Why Companies Hire Me (And Why I Could Never Go Back to Nine to Five)

There is a question I get asked more often than you might expect, usually over a drink, usually by someone who has just watched me disappear into a project for a week and emerge looking like I have been living in a cave: why do companies hire you instead of just employing someone?

The question comes with an assumption baked in. The assumption is that contractors exist because we are easier to get rid of. Hire us for a project, wave goodbye when it is done, no redundancy packages, no awkward conversations, no HR paperwork. And yes, that is part of it. But it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is something most people do not talk about because it makes everyone slightly uncomfortable. It is about time. Specifically, it is about how much of it I am willing to give when the situation demands it, and how employment law makes that arrangement essentially illegal if you put me on payroll.

The Convenient Explanation and Why It Is Incomplete

Let us get the obvious part out of the way. Yes, contractors are easier to engage and disengage. If a project ends, the contract ends. If the budget disappears, so do I. There is a cleanness to it that employment lacks. Employees come with notice periods, redundancy calculations, potential tribunals, and the general sense that once someone is on your payroll, removing them is an emotional and administrative ordeal.

But here is the thing: most of my projects are not short. I have worked with clients for years. The engagement might technically be a rolling contract renewed every few months, but the relationship is as stable as any employment. Some of my longest professional relationships are with companies that could have employed me a dozen times over. They chose not to. And when I ask them why, the answer is never about flexibility to terminate. It is about flexibility to work.

The Real Reason: Hours, Law, and What Happens at 2am

Employment law in most developed countries is built on a reasonable and humane premise: workers should not be exploited. There are limits on how many hours someone can work per day, per week, per year. There are requirements for rest periods, for breaks, for time away from the screen. These protections exist because historically, without them, employers would grind employees into dust for profit.

I have no quarrel with these laws. They protect people who need protecting. But they also create an interesting asymmetry.

If you employ someone in the UK, the Working Time Regulations say they cannot work more than 48 hours per week on average, unless they opt out in writing. Even with an opt-out, you cannot force patterns that would be considered harmful. You must provide 11 consecutive hours of rest in every 24 hour period. You must provide a 20 minute break if the workday exceeds six hours. These are not suggestions. They are law. Violating them exposes the employer to liability.

Now consider a startup with a product launch in 72 hours. Or an agency that just won a pitch and promised delivery in a timeline that seemed reasonable until everyone did the maths. Or a retailer whose entire e-commerce platform has fallen over on the first day of their biggest sale. These situations exist. They happen more often than anyone in a boardroom likes to admit. And when they happen, someone needs to work in ways that employment law does not permit.

That someone is me.

What a 38 Hour Day Actually Looks Like

I have worked 38 hours without stopping. Not regularly. Not as a lifestyle. But when it was necessary, when the deadline was real and the stakes were high and there was genuinely no other way. I have done it, and I will probably do it again.

Let me tell you what that looks like, because the number sounds absurd until you have lived it.

It starts normally enough. You arrive at the office or open your laptop at home, coffee in hand, to do list in mind. The first eight hours pass like any workday. Then evening arrives and you keep going because the work is flowing and the deadline is not going to move. Around midnight, you hit a wall. Your body wants sleep. Your brain feels like wet cement. You push through with caffeine, with movement, with sheer bloody-mindedness. And then something strange happens.

Around hour 16 or 18, a second wind arrives. Your body has accepted that sleep is not coming and it stops complaining. You enter a state of focus that is almost meditative. The code flows. The problems that seemed intractable at hour 10 suddenly have obvious solutions. You are not quite hallucinating, but reality has taken on a slightly dreamlike quality. The edges are soft. Distractions do not register. It is just you and the work.

By hour 24, you are running on something beyond caffeine. There is a momentum to it, a strange euphoria that comes from knowing you are doing something most people cannot or will not do. The work is getting done. The impossible deadline is becoming possible. You can feel the finish line.

Hours 30 to 38 are a blur in memory. I know I was working because the commits are there, the deploys happened, the thing shipped. But I cannot tell you what I was thinking because by that point I was not thinking in words. I was thinking in shapes and patterns, in flows of logic that bypassed the verbal parts of my brain entirely.

And then it is done. You close the laptop. You sleep for 14 hours. You wake up feeling like you have been hit by a truck, but also like you have done something remarkable. Because you have.

The Clients Who Need This

I am not going to pretend that every client needs marathon sessions. Most do not. Most projects proceed at a sensible pace with reasonable hours and everyone goes home at a civilised time. That is the default. That is what the contract assumes.

But some projects are different. Some projects arrive already on fire.

