Ask HN: Where to find contract work as a developer?

Either here or on reddit I've seen plenty of people mention the option of working as a contractor as a viable option.

I have been working as a developer for 12 years. For the first six years of my career I wrote C++ / Python for a finance-adjacent firm.

The second half of my career has been the typical full-stack developer stuff. Django / Pyramid / SQLAlchemy backend and several different front-end frameworks like Vue and React.

It's enough to say that I'm a generalist and a decent enough programmer.

I'd love the ability to work a contract for 6 months to a year and then take a few months off between gigs. But when I search for contract opportunities they seem somewhat rare. Additionally, the contract gigs I find seem to be seeking people who would prefer full-time employment but would settle for the contract as a sort of 'probationary' measure. I never seem to find opportunities where it is seen by all parties as a temporary placement.

Am I looking in the wrong place? Are there certain employment agencies that I am not aware of that have these in abundance? Am I lacking in experience? If so, what do I need to do?

I live in NYC. I would think that would be helpful but I'm not sure.

Look for small to med consulting firms in your field of interest, they’re always looking for subcontractors to staff projects. They have a sales pipeline and the good ones take care of their best subs.

Have you tried Upwork?

Try government work. I was in state government for a long time, trying to make it work. It doesn't. Unless you're a contractor.

They get all the development work, and then regular staff have to try to actually get things working, and maintain it, not knowing how or why it was built that way, but by then the contractor is off doing something else.

During the last failed project I was in the middle of, in 2003 (mostly as an observer, because I actually worked there), I was making around $42k/yr, and the guy in the next cubicle was making $200k.

He knew different things than I did, but I also knew different things than he did, so the difference in pay was because he was a contractor, and therefore considered to be valuable.

Whenever I got a chance to actually do something, my stuff would slip into production and actually work, silently and forever, so I never got to be a hero by coming in on weekends to perform miracle rescues when everything blew up. Because it didn't. One reason that I was never considered to be an asset.

Anyhow, there's government all over. Exactly every town has it, every county, and every state, and there are lots of companies already set up to feed on it, and usually always looking for bodies to throw at it. You can find a niche.

I've worked as a contractor on and off for years. In the UK it was always quite easy to find, once you have a few years experience, you just go to the usual job boards and tick the box for employment type "contractor" instead of "permanent". e.g. [0]. First time round you'll get asked in interviews why you want to switch from perm roles, so prepare an answer for that. Most of the listings actually come from recruitment agencies, but once you've done it a few times you can build a relationship with the more reliable agencies who will start to send work your way before it gets advertised.

I have no idea if there are similar opportunities in your part of the world, and it's not quite such an easy option in Britain any more since the tax rules changed. But it could be worth looking for some equivalent.

[0] https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/jobs/contract/developer/in-london?r...