I wanted to add a bit to yesterday's post about contracting. I feel that I covered some very high-level basics, narrowed the field down to the two most common contracting scenarios, and there were some good comments (as well as one fine post).

However, I entirely failed to mention some of the non-material gains of being a contactor. It isn't all about wondering how you're going to feed yourself next month - there's quite a bit more to it, really, and it's the "extra stuff" that has kept me going.

Here are a couple of things that come to mind when I think about the "extra stuff."

If you decide to contract, then you will encounter diverse projects and technologies. In my contract with NW Natural, I wrote desktop apps, web apps, web service goo, wrote software to integrate with several interesting 3rd party packages, worked with Windows, worked with the AS400, DB2, MS SQL Server, and did some distributed Java mumbo-jumbo. There's a bit more to add to this list, but I think you get the "diversity in technology" point I'm trying to make here.

While this might not be representative of the typical contract, there's something about being a contractor that opens these doors for you. You'll encounter someone at a company who need "things" done, but who doesn't want to go through the process of hiring an entirely new employee or contractor to deal with them.

You wind up getting to see some pretty weird things. I got to get my hands dirty writing a CMS that ran on a Sun Cobalt Raq. The OS was Linux, the code was Java, and the presentation was done in ASP (using the ChilliSoft ActiveX/Java bridge). It was a short and fascinating job that would never have gone to an employee. The scope of the project was too small (it was a simple CMS) to justify hiring someone, and the company that wanted it wasn't a software shop anyway. I got the chance to work on this whack-ass system because I'm the equivalent of a coding whore (get in, get out, here's your money, it was nice doing business with you).

I hate the title I gave this section, but I really wanted to use the word "meta" in here somewhere.

What I mean by "metastuff" is an understanding of all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

Have you ever actually sat and watched the closing credits of a film? I don't care it it's something incredible like "Contact" or something repulsive like "The Ewok Adventure" - the list is long. For every actor you see on the screen, there seems to be about 9,000 supporting roles from "Director" to "Mr. Penn's Personal Betty Ford Clinic Consultant."

Companies are the same way.

The work that goes on behind the scenes to turn your hours into a check is really something. As an employee, you often aren't fully aware of what it takes.

In a large company like Microsoft, for example, the workload bust be truly incredible. I'm only half joking when I tell people that I think approximately 50% of the IRS is dedicated to dealing with Microsoft, which is to say nothing of how many people inside of Microsoft are dedicated to keeping the company running.

For someone like myself, the scope is significantly smaller, but I still get the basic idea from my own experience. Having to handle my own quarterly taxes, utterly incomprehensible IRS forms, strange state and federal registrations, and so on, has taught me quite a bit about the supporting infrastructure that sits behind the curtain.

What I've learned is that it is not cheap to keep an employee.

For nearly every dollar your company pays you, they're paying another just to keep your butt in one of their seats.

You might think that this knowledge is abstract and useless, but it helps to make sense of an industry that sometimes defies comprehension. You begin to realize why it's so difficult to get work, and why you're worked so hard when you finally get it. Hiring anybody is a major risk for a company of any size. Before I was a contractor, I took employment as a given in life. Several years down the road, I've learned that it is very much a privilege, and that has had a direct effect on my performance. I want happy customers, and I want people to feel that they're getting their money's worth.

And that's what I learned from doing my own (small business) taxes. Your mileage may vary.