I have tried, and failed, and tried, and failed, to maintain interest in full time office-based positions. I just can't. I've never held a FTE position longer than 3 years. I'm nearing 40, by the way.
I use my skills, such as they are, in contract positions. I've been working continuously since 15 or so and aside from a brief spell of 4 months, never been out of work. When I became experienced/qualified enough to use my programming/engineering skills, after another failed FTE position I went contracting and never looked back.
Once again, recently, I have failed to engage with my latest run at an FTE role. I can't be doing with the monumentally slow pace of my employer, the power structures, the bureaucracy, the 45-minute daily standups (yes, I know), the broken business processes. So I'm back to contracting.
Some people aren't cut out for office life. Contracting is office life, sure, but you dictate the terms, you (generally) dictate the pay, you stay when you find a good team and walk when you want to. The problems are harder, you're generally solving issues the client can't solve themselves and bureaucratic blockers magically disappear when the client remembers you're costing them three figures a day.
LinkedIn jobs (HEAVILY filtered) tends to be my go-to when I go shopping for a new client, but there's plenty of contract-specific talent networks and bodyshop consultancies who you can find work from.
After all your time contracting, how easily can you find a new contract in terms of weeks/months spent searching for one? The reason I ask is because I'm getting tired of bureaucracy too and have been considering taking a break and getting into contracting as a software engineer for a while to see how that goes...How reliable is the pipeline of work in the software dev contracting world if you want to maintain access to a steady supply of income/benefits?
In the UK at least I can correct your timeframe to days and weeks, not weeks and months.
The quickest I have found a contract position from a cold start is 45 minutes.
Market's teeming and has been for years, aside from the obvious Covid period, there hasn't been any meaningful market collapse for a long time.
Saying that, this time of year is generally poor as companies eye Xmas and start shutting up shop. You'd do well late January onwards and especially after the start of the next budgetary cycle, typically end of March.
I've never contracted, but I'm in the exact same boat with regards to being someone else's full-time employee. Lately I've been struggling to stay even one year—I've been with 4 companies over the past 4 years! I'm a "flight risk". :)
And it's not that I don't want to work. I put 3-4 hours per weeknight into side projects, and another 8-12 hours on weekends. I have yet to make money on the side, but I keep hoping that something will succeed and I can run my own ship.
Perhaps you feel like you're chained in when you're working for an employer - I feel like it's a gilded cage. Yes, there's healthcare benefits, dental cover, bonus if I'm lucky, that kind of thing but at the end of the day I'm owned. My time is owned, my attention is owned and although I can pull the red cord and quit it's essentially bondage. Quitting becomes harder to do when you have a mortgage and kids, too. So you put up with it, and make yourself miserable, or put up with the misery.
But start working for yourself and all that goes away. You have CONTROL back - you dictate what you do, i.e. what you find interesting. Of course, the difficulty is making enough money to live, and finding that balance. I can't make money from side projects, I'm not that talented, but I can make money picking and choosing the projects that suit my interests and contracting is a happy medium.
I use my skills, such as they are, in contract positions. I've been working continuously since 15 or so and aside from a brief spell of 4 months, never been out of work. When I became experienced/qualified enough to use my programming/engineering skills, after another failed FTE position I went contracting and never looked back.
Once again, recently, I have failed to engage with my latest run at an FTE role. I can't be doing with the monumentally slow pace of my employer, the power structures, the bureaucracy, the 45-minute daily standups (yes, I know), the broken business processes. So I'm back to contracting.
Some people aren't cut out for office life. Contracting is office life, sure, but you dictate the terms, you (generally) dictate the pay, you stay when you find a good team and walk when you want to. The problems are harder, you're generally solving issues the client can't solve themselves and bureaucratic blockers magically disappear when the client remembers you're costing them three figures a day.
LinkedIn jobs (HEAVILY filtered) tends to be my go-to when I go shopping for a new client, but there's plenty of contract-specific talent networks and bodyshop consultancies who you can find work from.