I had a very different experience than how you wrote it. I started as a FTE for a small software company and was contracted out to a larger one. They made the mistake of letting me know how much they were actually charging for me per hour and when they started laying off engineers rather than management i realized how mis-managed the place was. Thats when i went on my own and searched for work on my own. Co-workers is one way of finding new gigs, but the best has been actively searching through linkedin and other forums such as HN!