Its that time again

TL;DR; A developer reflects on career changes, balancing family and work, and considers moving into contracting for flexibility and better pay, especially in .NET and enterprise tech.

Published on 16 July 2007

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

2 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/n0GHiv0sTfp

With a new baby, new mortgage rate and declining job satisfaction I am getting that itchy feeling in my feet. There was a time that I was allowed to Code for a living and not just support applications and document deployment strategies. I have ended up filling my free time with my love of Coding and now, with the new baby, I find that my free time is drying up.

My current thoughts are to expand into the field of contracting. That way when I get board I can just not renew my contract and find some greener pastures. The reason that I have not done this is the past is fear! Fear of having no income; fear of starting something new. I feel that it is time to bite the bullet and get on the Money ladder like 50% of my coworkers…

To that end I have been asking about and it seams that the going rate for a bog standard developer is around £300 per day… My, that would be nice. And I would hope that I am no bog standard developer! How many developers are already up on .NET 3.0, Team Foundation Server and Sharepoint 2007. How many developers are familiar with large scale deployments, enterprise architectures, disaster recovery and software factories.

I have turned down contracts before for a lot more than £300 a day, purely on the basis that they are a hundred miles up the road and I don’t like to commute… Well I have decided that is someone again offers me a 9 month contact for £650 a day, I will take it. I may not like being away from home, but I like my bank balance even less! And even the lowest rate would be double my salary…

Is anyone out there on the look out for a Senior .NET Developer with the skills I have listed? If so, ping me (see, learning the management jargon as well) and maybe we can take it offline and discuss the space!

How did you get into contracting?

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