Hmmm - I read in one of your comments that you're just graduating. Does that mean you haven't done any industry coding work? If so, I'm not sure that it's a great idea to jump straight into contracting.
You learn a lot in the first year or two on a job. Looking at it from a hiring position I would never take on an inexperienced dev on a contract (no offence, you may be great). Junior positions are like an apprenticeship; you know you're sinking time into someone but are hoping that over time they'll start providing value. Contractors are generally expected to have experience and, accordingly, they cost more.
If you've spent a bit of time at a job (2 years is a fairly normal time to leave) there are a couple of tricks you could try that worked for me.
A) Tell them you're leaving but you're available for contract work. You're a known quantity, you know their systems/products and can work efficiently when they need the extra resources. They will send you work (and some will just take you back on a contract straight away - that's how I started contracting).
B) If you've worked at an agency, ask to take some of their clients. It might sound insane, but every agency has clients they don't really want. Small clients that have been around for a while that they still need to service. That work is just unprofitable noise as an agency grows bigger. As a one-man-band it's perfect. The client is used to paying agency rates and with you they get personal service from the person who was doing their dev work anyway. I have clients from this arrangement that have been amazing.
"... accordingly, they cost more." I disagree with this. Contractors pay a significant price by leaving a full time job. No benefits, no company sponsored talks,training, no paid time off. The extra buck you make contracting is not extra.
For people who have problems with innumeracy (and lacking a tax advisor's phone number, I guess) this can be a real problem. For the rest of us, it's not that hard to figure out what those things cost, add it to how much you want to make, and then divide by 2000 to figure out an hourly rate.
The real price of contracting isn't the loss of benefits, but the increased burden of providing those things for yourself (if they were that important to you in the first place). The real reward is: freedom. You can provide any/all/none of those things for yourself as you see fit.
I'm not a contractor, but wouldn't dividing by 2000 be a bit excessive? That would be 40 hours x 50 weeks, and everything I've read about contracting implies that you cannot bank on having constant work like that.
I've been contracting since 1997 and I haven't had a single day without employment. Except when I've chosen to have a holiday.
My secret has been to do such a good job that the client finds me indispensable and then leave on my terms, always with another gig lined up. Sometimes I've had to stay with clients for many months when I'd rather move on. Once I was working for a client that had a smell like they were going broke so I had to ruthlessly extract myself before my contract was due to expire, but that proved to be a good decision as a few months later nobody was being paid and were suddenly out of work.
I worked in a permanent role for 6 years before contracting, and I doubt it would be a good idea to do it with no experience. My first contract was acquired through an agency, and probably 50% of my work is through an agency, the rest is word of mouth and doing more work for former clients.
I usually divide by 1,000 when I'm working out those numbers, to account for time spent finding clients, lulls, etc. Sometimes it's really nice to just take the afternoon off, and it's really nice when that's already factored into your rate.
I bill an average of 1816 hours a year. 10 holidays, 3 weeks of vacation, 3 sick days and a week a year finding new gigs. That's been the case for the last 12 years.
That's very true. And with full time staff there's also all the NI stuff to deal with (in the UK).
Having said that, there's a general attitude from employers (at least everywhere I've worked) of "I'm paying this person £400 a day, they'd better be good."
I've been on both sides, and from the employers side you're definitely willing to cut staff a lot more slack than contractors (though that may be totally irrational).
I followed option A in my career. I quit, went back to school to finish my degree and worked part time as a contractor for enough money to maintain my mortgage while in school.
Anyway, it is very important to learn to work closely with a team. It is also VERY important that you work with people that are SMARTER than you. IMHO, this is the best way to get proper mentor-ship and motivation to learn. I personally try to surround myself with people that are smarter than me.
Once you think that you know "everything" or that you're the smartest person in the room, it's time to change jobs. Because:
A) People won't like working with you
B) You'll stop learning new things since you already know everything.
Why is this? If enough people follow the "work with people that are SMARTER than you", which I think it's really important and I hope a significant number of people follow, why wouldn't they like working with you?
Thinking you know everything is a definitive sign that you do not!
One of the first lessons you learn from experience is that what you thought would happen, doesn't.
In other terms, you have cognitive biases, emotional biases, and filters your brain uses as information you process goes from perception to short term memory to long term memory...and lots of things get lost in the process.
If someone isn't smart enough to realize his perception of what he knows is colored and influeneced by things outside his control...he probably hasnt had even close to enough experience to be humbled.
Reminds me of the saying, "a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know practically everything about pretty much nothing."
It's when you start to think you know everything that people don't like to work with you. I haven't met that many people in my software career ~15yrs that have enjoyed working with a know-it-all.
You can of course be super smart at your job and know a TON, but when you start acting cocky and like you know everything it usually doesn't end well.
I can tolerate know-it-alls when they really do know a lot more about something than I do and are willing to share.
However in my experience, the majority of people with a know-it-all attitude are simply blowing hot air and trying to cover for the fact that they really aren't nearly as smart or knowledgeable as they would like to be.
Most truly smart and knowledgeable people I've met have been amazingly humble and usually fairly quiet about things. The qualities of quietness and humility lead to learning.
Having the internships obviously helps. Have you just had a look around on jobserve.co.uk? You might find something suitable.
In terms of applying for contracts a lot of it (unfortunately) still goes through recruiters. My advice would be to look at the buzz words in the ad and to change your cv to put all of those at the top. Recruiters see that and think you're the perfect candidate. That will normally get you an interview.
Probably. Sorry, little bit of a generic term but in particular I was thinking of web agencies - the kind that make glossy websites for other companies (or mobile apps, facebook promotions etc). Needn't be that sort of work. Could be embedded systems or whatever I suppose. All my experience is with web agencies.
Really, any company that's doing project work for other companies. They'll often have long standing clients that they wouldn't mind handing over.
You learn a lot in the first year or two on a job. Looking at it from a hiring position I would never take on an inexperienced dev on a contract (no offence, you may be great). Junior positions are like an apprenticeship; you know you're sinking time into someone but are hoping that over time they'll start providing value. Contractors are generally expected to have experience and, accordingly, they cost more.
If you've spent a bit of time at a job (2 years is a fairly normal time to leave) there are a couple of tricks you could try that worked for me.
A) Tell them you're leaving but you're available for contract work. You're a known quantity, you know their systems/products and can work efficiently when they need the extra resources. They will send you work (and some will just take you back on a contract straight away - that's how I started contracting).
B) If you've worked at an agency, ask to take some of their clients. It might sound insane, but every agency has clients they don't really want. Small clients that have been around for a while that they still need to service. That work is just unprofitable noise as an agency grows bigger. As a one-man-band it's perfect. The client is used to paying agency rates and with you they get personal service from the person who was doing their dev work anyway. I have clients from this arrangement that have been amazing.
Hope that helps in some small way.