My primary gig has all but ended due to a change in management at the client site.  It’s a bit of a bummer because we were doing some cutting-edge stuff in .NET 2.0, but alas, this is the life of a consultant/contractor.

Since I was putting full-time hours into that project, I didn’t have anything else lined up.  Now I’m in a position where I need to find something to take its place.  Previously, all my gigs came to me via friends, former co-workers and former bosses.  Unfortunately, things have tightened up at all those companies, so they’ve hired internally rather than go with consultants or
contractors.

Because of this, I decided to contact some of the area headhunters / body shops.  Big mistake so far.  The gigs they’ve pitched look cool, but what’s up with only wanting to pay $30-$40 an hour?  Yea, yea…I know what those numbers
equate to in yearly salary, but a) I’m not looking for a full-time gig and b) I’m not asking them to pay for benefits, so I’d think they could increase the hourly rate *just a bit*.  Geesh.  One of the things that frustrates me when it comes to working with agencies is that I know for a fact they’re charging the client well over $100 per hour, they just don’t want to reduce
their piece of the pie.

I guess I can’t really blame them given the current economy, but it isn’t like I’m a n00b with 6 months experience.   I’ve got a solid 10+ years in developing Microsoft-centric solutions.  The past 4-4.5 years have been spent doing .NET almost exclusively (remember this non-.NET project?).  Before that, it was every version of VB since 3.0 (I actually started programming in Quick Basic and then on to VB 2.0).

Unfortunately, big job sites aren’t much better.  It kills me to see postings for senior developers with 10+ years experience and the pay is only like $60k.  Ouch.