I have worked with food delivery platforms rebuilding payment systems while orders were actively flowing through the old one. Every minute of downtime was real money lost, real customers frustrated, real competitors gaining ground. The work had to happen fast, and it had to happen right, and it had to happen in a window that no employment lawyer would sign off on.

I have worked with major retailers launching e-commerce platforms for Black Friday, where the deadline was not negotiable because the advertising was already booked, the stock was already in warehouses, and a million customers were already planning to visit. The site would go live on that date or careers would end. We made it live. I do not remember much of the final 48 hours, but I remember the champagne.

I have worked with startups preparing for investor demonstrations where the product had to work, had to look polished, had to not embarrass anyone, and the demo was in 36 hours. The features were half-built. The design was not finalised. The founder was panicking. We shipped something that looked like we had been working on it for months. We had been working on it for a day and a half.

These clients do not hire me because I am easier to fire. They hire me because when the situation demands it, I will work in ways that an employee legally cannot. I will work until the work is done, however long that takes, without anyone worrying about regulatory compliance or duty of care liability. I am a grown adult making a choice about how to spend my time. That choice is mine to make.

Focus as a Superpower

There is something else that makes the marathon sessions possible, something beyond stubbornness and caffeine. It is the ability to focus for extended periods without distraction.

I do not know if this is a skill I developed or a trait I was born with. Probably both. But I can enter a state of concentration that blocks out everything else. Hunger, fatigue, the passage of time, ambient noise, the existence of my phone, all of it fades away until there is nothing but the problem and the solution emerging from my fingers.

This sounds mystical when I describe it, but it feels mechanical when I experience it. It is not that I am in some elevated spiritual state. It is that everything else has been turned off. The part of my brain that would normally interrupt me with thoughts about lunch or that email I need to send or whether I remembered to pay the electricity bill, that part just goes quiet. What remains is the work.

I can hold large amounts of complexity in my head simultaneously when I am in this state. The architecture of a system, the dependencies between components, the edge cases that might break things, the order in which operations need to happen, I can see all of it at once like a three dimensional diagram floating in my mind. Change one piece and I can trace the ripples through the whole structure.

This is why I work in long sessions rather than short ones. The setup cost is high. Getting into the state takes time. If I work for two hours and then break for a meeting, I lose the state and have to rebuild it from scratch. If I work for 12 hours continuously, I spend 11 of those hours in the productive state and only one hour getting there. The maths favours long blocks.

Employment law does not permit employers to ask for these long blocks. But I am not an employee. I am choosing this because it is how I work best.

The Trade: Chaos for Freedom

Now here is the part where I tell you the price, and I do not mean my day rate.

The price of being able to work 38 hours when necessary is being able to take a random Tuesday off when I feel like it. The price of being available for a crisis at 3am is being unavailable entirely when I decide to disappear. The price of intensity is freedom.

I have lost count of the number of times I have finished a brutal project, closed my laptop, booked a flight departing in four hours, and been on a beach or a mountain or wandering through a foreign city by the next morning. No notice period. No covering my shifts. No explaining to HR why I need the time off. Just: the work is done, I am tired, I am going somewhere else now.

This is the balance. Not balance in the sense of working sensible hours every day. Balance in the sense of intense compression followed by total release. Weeks of 60 hour effort followed by weeks of doing absolutely nothing productive. A rhythm that would make any corporate HR department twitch uncontrollably, but which suits me perfectly.

I cannot do this as an employee. Even with a generous leave policy, even with an understanding manager, the structure of employment assumes regularity. It assumes I will be there on Monday. It assumes I will attend the weekly standup. It assumes I will be reachable during business hours. The entire system is built around predictable presence.

Contractor life lets me be unpredictable. I can give you all of my attention for a week, and then give you none of it for a month. I can be the most available person you have ever worked with, and then be completely unreachable. The relationship is transactional in the best sense: when there is work to be done, I am there. When there is not, I am not. Nobody owes anyone anything beyond what was agreed.

On Pricing and Value

I should address the elephant in the room. I am not cheap. My rates are not the lowest you will find, not by a considerable margin. If you are price-shopping for the cheapest developer, we are not a match.

But I am also not the most expensive. I know what the market looks like. I know what the big consultancies charge. My rates are fair for what I deliver, which is not just hours worked but problems solved under conditions that would break most engagements.

Here is how I think about pricing. You are not paying for my time. You are paying for my ability to compress time. A problem that would take an average developer a month might take me a week, not because I am smarter but because I can focus longer, I have seen similar problems before, and I am willing to work in ways that employment law would not permit if you put me on payroll.

