Did you consciously become a contractor or fall into it?

[MarillionFan]

Poll to follow

[BlasterBates]

I fell into it. There was a German consultancy encouraging people to go freelance, they agreed a contract before they had a project and guaranteed you EUR 2000 a month as a retainer if they couldn't find you work. Obviously this was an absolute no-brainer. Admittedly they took a fairly hefty margin. Probably wouldn't have had the balls to do it otherwise. Unfortunately the law's changed now so they can't offer that anymore.

[doodab]

I quit my one and only permie job in a hissy fit and by the time they saw fit to offer me a raise I had found my first contract.

[alreadypacked]

I'm a

Planned to go into contracting since I was in Uni.
Took permie roles that would look good on my contracting CV, like Consulting company, blue chip etc.
While contracting have stuck to blue chip companies in different markets.

It's worked for me so far, my current goal is to reach the 1K a day.

[Spacecadet]

Conscious decision, although was persuaded by my manager to hang on for a redundancy package which was imminent. In the end it was almost 12 months later

[realityhack]

Fell into it - my first good job offer after uni was a contract that was too good to turn down, got the bug and continued in that vein for the next 10 years.

[mudskipper]

It was semi-conscious.

Was fed up with permie job, so when opportunity arose decided to go contracting and volunteered for redundancy so that I'd have a few quid to see me through. If the redundancy hadn't been on offer it probably wouldn't have happened.

Currently benched, so have gone for AndyW option.

[gingerjedi]

My first IT support job paid 14k + van.

It wasn't a hard decision to make when I was offered a 12 month contract on £25ph with only 2 month experience.

[TestMangler]

Was a (redundant) research scientist in the civil service for 14 years.

When i got redundo'd in '93, I went to the job centre and found there was very little call for anyone to build earth quake simulator tables or log data from gas meter callibration or inlet manifold flow modelling.

The bloke in the job centre asked me if I 'knew anything about them computer things' and I scored a contract building prototype server kit with IBM, which let to getting OS/2 gigs in the banking/insurance sector which led to test environment management/test management/infrastructure PM gigs, mostly in banking/insurance.

[TraceRacing]

Been permie most of my working life (some 30 odd years now) apart from a short term contract a couple of years ago. Now the kids have grown up and left home I have deceided to throw in the towel of trying to make the money last as long as the month and start contracting. My first gig (with an ex-employer) starts 2 weeks today after I finish my notice at current company...not that I'm doing anything anyway...

At least it beats having to answer the question "what do you want to be doing 5 years from now" which is asked of every permie interview... feck, I could never answer that! Now my 5 year plan is to save enough to retire..