Hiring an employee is an expensive, long-term proposition. To begin with, salaries are high, and you can figure on an additional 30% or so to cover benefits, administration, and so forth. Moreover, the vast majority of technical contributors are rather specialized. Coders rarely have much patience for project management tasks or paperwork. System administrators almost never have the experience to do more than the most rudimentary of programming tasks. Many analysts and architects have the attitude that they have somehow 'outgrown' coding, and project managers, similarly, often seem to consider themselves above rolling up their sleeves and diving into implementation. The largest companies can sometimes afford to support this level of specialization, but small and medium sized organizations rarely can. Furthermore, some essential skills are such that you just don't need someone to fill that role forever, and certainly not on a full-time basis.

There are many situations in which hiring contract help makes a great deal of sense. Once someone has set up your network and servers, do you really need an administrator on site 40 hours per week? Of course not. Similarly, if you're looking at improving your development process, perhaps pursuing CMM (Capability Maturity Model) levels, an initial assessment, followed by periodic 'tune up' visits is far more sensible than maintaining a full time methodologist/process-engineer

 

Let's face it, even the most diligent worker is rarely productive for a full 40 hours per week. Impromptu chat sessions on non-business topics, various distractions, occasional long lunches, and so forth are the norm in every working environment. While a contractor is not immune to these non-productive diversions, a reputable contractor will typically log this time as non-billable. Hence, when you pay for 40 hours of time, you will get a full 40 hours worth of work.

 

My greatest strengths stem from the fact that I have worn many hats in my long and varied career, and have remained current in all of them. I can easily transition from process definition, to architecture, to design, coding, network setup, server tuning, database administration, and so forth. I enjoy them all. More importantly, I acknowledge that I am not skilled at every task, and unlike many others I've encountered in this business, am not ashamed to admit when I don't know something. Conversely, when I say I do know something, you can rest assured that I have done it before . . . many times. In many cases, I may have specific design patterns or code components that will meet your needs in a much shorter time than if I had to develop them from scratch. In a nutshell, there is no substitute for experience!