When you hire me for a crisis, you are paying for the fact that I can be in a room with your panicking stakeholders at 9pm and still be in that room at 9am the following day, with the problem solved, while everyone else went home to sleep. You are paying for the fact that I have done this before and I will not panic. You are paying for certainty in a situation that feels chaotic.

Is that worth a premium? I think so. The clients who hire me repeatedly seem to think so too. The ones who balk at the rate usually come back later, after they have tried the cheaper option and discovered why it was cheaper.

Why I Could Never Go Back

Sometimes people ask if I have ever considered just taking a job. A proper job. Salary, benefits, pension, predictable income, the whole package. The question usually comes with a tone that suggests I am missing something obvious, that contractor life is somehow a phase I should eventually grow out of.

I understand the appeal of employment. I really do. The security of knowing that money will arrive in your account every month regardless of whether you found new work. The comfort of having a team around you permanently. The benefits that come with scale: healthcare plans, office snacks, someone else handling your taxes. These are not nothing.

But every time I seriously consider it, I think about what I would lose.

I would lose the ability to work the way I work. To disappear into a project for a week and then disappear from work for a week. To set my own hours, my own priorities, my own pace.

I would lose the ability to say no. An employee cannot decline a meeting because it interrupts their flow. An employee cannot refuse a project because it does not interest them. An employee is, in a very real sense, property during working hours. Their time belongs to someone else.

I would lose the ability to travel on a whim. To wake up on a Wednesday and decide that I am going to Portugal, and to be in Portugal by dinner. To take a month off because I want to, not because I accumulated enough leave days.

I would lose the ability to earn without ceiling. An employee's salary is negotiated annually. A contractor's income is theoretically unlimited, constrained only by how much work exists and how much of it you can handle. Good years can be very good.

And I would lose the identity. This is harder to articulate, but it matters. Being a contractor is not just how I work; it is who I am. I am someone who trades security for freedom, who bets on themselves, who takes the risk that there might not be work next month in exchange for the reward of controlling how that work gets done. That identity would die in an employment contract.

The Type of Person Who Does This

Not everyone is built for this life. I want to be clear about that. The rhythm I have described, intense work followed by total freedom, would drive some people insane. They need predictability. They need boundaries between work and life that I do not have. They need to know what next Tuesday looks like.

There is nothing wrong with needing those things. In fact, most people need them. Employment exists because most people work better within structure. The protections that employment law provides are not unnecessary; they are essential for the majority of workers who would otherwise be exploited.

But some of us are wired differently. Some of us find structure suffocating rather than supportive. Some of us would rather have chaos with freedom than order with constraint. Some of us are happier working 60 hours one week and zero hours the next than working 40 hours every week forever.

I do not know why I am this way. Maybe it is personality. Maybe it is the particular cocktail of traits that also makes me good at focusing for long periods and bad at tolerating meetings. Maybe it is just a preference that emerged from experience. The origin does not matter much. What matters is that I know myself well enough to know what works.

Contractor life works. Employment would not.

The Freedom at the End of the Tunnel

Let me leave you with an image.

It is the end of a brutal project. The one where we worked around the clock for the final three days. The site launched, the systems held, the client is happy, the invoices are sent. I am exhausted in that complete way where even my bones feel tired.

I open a flight booking site. I look for somewhere warm, somewhere with nothing to do, somewhere that my email will not reach. I find a flight leaving in five hours. I book it. I pack a bag. I get in a taxi to the airport.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean, the exhaustion transforms into something else. Satisfaction. Pride. And underneath it, a bubbling joy that comes from knowing I am free. No one expects me anywhere. No one is waiting for a status update. No one owns my time for the next two weeks.

I land. I find a hotel. I sleep for fourteen hours. I wake up and have breakfast at a cafe overlooking water. I have nothing to do except exist.

This is the payoff. This is what the 38 hour days buy. Not just money, though the money is good. Freedom. The genuine, unmistakable, intoxicating freedom of a life where work is intense but temporary, where deadlines are real but so are the spaces between them, where no one owns me except myself.

I could not trade this for a pension plan. I could not trade this for dental insurance. I could not trade this for the illusion of security that employment provides while extracting your best hours for someone else's benefit.

This is why companies hire me. And this is why I will never be an employee again.

If you have a project that needs someone who will work until it is done, regardless of what the clock says, I might be the right person. I am not cheap. But I am worth every penny, and the clients who have worked with me know it. Get in touch when you need something built fast and built right. Just do not expect me to be available immediately after. I might be on a beach somewhere, finally getting some sleep.