How to Stay Sane During Your Contracting Career

Contracting is fraught with many pitfalls and challenges, but most of the problems exist in our heads. Here are the most common complaints I hear from contractors and how to overcome them.

Benefit Envy

Benefit envy can rear its ugly head any time during your contracting career, and it most likely will repeatedly do so. Bouts of benefit envy are most likely to occur after the successful completion of a long project, where employees may receive a bonus or are thrown an after-hours party for a job well done. Another recurrence of benefit envy may crop up when it comes near to employee performance appraisal time. As a contractor, you will not receive the same praise and recognition as your employee peers, even though you have worked just as hard (if not harder) than them. You may find yourself gritting your teeth and silently seething about how they receive bonuses, raises, paid time off, special recognition, and other benefits reserved only for employees.

The solution here is to remind yourself that all those benefits have strings attached to them. That performance raise Joe got that he keeps gloating about? Well, he put in 20 extra hours a week for the last six months as a salaried employee, and he didn't receive any extra pay for those hours. Meanwhile, smart you has banked all your extra overtime cash, since you get paid for every hour you work. Take a minute to look at your fat and happy savings account. Most likely, you made more money over the last six months than what Joe just received as a performance bump. Since it didn't come to you in a lump sum, Uncle Sam hasn't taken as big of a chunk out of it, either. That after-hours party? Hob-knobbing with people during your precious personal time isn't all it's cracked up to be. Besides, you're a contractor. Your career does not depend on hob-knobbing with folks at a company where your time has an expiration date. So, who's the smart one now?

I Don't Get Any Recognition