It worked out. End of my contractor story.
Sharing this as I tend to read a lot of bad news on contracts/offshoring so wanted to share my story.
I was a contractor for over a decade working mainly between Finance and Government. My rates varied from £600 outside to £800 pd outside with an additional £300 pd coming from introductions (I knew people with niche skills who worked through my company). So I was making £1100 per day outside. Which I know is a dream rate for a lot of people.
I was bored as hell though. In government nothing was moving. I had lots of authority but the orgs were just grinding. Most of my time was spent in meetings presenting the same deck over and over and I got somewhat resentful of the income and contract. Everything was WFH which meant I spent a lot of time effectively doing nothing.
I bid on other government contracts but it was really stuff I didn't want to do i.e. "migrate legacy Oracle database for DWP", "call centre tech transformation for DVLA". Things which could be profitable but I was not really going to win these without some kind of help and even if I did win them, I knew it was more slide deck jockeying.
Some people I know that left contracting became CTOs in big orgs. Some went to Apple, Meta. Others went into trading companies where they did very well. I felt like I missed the boat by playing very safe.
A good friend of mine took a start up CTO role (after contracting) for a company that raised about £10 million and then went bust. He did some other tech leadership roles but had a 6 month unemployed phase. He was then picked up as an enterprise CTO for a pretty big and successful org. He was my inspiration.
So I pulled the pin. After 12 years of contracting, I joined a start-up as CTO. I really worked hard, for the first time in many years. I was putting in long hours, pushing extreme amounts of code. I had a savings safety blanket which was painful to see dwindle. What was really motivating me was just doing stuff again, a mission! Sleeves rolled up, smashing through, picking up the frontier model coding tools, agentic workflows, all the cool stuff.
It didn't work out with the CEO. He starting becoming very passive when the VCs passed on the first round and checked out while I was moving mountains. So, parted company after about 8/9 months. It's still going and has a runway (for now at least).
So I was back in the market during the summer. Complete tumbleweeds. Started seeing roles for Architects going for £600 inside IR35, 1 day per week in the office. Heart breaking! Then some more start up CEOs reached out. Then some orgs looking for senior AI leaders. Slow though, like 1/2 calls per week max. Some rejections, one or two interviews with the weird and wild variety of tech interviews people use these days.
Then a small niche finance player, super tech heavy reached out last week. Very high paying (much more than the contract rate). Latest tech, AI tooling, agents, LLMs, the lot. In some ways, a dream role just basically turned up for me. It also is a path into other parts of that industry.
It took a lot of faith but I know I personally couldn't just spin the contractor wheel. I did actually apply for some of those £600 inside IR35 roles but was not considered. Maybe I was confusing to the CV filters at this point.
Sometimes you have to ask the universe, and it responds.