After that, just have the confidence to push for it, to ignore the recruiters who will tell you you won't be able to - they just want the commission for placing you in perm work - yeah. I waited until I had about 12 years experience. I don't think I needed to wait that long.
I've been contracting five years, and the state of software engineering seems woeful in the small and medium sized countries of the UK.
Could have sworn I fixed that...
I have seen terrible disasters developed by every single sort of person. The issue normally comes when we as developers seem more interested in doing "clever" things at the expense of making sure we code for maintainability and support ability.
Combine the above with a large part of our community being terrible at communicating and you have a recipe for confusion and chaos.
[looks at current codebase]
> at the expense of making sure we code for maintainability and support ability
[cries, etc.]
(The current codebase is a masterpiece of cleverness - a single person's homegrown ORM and ObjectModel in Perl. Unfortunately that also means it's an overly complex, horribly unreadable, utterly unmaintainable piece of crap.)
Permanent members of staff seldom get the same money as skilled contractors and have to put up with a lot more restrictions around holiday and work life balance.
I would equate a contractor in the UK to being the equivalent experience of being a consultant without the politics and drama that comes with it. I have worked for almost a decade as a consultant in different countries and much prefer being a contractor to that.
Promotions seem to normally equate to more responsibility with a meagre if at all pay increase for permanent members of staff. People forget that there is only 1 CTO in an organisation, not everyone can ever get to that level. Most get stuck in middle management hell doing unfulfilling jobs.