After 12 years of contracting, I’ve decided it’s time to go permanent.

This isn’t a reaction to the state of the market or a midlife crisis. It’s just a shift in what I value and how I want to work. In my 30s, bouncing from company to company every few months was exciting. New projects, new challenges and new people kept things fresh and helped me grow fast. But now, at 43, that lifestyle feels a lot more exhausting than exciting.

The thrill fades

When you’re young(er), there’s a certain buzz that comes with being the “new guy” every few months. You drop into a team, figure out the lay of the land, solve the immediate problems, and move on before things get political or boring. I did that for over a decade, and it served me well. I learned how to navigate different orgs, get up to speed quickly, and deliver value fast. But that same cycle, repeated over and over, starts to wear thin.

These days, the context switching isn’t energising - it’s draining. Every new contract means rebuilding relationships, relearning domain knowledge, and proving yourself all over again. It’s a treadmill. And while I used to enjoy the sprint, I’m starting to miss the marathon.

These days, I’m not being hired to build a shopping cart feature, I’m being brought in to overhaul how teams work, how they make decisions, and how they deliver.

It’s a moving target, and it never stays still long enough to get boring, in fact the more you work on that problem, the more interesting it gets!

The contract that changed everything

The turning point for me was when I started working at a UK Intelligence Community department. Originally, it was just another short-term gig - go in, get the job done, and move on. But over time, that contract taught me something I hadn’t fully appreciated before: the power of staying put.

I went in as a senior frontend developer, but - as I often do - when I got there I saw areas where real improvements could be made. They were building an application suite and every application was built from scratch, by siloed teams with no cross-pollination of ideas.

I suggested that we build a unified codebase, standardise our code and implement a design system. The response to that was - in a nutshell - "off you go then".

So I did.

Building on a design system that I've been working on for many years, I produced 'The Wellspring': A developer toolkit that included a standardised boilerplate codebase, an SCSS theme, a robust component library and a well-documented and well-tested design system.

They absolutely loved it and the teams all adopted it quickly when building new applications. Soon enough, they wanted their legacy code to be upgrade to use The Wellspring and teams started to request I came over to their team to help them.

This resulted in me being given a new role: "Head of coding standards". It was - in a nutshell - a staff engineer role. I continue to maintain and extend The Wellspring and also supported teams in implementing it as well as mentoring developers.

I'd done all of these things before but the difference is that my value on this project meant I kept getting my contract extended, before I knew it, I'd been there for years.

When you’re embedded in a team for that long, you stop reacting to surface-level problems and start seeing the deeper ones - the ones that don’t show up until you’ve lived with the product for a while. You gain proper context. You see the unintended consequences of past decisions. And you can actually do something about them because you’re still there.

On a personal level - you see the impact of your work when you speak to your colleagues. There has never been a more rewarding period of my life than when I had colleagues I'd never even met before (we were a HUGE, distributed department) come up to me at our quarterly all-hands meetings and talk to me like I was a celebrity and enthuse about how much they loved working with my codebase.

I was known, I wasn't just "Alex" or "that contractor guy". I was "Foxy" and I was respected and by god did I love it!

That contract let me build long-term trust, make strategic improvements, and see the impact of my work unfold over time. I got more value out of it - and gave more value to the team - than I ever had on shorter gigs. And it completely changed how I think about my role as a developer.

Sadly, that department was a victim of the market shift and it was hugely defunded. They let go of almost all of their contractors and I was no exception.

Had I been permanent, I'd still be there now.

I'd have stayed there forever.

I’m not 'just' a coder anymore

Over the past few years, I’ve gone from senior frontend developer to lead, and now I operate at a staff/principal level. At this point, my job isn’t just writing code - it’s shaping systems, mentoring engineers, improving process, and driving long-term change.

And that’s the problem with short-term contracting. You’re often brought in to deliver a specific thing, fast. But when you’re working at staff level, the biggest problems are usually slow burns; things that need months (or years) of context, experimentation, and alignment. It’s really hard to have that kind of impact when you’re not expected to stick around.

Permanent roles make a lot more sense at this level. You get a seat at the strategic table. You’re trusted with long-range thinking. You can follow through on initiatives instead of handing them off just as they’re gaining traction. And you can grow alongside the product and the team.

The issue of money

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: money. For most of my contracting career, the financial upside was a big part of the appeal. I could earn a day rate that easily dwarfed most permanent salaries, even after accounting for gaps between gigs. It made the uncertainty worthwhile.

But in recent years, that equation has shifted. IR35 massively reduced the tax advantages of contracting in the UK. Meanwhile, top-tier perm salaries have caught up - especially at leadership levels. These days, I can earn almost as much in a permanent role as I do contracting, and I get a bunch of other perks on top.

Pensions, for one. Most perm jobs offer 5-10% employer contributions, which is essentially free money. Then there’s paid holidays, sick pay, learning and development budgets, annual bonuses, private health insurance, and stock options in some cases. As a contractor, I had to cover all that myself and if I took a break or got sick enough to need time off, I wasn’t earning.

Ultimately, even if the contractor market dramatically improves soon, the simple fact is that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore.

Building things I couldn’t stick around for

Some of the best work of my career happened as a contractor but I rarely got to see it through.

I founded the Royal Navy Design System, and later built The Wellspring design system for the UK Intelligence Community. These weren’t just component libraries, they were full-scale design platforms, crafted to improve consistency, accessibility, and developer experience across entire organisations. They were the kind of projects that require deep thinking, long-term maintenance, and wide-scale adoption to really shine.

And yet, like most contractor-led initiatives, once the core build was done, I was replaced. Not because of performance - just because that’s how it works.

Contractors cost more, and once the heavy lifting is over, it’s cheaper to hand things off to permanent staff. It makes sense from a business point of view, but it’s frustrating when you’ve poured that much into something.

I wanted to stick around, improve those systems over time, and guide them through real-world use. But I couldn’t. That wasn’t the deal.

Stability doesn’t mean stagnation. It means the freedom to do your best work without constantly looking over your shoulder. And at this point in my life, that’s worth a lot.

I don't see it as giving up... I'm levelling up

I’m not moving to perm because I couldn’t hack it anymore. I’m doing it because I’ve changed, I've reached a stage in my career now where contracting just doesn't make sense to me anymore.

Contracting gave me breadth. It gave me exposure to dozens of teams, tools, platforms and problems to resolve. I got really good (and fast) at figuring things out, getting stuff done, and helping teams move forward. But now I want to go deeper. I want to be part of something I don’t have to let go of the moment it’s stable.

I want to mentor people long-term. I want to clean up tech debt I helped create. I want to build systems I’ll actually get to live with. And I want to be there not just for the build-up, but for the follow-through.

That’s what permanent gives me. And at 43, it feels like the right next step.