In case you haven't been paying attention to the Twitter feed recently, I rejoined the workforce in a manner of speaking this week. I started getting paid for the internship at the church and I also undertook my first contract job as well. Now that the initial day is over, I think I have a much better handle on what to expect from here on out.
The world of the contractor is such a different one than what I have previously experienced, and my first contact with it left me kind of shell-shocked. I'm used to being an employee of a company who is assigned a project with fairly long completion dates and the understanding that if the technology isn't known that there is time to learn it; what I felt on the consulting end of things is that I'm expected to be an expert already - the client has a project and needs some expertise and brings in a contractor who has the missing skillset to fill in the gaps. I'm used to a much slower pace in initial negotiations as well and I wasn't quite prepared for the fact that an interview with a client for a contract position is more for them to see how you'd fit into the culture versus a competition for the open slot - if the contracting company presents someone to a client, they're presenting them as the ideal candidate and the initial meeting is to find out if the contractor is in some way not going to meet the needs rather than the rigorous interview process to discern the best technical expert for the job with the associated wait time as they interview other applicants. I really recoiled internally about being "the java guy" or "the web services guy" to come in and do a whole project with those things because I'm not an expert in those fields - I just have some overall and general exposure to them; I know the concepts but I've never written an application myself that uses them. I don't think anyone has ever used the words "ninja" or "pimp" to describe my coding or development skills. The idea of being "the" guy for anything right out of the gate caused me to put a lot of pressure on myself (whether it was real or imagined, I don't yet know) and that aided and abetted my freak-out.
So, you can probably imagine my surprise when I went from accepting a Wednesday interview slot on a Tuesday to having the realization that there was a good possibility that I could be working full-time on a contract for the next 2-3 months on the Thursday immediately following the interview. I sort of freaked out. It's like going from 0-120 mph in like .05 seconds. I'm sure that these thoughts played a big role in how I did in the interview because, to the best of my knowledge, I won't be getting that contract (although that was also due in large part to the fact that my planned mission trip to Galveston directly collides with their release timeline for the project). My confidence was a little shaken and I'm sure it showed in my discussions with the team. They will be expanding more in the future because they have a lot of irons in the fire, so hopefully after I get back from Galveston and have no further time collisions we can try again to see if there's a match there. Now that I know what to expect, I will probably come from a much stronger position internally and, as my fixer says, I must be pretty good because they don't let just anyone into IBM or stay for 9 years if they're not.
In the meantime, another 2-3 day gig came in on Wednesday that I accepted (with a better hourly rate than the one I interviewed for), which I started today. There was no interview process for this one - I just showed up at the specified time and place, was filled in on the situation, and got to work. That was also disconcerting - accepting work without hearing what the project entails is going to take some getting used to. For instance, all I was told about this contract was that it involved "debugging some web services security issues", and that was it. I didn't really feel that I had enough information to make a decision on whether or not I thought I could do it, and so I had to go into it with the "fake it till ya make it" mentality. Once I heard about the project and what they were trying to do, and once I got into it, the old programming juices started to flow again and I was feeling better about it, but all I can say (again) is that this is just going to take some getting used to.
I think in the end, I will come out of this liking the consulting gig for a while, because it does allow for a certain amount of autonomy and the ability to take a project from start to finish (which I haven't done in a long time). Also, if a gig sucks, it's not going to last forever and if it really goes sour the slate can just be wiped clean with the next contract. Granted, if enough of them go wrong, I'm sure the agency will stop bringing them to my attention, but I surely don't intend for that to happen. 2-3 months is not the end of the world, and neither is biting off more than I can chew - worst case is that they bring in someone else to replace me if I get in over my head, and best case is that I learn something useful in the process via the crucible of a pressure performance situation.
Plus, having a little more money coming in is good too.
