> How do you find such contract work? (at BigCo's I mean)

Become a half-human slave to one of large outstaffing companies with a proud yet faux label of "free contractor", for tax purposes.

Microsoft employs many contractors, we tend to call them "vendor staff" internally. More often than not these people will come from external companies who supply the staff, but they will be based on-site and embedded onto a team for the duration of their contract.

Pretty sure I can't name any of our vendor companies, but you can take a guess at some of the bigger ones I'm sure.

>...we tend to call them "vendor staff" internally...

There was a time when MSFT called them "dash trash". Good times. /s

They still tend to get worked pretty hard, have no job security and don't get paid anywhere near as well.

Not a big secret - just google largest Ukrainian IT companies (they are all outsourcing)

getting an auditing threat from a @v-microsoft.com accounts are pretty common

>How do you find such contract work?

It's a misnomer[0]. You usually find this work through vendor companies that actually hold the contracts with BigCo's. To the BigCo, you're a contractor but you're "technically" an FTE with the vendor company, who holds the actual contract (head count x duration) to work at the BigCo.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misnomer

I'm wondering why you felt the need to link to a definition of a word you used?

for the reader, not the writer. he/she obviously knows the word but a potential reader might not and he's just saving them the google search, my guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

he doesn’t realize all modern OS can automatically look up word definitions?

Knowing someone who works there and wants something done badly enough to go through the internal procurement process is one way.