.
• No employer benefits like health insurance - although you can earn a higher income, you have to give up some of the perks of being an employee.
• You need to be able to work independently. If you can't, you may not enjoy it.
• No training provided - you're expected to hit the ground running.
• If you prefer to stay in one company for a long time (say, for example, you really believe in their mission), you may be better suited to a full-time job.